(Actual winner: Birdman)

The IndieWire principal critic Eric Kohn wrote an open letter to the voting public shortly before the 2015 Academy Awards, arguing that Richard Linklater's 12-year labor of love "Boyhood" deserved the Best Picture award over Alejandro González Iárritu's "Birdman," which had established itself as the leading candidate thanks to its vibrant one-take aesthetic, star-studded cast, and self-reflexive Cinematic DNA.

The Academy, according to Kohn, would choose to wallow in the failures of the business rather than embrace alternatives to its limits, by letting "Birdman" win over "Boyhood." The Academy Awards, after all, have tremendous symbolic value.

However much adrenaline is pumped into us by the film's replicated crucial sequences and gonzo narrative, “Birdman” ultimately fails to disclose or teach us anything new about ourselves. It is impossible to duplicate the feelings provoked by “Boyhood”. Despite the fact that "Birdman" was eventually chosen as the Academy's best picture, "Boyhood" remains one of cinema's most important pictures of Americans in the twenty-first century.

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Year of Release: 2014

Director: Richard Linklater

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 100/100

IMDB Score: 7.9/10

(Actual winner: Green Book)

For many film fans and critics alike, the 2019 Awards Ceremony concluded on a low note with Peter Farrelly's "Green Book" winning Best Picture. The result sparked indignation among film reporters and experts on social networks, who all felt a feeling of déjà vu in seeing a divisive drama about racial relations (as viewed through a whiter lens) prevail against a highly acclaimed art house classic. The critical daring in this situation was Alfonso Cuarón's "Roma."

While film reviewers are not always correct, they were in this instance. "Roma" is Cuarón's magnum opus, garnering ten Academy Award nominations and 3 wins: Best Foreign Language Film, Best Director, and Best Cinematography. A year before "Parasite" made history, "Roma" deserved to have been the first foreign movie to earn top Academy Awards accolades. Cuarón's work was rated one of the decade's top films by IndieWire. This was not the case with "Green Book."

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Year of Release: 2018

Director: Alfonso Cuarón

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 96/100

IMDB Score: 7.7/10

(Actual winner: The King’s Speech)

The Academy's choice to award Best Picture to Tom Hooper's "The King's Speech" over David Fincher's "The Social Network" is largely regarded as one of the most heinous judgments in Oscar history.

The win demonstrated that a crowd-pleasing nonfiction period drama about overcoming adversity was always going to perform stronger with Oscar voter base than a chomping social critique from an original concept (yes, "The Social Network" is also a biographies drama, but Fincher avoids the genre trappings that are prominent in "The King's Speech"). At the very least, Aaron Sorkin, Atticus Ross, and Trent Reznor did not go unnoticed in the contests for Best Original Score and Best Adapted Play, respectively.

To this day, "The Social Network" unfolds like a surreal Shakespearean tragedy, gaining weight by the minute. It's both an exciting, unsettling investigation into how Facebook grew to be and a scathing critique of what it will ultimately become. According to IndieWire, it is the sixteenth finest film of the twenty-first century.

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Year of Release: 2010

Director: David Fincher

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 95/100

IMDB Score: 7.7/10

(Actual winner: Argo)

Oscar commentators sometimes assert that the Academy favors films about Hollywood, which partly explains why Ben Affleck's exhilarating crowd-pleaser "Argo" cruised throughout awards season as the leading candidate for Best Picture, before taking home the main prize on Oscar night.

And yet, none of the nine films nominated for An Oscar at the 2013 Academy Awards (including Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln," Quentin Tarantino's "Django Unchained," and Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty") came close to matching Michael Haneke's "Amour" in terms of emotional heft and unflinching honesty.

The Academy did the Palme d'Or winner justice by nominating it for several Academy Awards in addition to Best Foreign Language Film, including Best Actress (for Emmanuelle Riva), Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay, but this was years before "Parasite" opened the door for foreign-language films to win Best Picture, and thus the film never had a chance to win the top prize. According to IndieWire, "Amour" is the decade's 25th finest film.

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Year of Release: 2012

Director: Michael Haneke

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 94/100

IMDB Score: 7.9/10

(Actual winner: Gladiator)

While there is no doubt that Ridley Scott's "Gladiator" is a success, there were more brilliant selections for The Best Picture of the 73rd Academy Awards, ranging from Ang Lee's Wuxia classic "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" to Steven Soderbergh's Best Director-winning drug trafficking epic "Traffic."

Either picture merited the Oscar award for Best Picture over "Gladiator," but "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" edged out "Gladiator" in terms of jaw-dropping technique. If the Academy wanted to award Best Picture in 2001 to a major period film with heart-pounding action scenes and beautiful craftsmanship, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" was the obvious choice.

