What is the longest movie to win an Oscar for ‘Best Picture’?
Winning the most prestigious Oscar categories has long been associated with the longest film runtime, and of all the categories, ‘Best Picture’ sits at the pinnacle. Historical epics, wartime sagas, and biopics of complex characters are the types of movies commonly labelled as ‘Oscar bait’, often requiring long spans of the viewers’ attention to be fully effective (debatably).
With the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences gaining on its centenary, you might expect the longest film to win an Oscar for ‘Best Picture’ to have stiff competition and competition across a wide spread of decades in this century and the last. However, most of the top contenders stem from a concentrated period of time much closer to the Academy’s inception.
That’s not to say films have been getting shorter over time. As recently as the 2024 Academy Awards, the ‘Best Picture’ accolade was scooped up by Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which has a runtime of three hours (180 minutes). Further back in 1998, the award was given to James Cameron’s Titanic, which beats Oppenheimer’s runtime by 14 minutes.
Though inarguably mammoth in length, neither of these films – commonly mentioned in the same breath as the ‘longest movie’ question – come close to the longest ‘Best Picture’ Oscar winners we’re about to get into.
The longest movies nominated for the ‘Best Picture’ Oscar
Most of the longest movies that have been Oscar-nominated for ‘Best Picture’ were released during a relatively short period of time in the 1950s to 1960s. 1956 alone gave us two of these. One was Giant, James Dean’s final film, and a bittersweet swan song for the Hollywood icon. The other was The Ten Commandments, Charlton Heston’s biblical epic in every sense of the world. Giant is three hours and 35 minutes (201 minutes), and The Ten Commandments is three hours and 40 minutes (220 minutes).
1960’s The Alamo, John Wayne’s blend of the western and war genres for maximum hard-bellied machismo, ran to three hours, 22 minutes (202 minutes). 1965’s Doctor Zhivago, the highly-romanticised history of the Russian Revolution, clocks in at three hours and 20 minutes (200 minutes), and the following year, another war movie, Steve McQueen’s The Sand Pebbles, came in just shy of that (196 minutes).
More recent notable contenders keeping you from your bathroom breaks come from an increasingly serial offender. Martin Scorsese movies that are long and have racked up ‘Best Picture’ nominations include 2019’s The Irishman, a CGI-tastic de-ageing reunion for some of the revered director’s closest acting collaborators. That one is three hours and 29 minutes (209 minutes). Scorsese then gave Nolan a run for his money in 2023 with Flowers Of The Killing Moon, a stark look at historical violence against Indigenous communities in America. It beats Nolan’s Oppenheimer movie length at three hours and 26 minutes (206 minutes) but couldn’t pip it to the post for the ‘Best Picture’ Oscar.
So, what is the longest movie to win an Oscar for ‘Best Picture’?
Gone With The Wind always enters discussions about the longest movies of all time and the longest movies that have won Oscars. However, there’s some debate over whether it qualifies as the longest to achieve ‘Best Picture’.
The 1940 film stars Vivian Leigh as Scarlet O’Hara and Clark Gable as Rhett Butler in a rose-tinted portrait of the American South in the previous century. The initial rough-cut of the film was an indulgent four hours and 25 minutes long (265 minutes). This was then shortened to three hours and 44 minutes (221 minutes). Going by this length, it’s just beaten into second place as longest ‘Best Picture’ winner by 1962’s Lawrence Of Arabia, David Lean’s sweeping T.E. Lawrence film, which is three hours and 48 minutes (228 minutes).
However, when Gone With The Wind’s intermission, overture and exit music are factored in, the film’s full runtime exceeds Lawrence Of Arabia’s at 234 to 238 minutes in length. In addition to this, Gone With The Wind made a near-clean sweep at the 12th Academy Awards, bagging seven further wins for acting, directing, art direction, cinematography, editing and writing, alongside five additional nominations. It also made history as the first colour film to win ‘Best Picture’.
