With the 88th Annual Academy Awards set to take the stage of the Kodak Theatre on February 28th, the anticipation to see who will be crowned Best Picture is mounting by the day. One out of eight of this year's top films will be selected to join the other 87 films that have won The Academy's best honor, and go down in the history books. So now's the perfect time to see a stunning clip reel of those past winners, and you can do so by watching the clip below.
Yahoo compiled this ultimate supercut of every Best Picture winner between 1929 and today, which showcases the tastes of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Since the inception of the film world's top honors, those tastes have run the gamut from black and white to color, war epic to historical comedy, and silent to talking pictures. Yet for a history so rich and storied, there are definitely a couple of films that stick out among the crowd as being rather unconventional winners.
For instance, take 2003's winner for Best Picture, Chicago. While musicals were en vogue with Hollywood between the 30's and the 60's, it took 34 years for Hollywood to give the Oscar to a song-and-dance picture after Oliver! won it in 1968. Also, believe it or not, there are only two silent Best Picture winners in the history of the Academy Awards – 1929's Wings and 2011's The Artist. Even thinner is the herd that have won the top trophy of the year, and managed to be a horror film – which has happened for one film: The Silence Of The Lambs in 1992.
Of course, the best odds for winning a Best Picture trophy lie with one genre alone, and it's the one you'd expect to win the most trophies. If you want a Best Picture Oscar, it's in your best interest to make a Drama. Be it historical, romantic, war-time, or even socially challenging; Drama is as Drama does when it comes to taking the top honors. Even just looking at the past 10 years of Best Picture winners, you'll see that a majority of them are dramatic pictures. Technically the last time a flat out Comedy won Best Picture was in 1978, when Woody Allen's Annie Hall was all the rage; so if that doesn't say that Oscar likes to keep things serious, we don't know what does.
While the Academy Awards have come under fire for their lack of diversity in more ways than one, that doesn't take away from the fact that the films that have made the roster of the 87 best films in the history of the Oscars have each earned it. In their own special way, every film on that list has dazzled the judges by making them laugh, cry, fall in love, or think about the scenarios presented in front of them. And the 88th film to join their ranks is not far away, as the Academy Awards will present their latest winners on February 28th.
