10 Most Ambitious Best Picture Winners, Ranked

The following movies are all among the most ambitious Best Picture winners in the history of the Academy Awards. Unsurprisingly, a good many of these are epic films, but not necessarily all of them. Also, historical context is taken into account, so even if a movie from many decades ago isn't technically flawless by today’s standards, if it was a huge leap forward on a technical front at the time, it might well still be included here.

10 'Oppenheimer' (2023)

One of the biggest of the Best Picture winners of the 21^st century so far, Oppenheimer is very much an epic when it comes to its runtime, the number of characters wrapped up in the story, and the years spanned throughout its narrative, but then in other ways, it’s almost an anti-epic. There’s a lot it doesn’t show, at least compared to most World War II movies, and so much of it’s also uncomfortably introspective.

It’s a psychological drama, in other words, about a real-life figure: J. Robert Oppenheimer, who helped create the atomic bomb, and then doomed the world to panic about such weapons being used again after the devastation they caused on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And then it’s also existentially heavy and still relevant thematically all these decades later. It’s going for a lot all at once, and is edited in a way that makes you feel like you’ve watched a miniseries perhaps double the length (like a six-hour-long one) on double-speed, but in a way that works better than such a description might make it sound.

9 'Wings' (1927)

The first of the Best Picture winners, Wings, is still admirable as one of the most ambitious. Of all the epic movies to have won Best Picture, it’s understandably one of the more obscure, just based on the fact that it’s almost a century old, yet there’s still a ton to appreciate and even be entertained by here, because beyond the romantic melodrama stuff, there are some amazing battle sequences featured here.

They're worth the price of admission alone, and prove enough to make Wings an all-timer as far as World War I movies go. It feels believable a lot of the time, and the way it’s shot likely felt revolutionary for 1927, and all those big sequences – plus a fair few individual shots – still look amazing when watched in the 2020s (so, not just for viewers in the 1920s, by any means).

8 'Braveheart' (1995)

Braveheart goes as big as it also goes bloody, and it easily ranks among the most violent of all the Best Picture winners, for whatever that might be worth. It does so for a good reason, though, because it tells a violent story about revenge that spirals into rebellion and a full-on uprising, with William Wallace avenging his wife and then inspiring various other capable Scottish warriors to revolt against English rule.

It’s hammy stuff, but it also works incredibly well, and proves exciting for much of its lengthy runtime. Braveheart is kind of a crowd-pleaser, albeit the sort of crowd-pleaser that some might feel a little too squeamish for. If you don’t mind violent battle scenes and a runtime of almost three hours, though, it becomes very easy to recommend.

7 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' (2022)

There are so few sci-fi or fantasy movies that have won Best Picture, so that either shows the Oscars are a bit biased against genre movies, or they just needed a particularly good one to give out the top award to. There had been some fantasy movies that won Best Picture before 2022, but it was that year when the first proper sci-fi movie won Best Picture: Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Truth be told, it’s more than just a science fiction movie, which is where much of the ambition comes in. Everything Everywhere All at Once lives up to its title by being so many genres at once, and it’s a blast at everything it tries its hand at being, indeed all at once. It’s a martial arts movie, a family drama, an absurd comedy, and an intense existentialist film all at once, and it does all that without a full-on blockbuster budget, too, which makes it even more impressive.

6 'Gone with the Wind' (1939)

If Wings was the ultimate Hollywood epic of the silent era, then Gone with the Wind was, at the time of its release, the ultimate Hollywood epic of the sound era. It probably even remained the definitive epic made in the U.S. until the 1950s or ‘60s, and there’s still a lot here that can be appreciated in terms of sheer spectacle. Other things about the movie admittedly haven’t aged the best, if you feel the need to address that big thing with the trunk standing in one part of whatever building you're currently in (how did that get in there anyway?).

But the ambition! The ambition is undeniable, and that’s significant here, regardless of how you might feel about the other things found in this movie. Gone with the Wind is a big reason why 1939 is considered one of the best years in cinema history, and, for a while, it was as big as Best Picture winners ever got.

