Top 10 Oscar Best Picture Winners of All Time — Ranked by Legacy and Impact

The first sequel ever to win Best Picture, and the rare one that indicts its predecessor. Francis Ford Coppola runs two stories in parallel: Robert De Niro's young Vito Corleone building a family in 1910s New York, and Michael Corleone methodically dismantling that same family half a century on. The structure is the argument - every warm scene of the father is cut against a colder one of the son, until the myth the first film built reads as an alibi. It is longer, slower and far more punishing than The Godfather, closing not on a coronation but on a man sitting alone at Lake Tahoe having ordered his own brother killed. Six Oscars, including Director for Coppola and Supporting Actor for De Niro - who won playing a role Marlon Brando had already won for.

Paramount wanted something cheap. After its previous gangster picture flopped, the studio planned a contemporary-set story shot on the backlot for around $2.5 million and put an executive on set to watch the spending; Francis Ford Coppola, who believed he could be fired any week, fought for period New York and Sicily and a budget that ran past six million. What he delivered is less a crime film than an American tragedy about capitalism - a family business that launders murder through the language of loyalty, obligation and nothing personal. Michael's descent is the whole design: the war hero who wanted no part of the family ends the film accepting a hand-kiss as Don. Three Oscars, including Best Actor for Marlon Brando, who refused his.

The gold standard against which every subsequent epic is measured, and the best argument for why some films cannot survive a phone screen - David Lean and cinematographer Freddie Young stage the desert in 70mm as a space vast enough to erase a man, then hold the shot long enough that you feel it happen. What keeps this from being scenery is Lean's refusal to resolve his subject. Peter O'Toole's T.E. Lawrence is a contradictory enigma: a British officer championing Arab independence on behalf of an empire that has already privately carved up the territory, a man appalled by violence who discovers he enjoys it, finally consumed by the myth he helped build. Seven Oscars from ten nominations. O'Toole was not among the winners, losing Best Actor to Gregory Peck.

Marlon Brando's Terry Malloy permanently altered what screen acting could be - the mumble, the hesitation, the business with Eva Marie Saint's glove that Brando improvised and Elia Kazan kept: an interior performance in a medium that until then had rewarded projection. The taxi scene with Rod Steiger remains the most quoted two minutes in American film. Around it Kazan built a hard story about mob control of the New York docks, scored by Leonard Bernstein in the only music he composed directly for the screen rather than adapting from his own stage work. The film is inseparable from Kazan naming names to the House Un-American Activities Committee two years earlier, and critics have long read Terry's decision to inform as its director's self-defense. Eight Oscars.

Wartime propaganda that outlived its war. Michael Curtiz's film exists to argue that American neutrality was untenable, and it makes the case through a cynic - Rick Blaine, who insists he sticks his neck out for nobody and spends the picture proving otherwise. What preserves it is the refusal of a neat ending: Rick puts Ilsa on the plane with her husband, gets nothing for it, and walks off into the fog beside a corrupt police captain. The romance works because it is denied. Shot on Warner Bros. soundstages with a largely European emigre cast, many of them genuine refugees, it premiered in New York in November 1942 but went into general release in January 1943 - which is why it took Best Picture at the 1944 ceremony. Three Oscars, including Director for Curtiz.

The definitive Hollywood satire, though it is really about the theatre and, underneath that, about what the industry does to actresses who age. Bette Davis's Margo Channing is forty and knows the parts are drying up; Anne Baxter's Eve Harrington is the adoring fan who talks her way into Margo's dressing room and then into her roles. Joseph L. Mankiewicz's script is the most quotable in American film and never lets you settle - almost everyone narrates, and nobody is reliable. It drew fourteen Academy Award nominations, a record that stood for decades, and it remains the only film ever nominated in four female acting categories. Davis and Baxter cancelled each other out and both lost. Six wins, including Mankiewicz for both Director and Adapted Screenplay.

Released barely a year after the war ended, William Wyler's film asked the audience filling the seats a question nobody had put to them yet: what happens once the parade is over. Three servicemen come home to the same Midwestern town - an infantry sergeant who cannot stop drinking, a decorated bombardier reduced to a drugstore counter and a marriage to a stranger, and a sailor who lost both hands. Wyler, who had flown bombing missions and come back partly deaf, sugarcoats none of it: the shell shock, the unemployment, the disability handled without pity. Harold Russell, who plays the sailor, was a real veteran and double amputee with no acting training, and the Academy voted him an honorary award assuming he could not win - then he won Best Supporting Actor anyway. Seven Oscars.