The received wisdom that the Oscar for Best Picture always goes to mainstream, generally inoffensive ‘quality’ pictures is only partially true. There have been multiple exceptions to this – and increasingly so over recent years, with an influx of younger Academy voters and a desire to be seen as more progressive than in the past.
Who knows what it might mean for this year’s Best Picture nominees – which are All Quiet on the Western Front, Avatar: The Way of Water, The Banshees of Inisherin, Elvis, Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Fabelmans, Tár, Top Gun: Maverick, Triangle of Sadness and Women Talking. But while we wait to find out on Sunday night, here are ten of the more unexpected movies to have won the gong:
The Shape of Water (2017) – Disney+, Amazon Rent/Buy
Guillermo del Toro’s hybrid romantic-fantasy-thriller is an unlikely Best Picture winner in its central theme of an inter-species sexual relationship between deaf laboratory cleaner Elisa (Sally Hawkins) and Doug Jones’s imprisoned ‘Amphibian Man’.
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