Best Picture Oscar Nominees from the ’00s That Should Have Won

As Oscar season heats up, we’ve been taking a critical eye to the Best Picture winners of the past, and having already tackled the ’80s and ’90s, we’re now moving on to the ’00s, where we will not be disputing the recognition that Gladiator, Chicago, and Slumdog Millionaire got from the Academy. We will, however, be risking it all on some thoughts elsewhere.

Without further ado, brace yourself for some potentially controversial opinions, as we take a look back at some of the Best Picture winners of the 2000s and decide who really should have won…

The Sixth Sense

We’re kicking off at the awards in 2000, which celebrated films released in 1999. It was a different time. Literally, but also culturally. American Beauty won Best Picture that year, and Kevin Spacey won Best Actor. So, you see what I mean. A different time! Looking back at the nominees, there are definitely some options that would have aged better than American Beauty: The Green Mile, The Cider House Rules, and The Insider were all vying for the statue. As was M. Night Shyamalan’s iconic horror movie, The Sixth Sense.

I genuinely love most of Shyamalan’s subsequent projects (I’ll even go in the ring for Signs if I have to) but still think The Sixth Sense remains his best, with every element of the movie coming together perfectly to create a wonderful, scary, and touching ghost story that would still blow someone’s mind today if they had no idea how it ended. Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment both give great performances here, but it’s Toni Collette who makes the whole thing work as well as it does, putting in a gut-wrenching turn as a gifted young boy’s frantic mother. Horror rarely gets its due at the Oscars; a win for The Sixth Sense would have been a nice change of pace.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

A Beautiful Mind proved way too Oscar-baity for voters in 2002. Ron Howard also snagged Best Director for his emotional biopic about the life of mathematician John Nash, which is absolute friggin scenes when you consider that he was up against David Lynch for Mulholland Drive (one of the greatest movies ever made!) and Peter Jackson for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which should have easily taken Best Picture that year.

Russell Crowe’s powerful performance as Nash carries A Beautiful Mind, a movie riddled with historical inaccuracies that also simplifies schizophrenia and culminates in one of the most predictable twists of all time. It’s simply no match for the epic storytelling and Middle-earth worldbuilding that The Fellowship of the Ring gives us.

Moulin Rouge!

Sometimes, there’s more than one nominee in the running that deserved the Oscar more than the ultimate winner, and that certainly feels like it was the case in 2002, where A Beautiful Mind triumphed over not just The Fellowship of the Ring, but Baz Luhrmann’s entirely different but utterly audacious Moulin Rouge!. With as many influences on its sleeve as edits per minute, Moulin Rouge! courts elements of the Greek tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice, vaudeville, and even La bohème as it tells the tragic tale of Ewan McGregor’s English poet Christian, who falls in love with Satine, a waning courtesan at the heart of the Moulin Rouge caberet.

It’s a postmodern musical that weaves some more contemporary pop bangers into the aesthetic of fin de siècle France and pounds with an energy that thrills some people and gives others a proper bloody headache. I’m in the former camp, but whatever you think of Moulin Rouge!, it’s a fair bit more exhilarating than Howard’s formulaic A Beautiful Mind, and dug its nails into pop culture with a much more enduring severity.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

Since we’ve just spent a while theoretically removing a Russell Crowe movie from our Best Picture winners, let’s add one in to make us square: Peter Weir’s epic period drama should have beaten The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in the Best Picture race. Putting aside its eye-watering attention to detail and its immersive and practical action (the kind you rarely see anywhere anymore) it feels like Master and Commander largely lost out that year because every nominee that wasn’t Return of the King was doomed. Having lost the statue on the previous two installments of the LOTR trilogy, the Academy seemingly felt obliged to recognize Jackson’s efforts in making it, despite Return of the King perhaps being the weakest of the bunch.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is high-key the favorite movie of that one person you know who watches every historical TV documentary and owns more books about naval warfare than there are endings in 2004’s actual Best Picture winner. Given the chance, they will also bang the drum that Master and Commander deserved to win that year, and y’know what? They’ve got a good goddamn point.

