Best Picture Winners Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Written by and starring a then-unknown Sylvester Stallone, who refused to sell the script unless he could play the lead, this 1976 boxing story was made for about a million dollars and beat All the President's Men and Network.

Question 2

Steven Spielberg's 1993 film, shot mostly in stark black and white, tells the true story of a German factory owner and Nazi Party member who came to spend his fortune saving more than a thousand Jews from the Holocaust. It won seven Oscars.

Question 3

This 1970 war film opens with the general at its center giving a speech in front of an enormous American flag. Its star, George C. Scott, refused the Best Actor Oscar, calling the ceremony a 'meat parade.'

Question 4

Clint Eastwood directed, produced and starred in this 1992 grim, unromantic Western about a retired outlaw and pig farmer who takes one last killing job, and it won Best Picture and Best Director.

Question 5

This 2018 film, set in 1962, follows a Black concert pianist and the white working-class bouncer he hires as a driver and bodyguard for a concert tour through the American South. It won three Oscars.

Question 6

Rob Marshall's 2002 film of the hit stage musical, about two 1920s women on death row for murder who compete for fame and press attention, was the first musical to win Best Picture in 34 years.

Question 7

Anthony Minghella's 1996 film, told in flashback as a badly burned pilot in a Tuscan monastery recalls a doomed pre-war love affair in the North African desert, won nine Oscars.

📚 All Quizzes

Browse every category and see the full list of quizzes on BriskQuiz

→

About Best Picture Winners

The Academy Award for Best Picture has been handed out every year since 1929, and its winners trace the whole history of the movies. The silent era closed with Wings; the studio age produced It Happened One Night, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca and Hamlet, the first British film to win. The 1950s and 1960s ran to spectacle: Ben-Hur, the first film to win 11 Oscars, plus Lawrence of Arabia, West Side Story and The Sound of Music. The 1970s brought the New Hollywood of The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, the first sequel to win, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

The record book is full of firsts and near-misses. Ben-Hur, Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King share the mark of 11 Oscars, and Return of the King won every category it was nominated in. It Happened One Night, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Silence of the Lambs swept the "big five." Rebecca is Alfred Hitchcock's only Best Picture winner. Wings and The Artist, 83 years apart, are the silent winners. Parasite in 2020 was the first film not in English to win; CODA in 2022 the first from a streaming service.

Some winners are remembered as much for controversy: The Greatest Show on Earth over High Noon, How Green Was My Valley over Citizen Kane, Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan, Crash over Brokeback Mountain, and the 2017 night the wrong film, La La Land, was read out before Moonlight was corrected on stage.

Every answer in this quiz is a film that won Best Picture. The clue gives you the year, the director, the stars and a memorable fact, and 25 of the questions add a photo of a key figure. Read the clue, pick the winner, and get the full story after each answer.