5 'Titanic' (1997)

It’s a grand romance film, a disaster movie, and an epic in every sense of the word. It’s Titanic, and it sure is a James Cameron film, since you can pick it apart in various ways if you feel so inclined. You might be missing out, though. It’s a movie that’s best to get swept up in, and that doesn’t mean turning off your brain entirely, by any means, but does involve trying to feel the movie over anything else.

It makes a ton of emotional sense, in other words. And in terms of making other kinds of sense, Titanic does that better than many give it credit for (the door nitpick is funny as a joke, but a joke if you bring it up as a serious criticism all these decades later). Also, like many of the movies mentioned in this ranking, Titanic is hard to fault technically, and most of the special effects here (there are so many scenes with special effects) still look good when the movie’s watched today.

4 'The Godfather Part II' (1974)

The Godfather Part II won Best Picture two years after The Godfather also won, and both movies were incredibly deserving of said award. When it comes to ambition, though, The Godfather Part II does succeed in doing even more than the first movie, and sure, it gets plenty of things to utilize and build upon that were already established in the first film… yet that’s not something all sequels have proven able to do.

It’s harder than it looks, in other words, maybe, to make a sequel, even if you’ve already got a whole heap of winning ingredients. And that’s before considering the fact that The Godfather Part II runs for longer than the first movie by about half an hour, and functions as something of a prequel for some of its scenes, alongside being a vital sequel. That it all works quite this well while doing so many different things at once is remarkable, as far as filmmaking achievements go.

3 'The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King' (2003)

This might seem like another instance of a sequel winning Best Picture, almost three decades on from The Godfather Part II, but it’s a bit more complicated when it comes to The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. This third film in the trilogy, plus the other two, were shot as one production, and then all the footage was edited into three separate movies, with one released every year, in 2001, 2002, and then 2003, respectively.

If The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won for the whole trilogy, then that’s okay. It was a perfect conclusion to everything built up in the other two movies, and then on its own, it was also easy to observe as entirely spectacular. The landing was more than stuck here, and The Return of the King also contains many of the most jaw-dropping sequences of the whole trilogy, so its win was, on every front, incredibly well-deserved.

2 'Lawrence of Arabia' (1962)

Easily one of the greatest British movies of all time, Lawrence of Arabia… well, it’s one of the best anything movies of all time. It’s in second place here, not because of quality, but because there’s one other Best Picture winner that might well be more ambitious. Only one. And it still feels bold not putting Lawrence of Arabia in the top spot. Has to be stressed: if it were only quality being taken into account, this film would likely be the winner.

Like with Oppenheimer, Lawrence of Arabia manages to be a psychological drama/biopic on top of also feeling like an epic, yet the epic side of things here, compared to Oppenheimer, proves a whole lot more sweeping. It succeeds in being a full-on – and sometimes even action-packed – war/adventure film on top of a character study, and it does so while being pretty much perfectly written, shot, acted, and scored.

1 'Ben-Hur' (1959)

Sure, Ben-Hur might not be the best epic movie to ever win Best Picture, though it is still overall largely fantastic. But more importantly, for the topic at hand, it is possible to argue that it’s the most ambitious of all the Best Picture winners in Oscar history. Before Ben-Hur, there was Gone with the Wind, and some other pretty massive movies, but then Ben-Hur elevated what an epic film could look and feel like, and it can still stand tall among just about every epic movie that’s come out in the (many) years since 1959.

If you break down the plot, it’ll probably sound like a simple one about injustice, enslavement, and subsequent revenge, yet it does all that alongside being a biblical epic of sorts, even with the religious side of things sometimes playing out in the background (it gets foregrounded by the end, at least). It achieves a lot narratively and thematically, all the while being one of the most technically impressive epic films ever made, with the scale of the production here still impressing tremendously close to 70 years on from its initial release.