Winning it is nice, of course — but even just a nomination for the Best Picture Academy Award is perhaps the biggest honor in the film industry. Throughout the nearly one-century history of the award, there have been dozens upon dozens of Best Picture nominee lineups of all varying degrees of quality. Throughout the 2000s in particular (the last decade that had five nods in the category every year before it was expanded to ten in 2010), each of the ten lineups ranged from mediocre to phenomenal.
Every Best Picture lineup has a stronger movie, which doesn’t always go on to win, and a clear weak link, which sometimes wins, somehow. But when these five nominees align and deliver extraordinary and unforgettable cinematic experiences, that’s how one knows that was a special year for those who enjoy following awards season. From years that maybe only had one or two outstanding films to ones where each nominee has stood the test of time like fine wine, this list will rank every Best Picture lineup of the 2000s. Some are outright tragic, while others are fascinating to look a bit more deeply at.
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81st Academy Awards (2009)
Nominees: ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ (won), ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,’ ‘Frost/Nixon,’ ‘Milk,’ and ‘The Reader’
The 81st Academy Awards rewarded the best in cinema of 2008. Infamous for being the year that Christopher Nolan‘s The Dark Knight was snubbed for Best Picture (one of the main reasons why the number of Best Picture nominees doubled the next year), it’s also the weakest lineup of the 2000s. The year, aside from offering what many still call the greatest comic book movie of all time, had all sorts of other exceptional movies, which makes the Best Picture nominees all the more disappointing.
Slumdog Millionaire, a rather problematic and not particularly memorable film, won Best Picture that year (along with seven other Oscars). The best of the bunch was arguably David Fincher‘s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a great drama with a very creative premise, but by no means the director’s best. Milk is a fine biopic with a fantastic Sean Penn performance; Frost/Nixon is a splendid historical drama, and divisive though it may be, some think The Reader is also decent. The fact that this year’s Best Picture winner was a film that almost went straight to DVD doesn’t exactly speak highly about the quality of this lineup.
9
79th Academy Awards (2007)
Nominees: ‘The Departed’ (won), ‘Babel,’ ‘Letters from Iwo Jima,’ ‘Little Miss Sunshine,’ and ‘The Queen’
The 79th Academy Awards rewarded the best in cinema of 2006, another year full of fantastic movies that went under Best Picture voters’ radar, like Pan’s Labyrinth and The Prestige. There’s one bright spot, however: the winner of the award that year was Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed—the first (and so far only) time that one of the legendary director’s films won Best Picture. It was a well-deserved victory, even if many other of the year’s best were overlooked.
2006 was a great year for action, dramedy, foreign arthouse, and Hollywood arthouse alike. As for the Best Picture nominee lineup, while definitely not representing more than just a couple of the year’s best (those being The Departed and Little Miss Sunshine, one of the best movies about mental health), it’s nevertheless a pretty decent group of movies. Letters from Iwo Jima is an okay Japanese WWII film directed by Clint Eastwood, Babel is a bloated but powerful multi-story drama, and The Queen is… a Best Picture nominee. But although these three movies are just okay, their two superior peers more than compensate for their shortcomings.
8
78th Academy Awards (2006)
Nominees: ‘Crash’ (won), ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ ‘Capote,’ ‘Good Night, and Good Luck,’ and ‘Munich’
The 78th Academy Awards rewarded the best movies of 2005. People shouldn’t allow themselves to be fooled by that year’s Best Picture recipient, Crash, typically ranked at the very bottom of most people’s ranking of every Best Picture winner. 2005 was actually a pretty enticing year for movies, even if not the most exciting of the decade. Pride & Prejudice, Grizzly Man, and Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith are but a few of the year’s most memorable films, none of which received Best Picture nominations.
The general narrative is that Crash‘s win was a highway robbery that left the true best motion picture of the year, the gay romantic drama Brokeback Mountain, in the mud. It’s a beautiful film, and it has indeed aged far better than any of its four co-nominees. Even still, Capote is a solid biopic of the titular author, with Philip Seymour Hoffman delivering one of the best performances of his career (which won him an Oscar), Good Night, and Good Luck. is a really underrated period drama directed by George Clooney, and Munich is one of Steven Spielberg‘s best 21st-century works.