Sideways

Voters were once again faced with a couple of worthy biopics in 2005, as Martin Scorsese’s glossy The Aviator and Taylor Hackford’s Ray jostled for attention. They seemed to cancel each other out in the end; Million Dollar Baby walked away with Best Picture and a slew of other awards that congratulated Clint Eastwood and co. on a job well done in bringing their depressing sports drama to the screen. Yet, the project that lost out the most that year was Sideways, a movie packed with sharp dialogue and unlikable characters that proved too divisive for some but has actually stood the test of time.

Over two decades later, I reckon that general audiences are better at coping with unlikable characters in their comedies, but Sideways was released in a pre-Breaking Bad, pre-Succession world. A couple of selfish, immature men going on a road trip through wine country would easily be an 8-episode HBO series these days. We wouldn’t be able to get enough of Miles and Jack’s nonsense! And we would still not be drinking any fuckin Merlot.

Brokeback Mountain

Welp, we’ve hit what I consider to be “the big one” on this particular list. A travesty so wild that people were justifiably yelling about it for years. After winning Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director awards, Ang Lee’s incredible Brokeback Mountain seemed sure to grab Best Picture, too. And then it didn’t. To a gasp heard around the world, Crash won instead. Not the David Cronenberg car sex movie, of course. No, that would have been cool (if belated.) The heavy-handed and reductive Paul Haggis ensemble flick.

Look, maybe you love Crash. I’ve never met someone who does, but I guess anything’s possible. But Brokeback Mountain is not just one of the best films of the 2000s, or of the 21st century. It’s one of the best films of all time. It’s so good that you can even forget Randy Quaid is in it. What the hell were they thinking that year? Sweet lord.

Little Miss Sunshine

I know deep down in my heart and bowels that I’m about to make some people very cross, but I have to follow my own truth on this one: The Departed isn’t close to being the best Martin Scorsese movie. I mean, he’s made some great ones, hasn’t he? Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, After Hours. I could go on. It’s not that I don’t think a Scorsese movie should have won Best Picture. I just don’t think this should have been the one. The Departed is… fine. It’s fine. But it’s a remake of a better Chinese movie, and I stand by that. Andy Lau and Tony Leung are phenomenal in Infernal Affairs, a benchmark of Hong Kong crime cinema that is much more tightly paced than Scorsese’s less subtle, tonally messier version of the story.

The idea of a dark indie comedy going toe-to-toe with The Departed tickles me, even now. Little Miss Sunshine is such a strong ensemble movie, featuring a standout performance by Paul Dano (stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Tarantino) that hits deep in a way that Scorsese’s star-studded crime drama just doesn’t. Was it the “best” film of the year? Debatable, but the only movie that could have beaten Little Miss Sunshine in terms of awards contenders for me was Pan’s Labyrinth, which didn’t get nominated for Best Picture. So here we are.

There Will Be Blood

The 2008 Academy Awards were absolutely brutal. In line for Best Picture were Atonement (good), Juno (good), Michael Clayton (underrated as hell), and No Country for Old Men (also good.) The thing is, all those movies may be really good, but There Will Be Blood is great. I get that Oscar voters must have felt like they were scoffing their faces at the fine cinema buffet that year, but Paul Thomas Anderson’s period drama was the main course; the bloody, buttery steak that they should have been pacing themselves for!

Daniel Day-Lewis dishes up an acting masterclass in Anderson’s morally complex character study. He got Best Actor for that, but his performance never overshadowed a sublime movie across the board. Robert Elswit’s stunning composition and natural lighting make you feel as if you are actually there during the California oil boom, Jonny Greenwood’s score is positively haunting, and Anderson’s direction is meticulous. There Will Be Blood is a memorable, modern classic that unfortunately lost out in what was simply a great year for cinema.