Inspired by a member query, we looked into the best years for Academy Award Best Picture nominees by average rating. (Updated on January 23, 2024.)

2019 certainly felt like a great film year for highly rated Best Picture finalists (indeed, all of the finalists in the 92nd Academy Awards are in our Official Top 250 Narrative Feature Films), but when we ran the data on 560* Best Picture-nominated films across 92 years of Academy Awards history, the year 1975 (awarded at the 48th Academy Awards in March 1976) was the winner by a decent margin. Time for medicine!

Each year’s lineup is represented in the list below by its highest-rated film. In the notes, you’ll find the overall average rating and the other finalists for that year. The winner for each year is marked with a trophy. There are no ties—we compute the average for each year to several decimal places, but they are rounded to 2dp below.

Statistics of Interest
— The 1970s is the highest-ranked decade overall, with a 3.94 average rating across all nominated pictures.
— The 2010s was a strong decade, with 44 films making our top 250 of the decade (exactly half of that decade’s nominees).
— There was no obvious advantage or disadvantage for years with expanded Best Picture lineups.
— The overall average of all Best Picture nominees is 3.74.
— You agreed with the Academy on the Best Picture winner in just 25 of 95 ceremonies.

*We excluded lost and partially lost films. Ernst Lubitsch’s The Patriot (1928) is the only lost film that is impossible to see (Letterboxd members have mostly rated its trailer). The White Parade (1934) is only available at UCLA’s laboratories and has yet to be restored and publicly screened. East Lynne (1931) is available but the final reel is lost. We also excluded the nominees for Best Unique and Artistic Picture at the first Academy Awards (Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, Chang, The Crowd) because the Academy doesn’t recognize the category as part of its Best Picture history.

Here’s a handy list of all films nominated for Best Picture. All numbers crunched by Jack Moulton and Letterboxd HQ.