What was the first British movie to win the Oscar for ‘Best Picture’?
In the nearly one hundred years that the Academy Awards have been running, Hollywood movies have gotten the bulk of the awards. This makes sense. The ceremony was created in Hollywood by Hollywood luminaries who wanted to congratulate themselves and throw a party. They weren’t necessarily thinking expansively about the most worthy films in a given year, American or otherwise.
For a while, they weren’t thinking about other parts of the world at all, let alone awarding them. It wasn’t until 1956 that a special category was made for movies that were not in English. In this light, it’s hardly surprising that it took decades before the Academy recognised a British film as the best of the year, and it would take another decade and a half after that for a second one to be recognised.
British actors and filmmakers were treated much more favourably from the beginning, as long as they were making Hollywood pictures, of course. English-born cinematographer Charles G Rosher became the first British person to win an Oscar and the first person to win the award for ‘Best Cinematography’ (shared with Karl Struss) at the first Academy Awards in 1929. A year later, George Arliss became the first Brit to win an acting award for his performance as Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, which seems fitting.
Nearly two decades later, the Brits finally got their names on the ledger when Hamlet, Laurence Olivier’s 1948 adaptation of William Shakespeare’s most existential play, won ‘Best Picture’. It had stiff competition, too. John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was nominated, as was the melodrama Johnny Belinda, the psychological drama The Snake Pit, and, most notably, the Powell and Pressburger masterpiece The Red Shoes.
In retrospect, this was a bit of an own-goal for the Academy. When you have one of the greatest feats of cinema ever committed to celluloid on the shortlist, why would you go for a plummy, over-acted parody of jolly old England? It almost makes the Academy voters look downright xenophobic. Olivier caught flak for axing large portions of Shakespeare’s work, but to be honest, anything more than two-and-a-half hours would have been a bit too much to ask. The Red Shoes was robbed.
How many British movies have won the Oscar for ‘Best Picture’?
Perhaps you’ve noticed that the tables have turned in recent decades. All of a sudden, British actors are putting on American accents and playing just about every role in Hollywood while so-called American movies are being made largely in Britain. Movie executives in Culver City are wringing their hands over the mass exodus of talent to UK soundstages, and it seems that there is little that they can do about it. Tax incentives speak louder than tradition.
It didn’t happen all at once, though. After Hamlet took home the top prize in 1949, it took another decade and a half for Tom Jones to follow suit. Five years later, Oliver! became the third British film to earn the ‘Best Picture’ award. Things start to get pretty messy after that because, these days, it’s often hard to say where a movie is from.
For example, Shakespeare in Love is set in Britain and directed by an Englishman, but it was a joint production between American and British producers and its main character is played by an American (Gwyneth Paltrow). The Departed seems quintessentially American, set in Boston, starring some of the US’s biggest movie stars, and directed by one of the most prominent American directors of all time (Martin Scorsese). However, it is often included in the tally of British Oscar winners because it had an English producer.
At this stage, there have been about a dozen British movies to have won the ‘Best Picture’ Oscar if we’re using a generous definition. They include British-coded films like Chariots of Fire and The King’s Speech and ones like The Departed and The Deer Hunter that seem pretty darn American.
To underscore the ambiguity, four out of the ten films nominated for ‘Best Picture’ in 2024 were supposedly British, even though three of them were set in America — Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Killers of the Flower Moon — and one was set in Germany and featured German rather than English dialogue — The Zone of Interest. At this stage, you can pretty much assume that most of the ‘Best Picture’ nominees are products of the UK rather than Hollywood.
