From the blockbusters that swept the board to the ones that scooped the five most important prizes—plus the one that won the most while missing out on best picture—these are the most successful Oscar-winning films of all time.
Films that have won the most Oscars
Three films jointly hold the record for the most Oscar wins (11).
Nominated in 12 out of 15 categories, the success of William Wyler’s sword and sandals epic quickly turned the ceremony into a suspense-free procession. Perhaps the voters were responding to the new challenges of TV in rewarding a movie that was so clearly cinematic. Perhaps they just loved Wyler: This was his third best director/best picture double after Mrs. Miniver (1942) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). “I guess this is old hat to you,” said Charles Heston, backstage. “Chuck, it never gets old,” Wyler responded.
If Kim Basinger hadn’t beaten the pre-ceremony favorite, 87-year-old Gloria Stuart, to the best supporting actress statuette for her role in L.A. Confidential, Titanic would have won a record number of Oscars, including best director and best picture. As it was, it took 11 out of its 14 nominations—Kate Winslet also missed out (to Helen Hunt in As Good As It Gets) in the best-actress category, while Leonardo DiCaprio wasn’t even nominated as best actor (which Jack Nicholson took, also for As Good As It Gets) and make-up went to Men in Black. The ceremony contained the divisive moment when director James Cameron declared: “I’m king of the world”—a quotation from DiCaprio’s Jack in the bow of the ship. Critics thought it was arrogance; others felt it was fair enough given what a passion project Titanic had been and how widely it had been assumed that it would be a flop.
When voters rewarded the final part of Peter Jackson’s epic J. R. R. Tolkien adaptation, they were really giving the Oscars to the genre-defining trilogy as a whole. The film won all 11 categories in which it was nominated; only its surprising omission from the cinematography line-up prevented it from becoming the most-garlanded Oscar movie of all time. As it is, it remains the only film in Academy Award history to have been nominated in more than 10 categories and won all of them including best picture.
Films that have won the five top Oscars
Three films have taken home the so-called “Big Five”—best picture, best director, best actor, best actress, and best screenplay (either adapted or original).
It Happened One Night effectively invented the screwball comedy as it sent the ill-matched Claudette Colbert (as a runaway heiress) and Clark Gable (as a newspaper reporter) out on the road together. But its director Frank Capra had suffered humiliation the previous year when “Frank” was announced as the best director winner: Capra was well on his way to the podium, when he realized that the Oscar had gone to Frank Lloyd for Cavalcade. A year later, best director and best picture were his, but he was understandably slow to move when host Irvin Cobb opened the best director envelope and said: “Come and get it, Frank.”
In the best actor category, Gable won even though, under the old studio system, he had been loaned to Columbia by MGM as a punishment for his wage demands. In the best actress category, there had been such outrage that Bette Davis hadn’t received a nomination for her sensational performance in Of Human Bondage that the Academy had allowed her name to be written on the ballot. Everyone assumed her victory was a done deal, so though she was present at the ceremony, none of her competitors were. Colbert was actually on a train, waiting to go on holiday to New York; she was rushed back to the Biltmore Hotel in the sidecar of a police motorbike to collect her award.
Having lost out in the best actor category for the previous two years, in The Last Detail and (amazingly) Chinatown (the latter to Art Carney, in the almost-forgotten Harry and Tonto), Jack Nicholson finally bagged the best actor Oscar for his performance as Randle McMurphy, a charismatic con man who ends up in a psychiatric hospital. In his acceptance speech, he thanked his first agent who told him he had “no business being an actor.” The most moving speech of the night, however, came from Louise Fletcher, who won best actress for her portrayal of Nurse Ratched and gave a tearful tribute to her deaf parents in sign language. Ironically, Fletcher had originally been due to play the signing leader of the deaf choir in Robert Altman’s Nashville—a film up against Cuckoo’s Nest in the best picture category, alongside Jaws, Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, and Dog Day Afternoon. (That Nashville part ultimately went to the brilliant Lily Tomlin.)
Punters called the 1991 Oscar race the most wide-open in years, and the best picture nominees revealed the oddity of the line-up. Disney’s Beauty and the Beast was pitted against Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-touting JFK, Warren Beatty’s gangster biography Bugsy, and Barbra Streisand’s sentimental The Prince of Tides. In the end, it was Jonathan Demme’s classy chiller that came through, thanks in no small part to the Oscar-winning performances of Anthony Hopkins as serial killer Hannibal Lecter and Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling, the FBI agent who seeks to get inside his mind. Hopkins’s award was a particular surprise, since viewers had assumed that Nick Nolte’s psychologically damaged hero in The Prince of Tides was an absolute shoo-in.
The film that won the most Oscars without winning best picture
The original version of West Side Story remains the musical that has won the most Oscars (10), with Gigi coming close with nine. But there’s no doubt that Cabaret would have rivaled their success if it hadn’t had to contend with The Godfather as its major opposition. In the end, Bob Fosse’s musical set the less enviable record of becoming the film that won the most Oscars (eight out of 10 nominations) while missing out on best picture, to Coppola’s sprawling mafia saga. Fosse won best director though, Liza Minnelli took home the best actress award, Joel Grey the best supporting actor award, and the movie swept up the technical awards (cinematography, art direction, sound, editing, and music).