Which major movie studio has never won a ‘Best Picture’ Oscar?
In the realm of cinema, the term “major studio” immediately transports our minds to summer blockbusters and Christmas cash cows. The furthest thing from our imaginations is an edgy, critical darling or a film primed for awards season. Nevertheless, ceremonies like the Oscars are as much about major film studios as they are about plucky indie groundbreakers.
Even more so, in fact. No indie production company can get near the number of ‘Best Picture’ Oscars won by most of the majors. After all, what film producer could have put together movies like Gladiator, Titanic, Braveheart, Gandhi, Lawrence of Arabia or Ben-Hur, to name but a few winners of the biggest prize at the Academy Awards, without the financial clout of a major studio behind them?
Independent films do regularly trump the major players for the award, which proves that artistic merit can triumph over campaign financing at the Oscars ballot box. But they’re one in a thousand swimming against the same stream, who manage to overcome the individual odds stacked against them. They have their year, but the majors are thinking in terms of decades and centuries.
There’s one major film studio, however, that is severely lacking in the ‘Best Picture’ department. Despite being nominated 13 times for the award, a record that only eight other studios can better, they’ve never managed to come out on top.
Luck of the drawing?
The studio we’re talking about is Walt Disney Pictures, the flagship name for the Walt Disney Company’s live-action feature films, and the umbrella company for Walt Disney and Pixar animated features, too. Disney is one of Hollywood’s “Big Five” movie studios with a 21% share of the North American film market, so it may seem like a glaring omission from the cinema industry not to have gifted one of their chief paymasters at least one ‘Best Picture’ statuette.
One reason for the disparity in Oscar victories compared to the other majors is that Disney’s niche has historically been cartoons. And so, their films have traditionally been pigeonholed in the ‘Best Animated Film’ category, even if they more than hold a candle artistically to their live-action counterparts. Works of cinematic brilliance like Dumbo and Bambi were basically excluded from the main award, and it took until Beauty and the Beast in 1992 for a Disney animation even to be nominated.
The trend has continued, with Pixar being a shoe-in for ‘Best Animated Feature’ every other year but only Up and Toy Story 3 getting a look-in for the biggest prize at the Academy Awards. Meanwhile, Walt Disney Pictures has featured relatively sparingly among live-action nominees, with Mary Poppins, for which Walt Disney himself was credited as a producer, being a major exception in 1966.
On the other hand, since Disney bought out 20th Century Fox, formerly Hollywood’s sixth major film studio, in 2019, things have become a bit more complicated. On Disney’s website, you’ll see Disney claiming a ‘Best Picture’ win for Chloé Zhao’s superb road drama Nomadland in 2021. Yet Disney had zero role in producing the movie, even as a parent company. It just happened to be distributed by Searchlight Pictures, the arthouse studio Fox founded in 1994.
That’s good enough for Disney. The link may be extremely tenuous, but whatever credit was once Fox’s is now theirs. That’s the Walt Disney Company, though. Sorry, Walt Disney Pictures – the wait goes on.
