Top 10 Best Picture Winners: 1961-2010

Continuing with our pre-Oscar features, I'm continuing Daniel's list from yesterday regarding Best Picture winners. Daniel created a fantastic list of ten films released between 1927 (the first ever Academy Awards) until 1960 (when Billy Wilder's The Apartment took home the night's big prize), and he has left me the daunting task of listing the Top 10 Best Picture Winners from 1961, when the Shakespeare-inspired musical West Side Story hauled home 10 Oscars, until 2010, when The King's Speech beat out much more deserving films like The Social Network, Black Swan, True Grit and Inception (in fact, every other film nominated last year was more deserving of the final award than The King's Speech). Anyway, this assignment is slightly overwhelming for two reasons: First, whereas Daniel had to sift through only 33 years of winners, I have to select ten from 49 years, and second, many of the best picture winners from the past 49 years were arguably undeserving. Upon perusing the last half decade of Best Picture winners, some of the listed winners are jaw dropping when compared to what films the winners were competing against (Dances with Wolves over Goodfellas, Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan). Even the most casual of movie watchers would find some more recent Best Picture winners questionable. But alas, I digress and Oscar snubs and upsets will be discussed another day (or in future Top 10 lists perhaps). Here are the Top 10 Best Picture Winners: 1961-2010 (and 5 Honorable Mentions because I had to deliberate over 16 more titles than Daniel)