Every R-rated movie to win ‘Best Picture’ at the Oscars
It wasn’t until the 42nd edition of the Academy Awards that an R-rated movie went home with the biggest prize, but since then, it’s become commonplace for adult-skewing and mature titles to be awarded the prestigious honour of ‘Best Picture’.
In fact, history-maker Midnight Cowboy was deemed so risqué that it was originally awarded with an X-rating before being re-classified, and it remains the only ‘Best Picture’ winner to have carried the harshest of content restrictions.
In the years to follow up until the turn of the millennium, some of the greatest movies ever made have scooped the most notable honour at the Oscars while carrying an R-rating, with the first two chapters in The Godfather saga, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Deer Hunter, and Schindler’s List also being awarded top honours, along with a couple of controversial and hotly-debated titles including Braveheart and Shakespeare in Love.
However, since the year 2000, the ratio of R-rated films to have won ‘Best Picture’ has risen exponentially, to the point where it’s now much more of a rarity for an all-ages production to emerge victorious. Since 2006, only three PG-13 or lower movies have walked away with the gong under their arms, and even at that Siân Heder’s CODA was initially designated with an R-rarting from the Motion Picture Association of America before being trimmed down, with The Artist and Green Book the other two outliers.
Essentially, the Oscars were more than 40 years in before an R-rated feature ever managed to win ‘Best Picture’ for the first time, but the volume of movies to have won the prize since 2005 alone is equal to the total number of recipients between 1969 and 1995.
In total, 16 films have snagged the trophy since the advent of the 21st century, in comparison to the 17 that managed to accomplish that feat between the ceremony’s inception in 1929 and Midnight Cowboy. There were five in the 1970s, four in the 1980s, seven in the 1990s, six in the 2000s, and eight in the 2010s.
CODA is sandwiched in between Nomadland and Everything Everywhere all at Once so far this decade, but the current crop of front-runners for the next ‘Best Picture’ winner are once again leaning heavily into the R-rated side of the equation, with Barbie perhaps the highest-profile contender that’s accessible to viewers from any demographic.
R-rated movies to win ‘Best Picture’ at the Oscars:
- Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969)
- The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971)
- The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
- The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Miloš Forman, 1975)
- The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1979)
- Ordinary People (Robert Redford, 1980)
- Terms of Endearment (James L. Brooks, 1983)
- Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986)
- Rain Man (Barry Levinson, 1988)
- The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991)
- Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992)
- Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993)
- Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995)
- The English Patient (Anthony Minghella, 1996)
- Shakespeare in Love (John Madden, 1998)
- American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999)
- Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000)
- Crash (Paul Haggis, 2004)
- The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006)
- No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)
- Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008)
- The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2009)
- The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010)
- Argo (Ben Affleck, 2012)
- 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)
- Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (Alejandro G Iñárritu, 2014)
- Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015)
- Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016)
- The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro, 2017)
- Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019)
- Nomadland (Chloé Zhao, 2020)
- Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, 2022)
