Image via Netflix
Each award season, subjective panels unfailingly attract outrage as they pick the winner for best film of the year. Like all human endeavors, choosing nominees for the category is an imperfect process that nonetheless helps to memorialize certain films as significant for their time period and genre. Those that did not win remain remembered as just great entertainment and memorialized on the movie screens they inhabited. Even when cases can be made against a movie winning top honors, these films act as valuable touchstones for the present to re-experience the lessons, emotions and spectacles of the past.
Since Netflix currently streams only six Oscar-Nominated Best Pictures according, Complex has sprinkled in some Golden Globe winners to round this Netflix list out at an even number. Centered around actors and actresses ranging from the most merciless warriors on the planet to the cutest, most caring creatures ever imagined, these films reflect the versatility and impact that cinema can have at its “best.”
Make sure to tune in to the Academy Awards showing this Sunday, February 26th, to see who takes home this years coveted Best Picture Award. We will be glued to our TVs, guaranteed. If you are looking for more of a wide range of movies, please refer to our Best Movies On Netflix List.
RELATED: The 100 Best Movies Streaming on Netflix Right Now
Gentleman's Agreement (1947)
Director: Elia Kazan
Stars: Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, John Garfield
Americans tend to whitewash the fact that we too embraced eugenics, anti-Semitism and concentration camps during the World War II era. As the victors, we concealed our similarities to the horrors carried out in Germany. This beyond-ballsy-for-the-time film stars a Gentile journalist who goes undercover as a Jewish man to experience the rampant discrimination against them. Along the way, he gets engaged to a woman who may not outwardly embrace prejudice, but encourages it through her silence against bigots and misguided, implicit assumptions. After experiencing the day-to-day abuse, the journalist files his story and leaves New York and his fiancee behind. Debuting over 60 years ago, this film rings truer than ever with white nationalists whispering in the ear of the President, who throws down sloppy, cruel decrees against minorities as America inches closer to the evil we fought in the ‘40s.
Shakespeare in Love (1998)
Director: John Madden
Stars: Gwyneth Paltrow, Joseph Fiennes, Geoffrey Rush
For a man that wrote over 37 plays, nearly all of which have withstood the test of time due to his enduring brilliance, it’s odd that William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) would be saddled with writer's block in this ludicrous period piece. But so anyway, to overcome it he decides to have an affair with the wealthy Viola de Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow), which gives him the inspiration for Romeo and Juliet. Through plot twists and turns, Shakespeare ends up playing Romeo and Viola disguises herself as a man so she’s allowed to play a woman (Look bro, the Victorian era was very strange). Ben Affleck stars as a delightfully-full-of-himself big shot actor and Geoffrey Rush gives the film more than it deserves. This semi-infamous Best Picture attempts to cultivate the grand, delirious romances found in all of Shakespeare’s comedies, but does so with a tenth of the tact.
Patton
Director: Franklin J. Schaffner
Starring: George C. Scott, Karl Malden, Stephen Young
This war epic begins with General George Patton decked out in extravagant regalia, back-dropped by a billboard-sized American flag. The general represents the American ideal of a strongman who sees the evil of the Nazis and pledges to “cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.” Patton loves war, almost as much as he loves himself—riding his immeasurable ego to inspire his soldiers and rationalize the furious charges he leads. Unlike the intimate battle scenes of other war epics, his men only get seen in wide shots through his binoculars as they’re punctured by lead shrapnel, pawns in his global game of chess. Patton caresses the injured, but those too shell-shocked to continue on get slapped and sent to the front to die as he has no space in his army for “cowards.” Patton is the fascinating examination of a man who only feels like himself while overseeing death on a massive scale.
Braveheart
Director: Mel Gibson
Starring: Mel Gibson, Sophie Marceau, Brendan Gleeson
Before Mel Gibson publicly drunk-drove and spouted bigotry, he snagged the Best Picture for this historically inaccurate, but super dope biopic about legendary Scottish warrior, William Wallace. During the peak of the United Kingdom’s colonial dominance, Wallace snaps after his beloved gets murdered. So he rallies a band of rowdy, bearded warriors to attack England’s vastly superior army and avenge their stolen land, raped wives and murdered countrymen. After the fake blood flies in some medievally gory battle scenes, Wallace is captured by the empire, who place him on a torture rack to break his spirits. After removing the body part males care most about, they ask him to cry out “mercy.” Wallace chooses a different word to scream before passing, bolstering the cause for Scottish independence.
