All 8 Movies About Music That Won Best Picture, Ranked
Almost every kind of movie has won Best Picture at some point in the history of the Academy Awards, including a horror movie, if The Silence of the Lambs counts. Still, more dramas have won than anything else, especially those that focus on some kind of historical event or figure, while a decent number of musicals (albeit not a lot) have also won Best Picture.
The following is not focusing on ranking musicals, though. Some of the following movies are musicals, yes, but some are not. They all focus on music as an important part of the story at hand, and so they’re music movies, be they musicals, dramas, biopics, or even dramedies. So, Chicago is not here, and neither is My Fair Lady, as they’re musicals that aren’t really about music or musicians. Just go with it. Also, all the musicals that won Best Picture have already been ranked here.
8
‘The Broadway Melody’ (1929)
So, the cool thing about The Broadway Melody is that it’s one of the first Best Picture winners, and was indeed the first sound film to win Best Picture. There is, however, nothing else that’s cool about The Broadway Melody. And this isn’t just an “Oh, old movies are stupid and lame” kind of thing, since Wings won Best Picture before it, and All Quiet on the Western Front won Best Picture not long after it, and things about both those movies still hold up.
Nothing about The Broadway Melody holds up or really resonates today. It clearly did something for Oscar voters back in the late 1920s, but it’s a dreary, boring, and melodramatic film about Broadway and love and people being heightened and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And blah. Don’t forget blah and blah as well. It’s blah. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and some more blah for 101 minutes, and then it mercifully ends. Don’t watch it.
7
‘The Great Ziegfeld’ (1936)
A few years after The Broadway Melody, The Great Ziegfeld also won Best Picture as a kind of boring and largely dated movie, but it’s a little more palatable than The Broadway Melody. That being said, it is over three hours long, and so you really get exhausted at a point. It’s an okay biopic for its time, for a while, but then it just goes on and on, and seems to never stop.
It’s about the life of Florenz Ziegfeld, covering what he did for Broadway (hey, it’s a Broadway movie again), and it functions as an okay biopic, but it’s too long and slow. That’s the main issue that stops The Great Ziegfeld from itself being great, but maybe an epic true story like this, on this scale, was more exciting at the time. So, yeah, the commentary here for it is similar to how one might feel about The Broadway Melody, but these are similar films, in a way. One is better, but also more of an endurance test. Pick your poison.
6
‘Going My Way’ (1944)
Going My Way was a crowd-pleaser sort of film, and one less likely to please crowds nowadays, but it holds up a bit more than the two aforementioned movies. It’s about a clergyman being assigned to a parish and trying to revitalize it, particularly in regards to helping a group of disaffected young people (connecting with them mostly through music) while also clashing with an older clergyman who’s a bit more traditional.
It’s a story that has some drama, and a bit of very gentle comedy, and it’s just okay. Going My Way is not a highlight of Leo McCarey’s filmography, even though it was a Best Picture winner, since films like The Awful Truth, Make Way for Tomorrow, and Duck Soup all hold up better, but if you want to watch every single Best Picture winner out there, there are certainly some that prove more arduous to get through than Going My Way.
5
‘Green Book’ (2018)
A divisive film for sure, Green Book is one of the more recent music-related films to win Best Picture, and it’s also something of a buddy comedy and a road movie. It’s about a bouncer turned driver and a musician who become unlikely friends in the 1960s, with Green Book tackling some heavy themes regarding race and prejudice in a very gentle, perhaps overly simple/broad way.
Green Book is a watchable movie, it’s not always offensively bad, by any means, and the performances do carry it when other parts threaten to let it all down.
It’s not a challenging film at all, and it’s tempting to dismiss it because of what doesn’t work, but it’s also worth acknowledging some of the stuff that does work. It’s a watchable movie, it’s not always like, offensively bad, and the performances do carry it when other parts threaten to let it all down, with both Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen being pretty great. Though you’d be forgiven if you’d rather watch the other Best Picture winners those two appeared in instead (Moonlight and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, respectively).
4
‘CODA’ (2021)
Most of CODA is definable as a family drama, and something of a coming-of-age film, centering on a young woman who’s the only non-deaf person in her family (with CODA standing for “Child of Deaf Adults”). She’s relied on by her family members quite a lot, but also has her own interests, including music, and so that’s where most of the film’s drama comes from.
And it’s all done pretty well and smoothly, being a broad and approachable movie, even if it’s not a hugely memorable Best Picture winner. It gets the job done, and was inevitably released in a year that was impacted a bit by other world events (the pandemic and all; the same can be said about 2020). CODA is just pretty good; unlikely to be anyone’s favorite movie, but certainly not sticking out as a terrible or hugely questionable Best Picture winner.
3
‘The Sound of Music’ (1965)
Yes, The Sound of Music is very much a musical, but it is also about music, so it counts as a music film, unlike some other musical Best Picture winners of the 1960s (like West Side Story and Oliver!). Also, like The Great Ziegfeld, The Sound of Music is very long and inspired by a true story, but it’s a bit more interesting than that Best Picture winner, and it was helped immensely by having some dangerously catchy songs.
Those songs are earworms, and possibly even annoying if you hear them enough, but they wouldn’t stick in the brain so much if they weren’t well-crafted. And though it’s a very in-your-face sort of classic musical, and maybe not the kind that will convert people who don’t love musicals generally speaking, you can kind of see why The Sound of Music is considered a classic, even if you yourself don’t quite love it.
2
‘An American in Paris’ (1951)
The superior Gene Kelly musical is Singin’ in the Rain, but that one didn’t win Best Picture, though An American in Paris did the year prior. Still, An American in Paris scratches a similar itch in terms of being breezy, romantic, visually pleasing, and quite funny in parts, though the “music” part mostly comes in because one of the characters has aspirations of being a concert pianist.
There’s some other stuff, but the actual story of An American in Paris is rather thin, and also not very important. It’s an excuse to have some eye-catching and sometimes surreal musical numbers, and it’s a creatively shot and staged film overall, with that being enough to carry things and keep it all interesting. Perhaps like with The Sound of Music, you do have to be quite into old-school musicals to fully appreciate it, but it’s a bit underrated overall as far as Best Picture winners go nonetheless.
1
‘Amadeus’ (1984)
There’s no contest, really, when it comes to the best music movie to win Best Picture, since it’s gotta be Amadeus. This is a movie all about two composers, one of whom is the very well-known Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with the other being the less well-known Antonio Salieri. The latter is fascinated with the former, and also intensely jealous of him, looking back, as a bitter old man, on how their paths crossed earlier in his life.
It’s a period drama that’s also quite thrilling and funny at times, being inspired by real people without necessarily being as concerned with historical accuracy. Drama and conflict are played up in Amadeus, even if it might not have happened that way in reality, but what the story ends up saying about various facets of human nature proves enthralling and engaging. It’s a fantastically made film on just about every front, and one of those absolute must-watch older Best Picture winners, regardless of your age or how often you like to watch older films.
Amadeus
- Release Date
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September 19, 1984
- Runtime
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160 minutes
- Director
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Milos Forman
- Writers
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Peter Shaffer