7
74th Academy Awards (2002)
Nominees: ‘A Beautiful Mind’ (won), ‘Gosford Park,’ ‘In the Bedroom,’ ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,’ and ‘Moulin Rouge!’
The 74th Academy Awards rewarded the best in cinema of 2001. It was the turn of the century, so a lot of weight was lying on filmmakers’ and studios’ shoulders to prove that they were capable of delivering modern films that lived up to the masterpieces of the 20th century. As the Best Picture lineup from the 2002 Oscars proves, they were off to a really good start.
While the impactful but melodramatic A Beautiful Mind wasn’t exactly a great start to the 21st century’s Best Picture selection, it was definitely not the worst one possible. Besides, with nominees as exceptional and timeless as The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (which, frankly, should have won that year) right there, it’s hard to complain about this lineup. The whodunnit Gosford Park and the tragic drama In the Bedroom are both fantastic and criminally underrated nowadays, and Moulin Rouge! is the best-crafted example of Baz Luhrmann‘s maximalist style.
6
77th Academy Awards (2005)
Nominees: ‘Million Dollar Baby’ (won), ‘The Aviator,’ ‘Finding Neverland,’ ‘Ray,’ and ‘Sideways’
The 77th Academy Awards rewarded the best in cinema of 2004. Following the historic 76th Awards that saw a particular fantasy epic win a record number of eleven Oscars was always bound to be hard, but 2005 came in clutch. 2004 was one of the best years for cinema of the 2000s, and while many of its best and most memorable movies (like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Incredibles) didn’t receive Best Picture nods, the ones that did are fantastic.
The Best Picture winner from that year was the heartbreaking Million Dollar Baby, one of Clint Eastwood’s best-ever directing efforts—though some might point to The Aviator, one of Scorsese’s best 21st-century films, as the more deserving winner of the two. While lesser, the other three nominees were still very worthy contenders, though. Finding Neverland is a beautiful movie about the man who created Peter Pan; Ray unsurprisingly landed Jamie Foxx his first Oscar win for perfectly playing Ray Charles (in a year when he was also nominated in the Best Supporting Actor category for another phenomenal movie, Collateral), and Sideways is as hilarious and complex as it is beautifully and deeply human.
5
73rd Academy Awards (2001)
Nominees: ‘Gladiator’ (won), ‘Chocolat,’ ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,’ ‘Erin Brockovich,’ and ‘Traffic’
The 73rd Academy Awards rewarded the best in film of the year 2000, the cinematically glorious end of the 21st century. A remarkable number of incredible films that are still remembered as some of the best of modern times were released during this year — some nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, most not. But while masterworks like Memento and Requiem for a Dream got less Oscar love than they deserved, the actual Best Picture lineup from the 20001 ceremony is pretty great.
While not the ideal condensation of everything that 2000 had to offer in terms of great movies, the 2001 Best Picture lineup is nevertheless an exceptional group of films.
Gladiator, one of the most exhilarating historical epics of the last few decades, was the movie that deservingly won Best Picture. As for a runner-up, most people might point to the martial arts extravaganza Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, one of the best international movies of the past quarter-century. Steven Soderbergh made two phenomenal nominees in Erin Brockovich and Traffic, and though the feel-good romance Chocolat is easily the weakest link, it’s still a pretty sweet movie. While not the ideal condensation of everything that 2000 had to offer in terms of great movies, the 2001 Best Picture lineup is nevertheless an exceptional group of films with two all-timers and another pair of fantastic movies surprisingly made by the same director. Chocolat is there, too.