Amadeus
Director: Miloš Forman
Starring: F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge
The Best Picture of 1984 follows Mozart, a man mostly known today through grandiose portraits and pompous performers playing in prohibitively expensive concert halls. In the 1700s, Mozart wrote his first piece at six and would compose 600 more, forever changing classical music by the time he died in his late 30s. He handled his natural brilliance with tremendous flair. Throughout the film, Mozart rocks pink wigs, fornicates excessively and exhibits a tendency towards fart jokes—while still caring about the production and reception of his music at Kanye levels. Through his undeniable excellence, he displaces a ho-hum composer named Salieri, who believes God is mocking him by blessing such a debaucherous man. But after Mozart passes, Salieri confesses his grief as his jealousy caused him to hasten the death of the greatest musical genius of the century.
No Country For Old Men
Director: The Coen Brothers
Starring: Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Woody Harrelson
The Big Lebowski sits atop the Coen Brothers’ power rankings, but isn’t anyone’s definition of Oscar bait. So the fraternal duo snagged their little gold man for a nouveau-Western about a rancher who picks up the wrong briefcase. After stumbling on a drug deal while hunting, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) takes a substantial sum of money belonging to Anton Chigurh, Javier Bardem’s cadaverous serial killer who enjoys putting holes in people with his silenced shotgun and air-powered cattle-killer. A gruff, middle-distance-staring Sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) and a smarmy bounty hunter (Woody Harrelson) insert themselves into the action, but fail to secure the money or a happy ending. The Coen Brothers craft a taut classic that if nothing else, ought to teach a viewer to leave drug money where they find it.
The Graduate
Director: Mike Nichols
Starring: Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Katharine Ross
If you frequent certain websites, there’s loads of movies about a young man able to harmoniously balance the affection of a mother and daughter. In The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman fails to do so. After graduating from college, Hoffman doesn’t much want to head to grad school or a cubicle. So he starts sleeping with a married woman, Mrs. Robinson. They bone in hotel rooms until Dustin gets set up with the younger Ms. Robinson by his parents and grows to care for her after a rocky first date that makes a stop in a titty bar. When the women find out about his double-dipping, they are none too pleased. As he ponders his future, Hoffmann must decide between the path his parents took to hollow success and a different path leading somewhere unknown. He ends up on the back of a bus with the woman of his dreams—a happy ending with a bittersweet aftertaste.
Babe
Director: Chris Noonan
Starring: James Cromwell, Magda Szubanski, Christine Cavanaugh
Like pigs, Babe is smarter than expected. The children’s film refuses to pander while preaching kindness from humans towards animals, from animals towards animals and from humans towards humans. After the titular pig gets adopted by the humble, properly named Farmer Hoggard, he gets raised by his sheepdogs. After a duck teaches Babe that he must be useful to avoid getting consumed, the pig takes up his adopted parents’ profession, much to the derisive laughter of the sheep. But after asking them politely, they obey his orders well enough to convince Farmer Hoggard to enter him into a sheep-herding competition, an unconventional move roundly mocked by the spectators, who then get rendered speechless. With rudeness and violence rampant in our world, ain’t nothing wrong with watching a clever little pig inspire others to treat every living thing a bit more gently.
Sunset Boulevard
Director: Billy Wilder
Starring: William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim
A timeless film, Sunset Boulevard centers upon the biggest silent movie actress in the world, who can’t find work once films add sound. Rotting in an opulent mansion, Norma Desmond (Swanson) lives vicariously through her prior appearances on the silver screen while cared for by her devoted butler, Max, a once great silent film director—and Desmond’s former husband— who is so one-way devoted to her, he forges fan mail. Enter a failed screenwriter named Joe who gets ensnared in Desmond’s mansion, ostensibly to write her a new piece, but really to make her feel desired by a young man in exchange for a comfortable lifestyle. Desmond entertains a card game that features a cameo by Buster Keaton, another silent star who failed to transition to the sound era, and throws an opulent New Year’s Eve party for only herself and Joe. Eventually, her delusions catch up to her in this melancholy ode to those left behind by time, but not before she gets one last close-up.
E.T
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Dee Wallace, Henry Thomas, Drew Barrymore, Peter Coyote
In the highest grossing movie of the ‘80s, Steven Spielberg looks through a child’s eyes at the the unknown and decides not to terrify, but rather craft a cute story about caring for those we barely understand. When a little boy meets an alien left behind by a spaceship, they form a telekinetic bond, which, among other things, gets the little boy drunk while E.T. chugs a six pack, but also informs him that the creature wants to go home. While they work on that, Elliot (Thomas) conceals E.T. as he shows him some of the joys of earth while E.T. heals the boy’s cuts with a glowing finger and lifts his bicycle into the sky, for one of cinema’s most magical moments. Eventually, the authorities find out about E.T. and want to run tests on him, but Elliot’s tear-jerking heroism, like Spielberg’s restrained direction, assert that we can leave a little mystery in the things we love.