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Year of Release: 2000

Director: Ang Lee

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 94/100

IMDB Score: 7.8/10

(Actual winner: Spotlight)

In the end, the Academy decided that "Spotlight" was more appealing to them as a whole because of its realistic story that was pulled straight from the newspapers, as opposed to George Miller's bombastic and explosive "Mad Max" sequel "Fury Road."

While the latter did not win Best Picture or Best Director, it was no surprise that it swept the craft categories at the 88th Academy Awards ("Mad Max: Fury Road" took home Oscars Production Design, Costume Design, Hairstyling and Makeup, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, and Film Editing.

Six years after its debut, "Mad Max: Fury Road" remains one of the most significant action films of all time, and according to IndieWire, it is the ninth greatest film released in the decade of the 2010s. "Spotlight" has not lasted in the same way, and it does serve as an example of how receiving an Academy Award for Best Picture does not always ensure that a film will continue to shine brilliantly in eternity.

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Year of Release: 2015

Director: George Miller

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 90/100

IMDB Score: 8.1/10

(Actual Winner: Crash)

Aside from "Green Book" beating "Roma," the Academy Awards have never been derided as much as they were when "Crash" won the Best Picture award at the 78th Academy Awards, defeating "Brokeback Mountain" and "The Grand Budapest Hotel."

Ang Lee' dramatic tour de force and pioneering homosexual romance received eight Academy Award nominations and won awards for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score, and Best Director. Sadly, it was still not enough to stop "Crash," the ensemble-driven racial drama directed by Paul Haggi, from taking home the grand prize.

In addition to winning the Golden Globes, the British Academy Film Awards, and the Producers Guild of America awards, "Brokeback Mountain" also won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Ensemble in a Motion Picture. However, it was Haggis' win for "Crash" as Outstanding Ensemble in a Motion Picture that helped to shift the tide of the awards season in his favor. According to IndieWire, "Crash" is the worst Best Picture candidate of the twenty-first century.

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Year of Release: 2005

Director: Ang Lee

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 87/100

IMDB Score: 7.7/10

(Actual winner: A Beautiful Mind)

"A Beautiful Mind," directed by Ron Howard, is the prototypical Best Picture Oscar winner: a well-crafted historical melodrama about a misunderstood genius who must overcome a barrier — in this case, mental illness – in order to achieve his or her dreams.

The fact that Todd Field's family drama "In the Bedroom" was the most searing and resonant piece of the bunch (unless you count Robert Altman's equally mesmerizing "Gosford Park") is undeniable. Yet, it is unsurprising that the Academy chose Howard's film over blockbuster contenders such as "Moulin Rouge!" and "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring."

"In the Bedroom," which stars Sissy Spacek, Tom Wilkinson, and Marisa Tomei in Academy Award-nominated performances, is among Todd Field's first and only feature films since 2001 (the other being "Little Children" five years later). It was his directorial debut, and it was well-deservedly nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture.

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Year of Release: 2001

Director: Todd Field

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 86/100

IMDB Score: 7.4/10

(Actual winner: The Shape of Water)

While Guillermo del Toro's enthralling fantasy film "The Shape of Water" is an excellent option for Best Picture, one of four Oscars the film won at the 2018 ceremony (it also won for Best Production Design, Best Director, and Best Original Score), it's difficult to deny that awarding Jordan Peele's "Get Out" would have been the most thrilling Academy choice in Oscars history.

There were a few excellent competitors in 2018, including "Shape of Water," "Call Me By Your Name," "Dunkirk," "Lady Bird," and "Phantom Thread," but none reached Peele's zeitgeist-defining heights.

For nearly a year, "Get Out" dominated cultural discourse, and it just so happens to be an astutely crafted suspense with an Oscar-winning script. How often does the Oscars get the opportunity to award Best Picture to a horror film and the year's most talked-about masterpiece? The Academy should have seized this chance with the production of "Get Out."

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Year of Release: 2017

Director: Jordan Peele

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 85/100

IMDB Score: 7.7/10

(Actual winner: The Artist)

Michel Hazanavicius' "The Artist" was a love homage to Hollywood's silent cinema period, which made it Oscar voters' catnip during the 2011–2012 Oscar season. On the other end of the scale came Terrence Malick's Palme d'Or-winning magnum epic "The Tree of Life," a convoluted and divisive coming-of-age drama that parodies Malick's own Texas childhood and the universe's whole genesis.

"The Tree of Life" is not the type of film that the Academy celebrates, thus its inclusion in the Best Director and Best Picture categories was a triumph. It was nominated for the third time in the category of Best Cinematography. There was never any question that "The Tree of Life" would lose the Academy Award for Best Picture this year (the closest challenge for "The Artist" came from Alexander Payne's "The Descendants"), which informs you all you need to learn about the Academy's tastes. "The Tree of Life" was selected the thirteenth greatest film of the decade by IndieWire.

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Year of Release: 2011

Director: Terrance Malick

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 85/100

IMDB Score: 6.8/10