This Is the Greatest Best Picture Winner in Oscar History

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Apr 20, 8:20AM EDT

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If the past year of being cooped up in our homes has taught us anything, it’s that few activities are better than watching a movie to take us to a place that’s far, far away from the real, pandemic one. With the Academy Awards coming up in just over a week, many people will be watching the currently nominated movies for Best Picture.

How do they compare to previous winners? And how do previous winners compare to each other? In honor of the upcoming 93rd Academy Awards on April 25, we set out to find out.

To determine the best of the best and rank all the Best Picture winners since 1964, 24/7 Tempo created an index based on several measures from the Internet Movie Database and Rotten Tomatoes. Movies that won the Oscar for Best Picture before 1964 were excluded because of missing data.

The list has it all: silent classics, noir, musicals, biopics and everything in between. Some of the movies that have been judged as the best in the year they were released have not stood the test of time and have been all but forgotten. Some even have low current ratings on Rotten Tomatoes.

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There are also those we looked at to determine the best of the best that are among Hollywood’s greatest, both in commercial and critical success. They have transcended expectations and established new standards for cinema.

Some of the most celebrated films never won an Oscar — after all, there can be only one winner — but they made it to the top of other prestigious lists.

To determine the best Best Picture since 1964, 24/7 Tempo developed an index that is a composite of the movies’ IMDb rating, Rotten Tomatoes audience score, and Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score. All ratings were weighted equally. Only films with at least 25,000 reviews on IMDb, 5,000 audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, 10 Tomatometer critics reviews and that have won an Academy Award for Best Picture in 1964 or a later year were considered. Data was collected in mid-March 2021.

Supplemental data on domestic box office and production budgets by movie came from industry data site the Numbers.

The best of the Best Pictures is “The Godfather,” released in 1972. It ranks second on the American Film Institute’s 100 Greatest American Films of All Time, behind only “Citizen Kane.” It was directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starred Marlon Brando, Al Pacino and James Caan. Its Tomatometer rating is 98%, and its IMDb rating is 9.2 out of 10. The film’s domestic gross box office was $135 million

Francis Ford Coppola’s gangster epic “The Godfather” breathed new life into the American film industry upon its release in 1972. The film currently has 98% positive ratings from both critics and audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics Consensus on the site describes the film as “one of Hollywood’s greatest critical and commercial successes” and credits it for establishing “new benchmarks for American cinema.”

Click here to see all the Oscar winners for best picture ranked.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.