4
76th Academy Awards (2004)
Nominees: ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King’ (won), ‘Lost in Translation,’ ‘Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,’ ‘Mystic River,’ and ‘Seabiscuit’
The 76th Academy Awards rewarded the best in cinema of 2003. Then again, for the vast majority of the competitive categories for narrative feature films, that meant The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Not that anyone’s complaining since it might just be the best fantasy movie of the 2000s. Nevertheless, its domination at the 76th Oscars may make it easy to forget that there were many other excellent films released in 2003, like Oldboy, Memories of Murder, and Kill Bill: Vol. 1.
None of those were nominated for Best Picture, though. However, while sad, that fact is by no means a travesty since the lineup was pretty phenomenal as it was. Seabiscuit is by far the weakest and least-talked-about of the bunch, but Mystic River is capable of rendering any viewer an emotional wreck, Master and Commander is a riveting adventure epic, Lost in Translation is a romance masterpiece, and — of course — Return of the King is one of those films that only come along once in a lifetime.
3
72nd Academy Awards (2000)
Nominees: ‘American Beauty’ (won), ‘The Cider House Rules,’ ‘The Green Mile,’ ‘The Insider,’ and ‘The Sixth Sense’
The 72nd Academy Awards rewarded the best movies of 1999. For the first Oscar ceremony of the 2000s, the Best Picture lineup was a pretty good omen of what was to come. From psychological dramas to fantasy tearjerkers to horror thrillers, it was a pretty solid group of films that one could hardly blame the Academy for considering the best of 1999, even if it meant leaving out films like The Matrix, Fight Club, and the late David Lynch‘s life-affirming The Straight Story.
While many would say that American Beauty has aged like milk left out in the sun for too long, others would still call it a very deserving Best Picture recipient. No matter the case, no one would have complained if any of the other four nominees had won instead. The Sixth Sense is one of the best horror films of the ’90s, The Green Mile is so emotionally hard-hitting that its DVD should have come bundled with tissues, The Cider House Rules is a great period drama, and the conspiracy thriller The Insider deserves to be a topic of conversation much more often nowadays.
2
80th Academy Awards (2008)
Nominees: ‘No Country for Old Men’ (won), ‘Atonement,’ ‘Juno,’ ‘Michael Clayton,’ and ‘There Will Be Blood’
The 80th Academy Awards rewarded the best movies of 2007, which some may go so far as to call the single best year for cinema of the 2000s. This bold statement was proved by movies as outstanding as Ratatouille, Hot Fuzz, and Zodiac. But while none of these movies received a Best Picture Oscar nod, 2008’s lineup of nominees is one of those rare cases where not a single one of the nominated films is anything less than great.
No Country for Old Men is often considered one of the greatest Best Picture recipients of modern times, and for good reason. It truly is a flawless masterpiece and one of the best in its genre—two qualities that also fit There Will Be Blood like a glove. Then, there’s Atonement, one of the best romantic dramas of the decade; Juno, a textbook example of a perfectly written comedy movie; and Michael Clayton, a legal thriller that hijacks the audience’s full attention and doesn’t let go until the credits roll. If Best Picture nominee lineups alone decided the cinematic quality of a year, 2007 would be way up there.
1
75th Academy Awards (2003)
Nominees: ‘Chicago’ (won), ‘Gangs of New York,’ ‘The Hours,’ ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,’ and ‘The Pianist’
The 75th Academy Awards rewarded the best movies of 2002, another strong contender for the title of best year for cinema of the 2000s. Whether it is or isn’t, however, there’s one thing that’s hard to argue against: its Best Picture nominee lineup is definitely the best of the decade. That’s without even getting into the topic of films that weren’t nominated but very much deserved to be, like City of God, Catch Me If You Can, Hero, and Adaptation.
The film that won Best Picture that year was Chicago, easily one of the best musical Best Picture winners ever. Some might say that The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, one of the most gloriously fantastic sequels of all time, was more deserving. Others might point to The Pianist, a virtually flawless war film with the capacity to wreck anyone’s heart. Even the multi-story drama The Hours and the criminally over-hated Gangs of New York would have been worthy winners of the award. If this tremendous lineup of movies doesn’t constitute the best one of the decade, none could.
