All 3 Remakes That Won the Best Picture Oscar, Ranked

“Remake” might be a dirty word in the eyes (or ears?) of some, and if you feel that way, then fair enough. If remakes didn’t exist, then the world wouldn’t have to deal with the likes of The Wicker Man and all those Disney live-action remakes that never work as well as the animated originals. But then again, you also wouldn’t have the likes of Scarface (1983) or The Magnificent Seven in a world without remakes, so you have to take – and appreciate – the good with the bad here. Also, some remakes have worked well enough that they happened to win Best Picture at the Oscars. Granted, it hasn’t happened a lot, in almost 100 years of Oscar history, but there are three remakes that won the biggest award of the night for the years they came out in, and those three remakes will be ranked below.

None are bad, but it feels like only two out of the three are genuine classics, while the third… again, perfectly fine, albeit a little more surprising that it won. Also, there has to be a distinction made between something being adapted again and something being remade. For instance, there were movies about the titular event made before Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), which won Best Picture, but that one is not considered a remake of those other movies, even if the subject matter is the same. There’s also West Side Story (1961), which feels right on the line, because you could possibly make an argument for it feeling like a remake of any Romeo and Juliet movie that existed before 1961, but such an argument would probably be a bit of a stretch. If West Side Story (2021) had won Best Picture, on the other hand, then that might be trickier, regarding whether it would fit in here, but that didn’t happen, so there’s no cause for alarm there. Finally, there’s Hamlet (1948), and while there were movies based on this Shakespeare play before 1948, all can be seen as separate adaptations of the stage play, including the 1948 one (so it’s not a remake of any that came before).

3

‘CODA’ (2021)

Image via Apple Original Films

There’s the least to say about CODA, of all the movies here. It is a solid film, just not an amazing one, and maybe the aforementioned West Side Story (2021) would’ve been a more deserving winner, out of the movies nominated for Best Picture that year. Granted, it wasn’t really an amazing year for cinema, and CODA already feels a little forgotten, and not just because there was an incident at the Academy Awards held in 2022 (for the movies of 2021) that overshadowed just about anything else that happened that night. Even if that year’s ceremony had gone well, CODA would probably still feel like one of those movies people would now, a few years later, potentially be surprised to hear was a winner. As for what it’s about, it’s a coming-of-age dramedy centered on a child of deaf adults (CODA), a young woman who is juggling family life and the question of what she wants to do with her adult life.

It’s normal stuff, for this kind of film, and maybe even a tad predictable, even if you’ve not seen the movie that CODA is a remake of. That film came out in 2014, was called La Famille Bélier, and was a French-Belgian production with the same sort of premise, all the while fitting into the same genres as CODA. It did well nominations-wise, at least, at the César Awards, which is the French equivalent of the Academy Awards, but wasn’t massively known on an international scale, making CODA’s status as a remake potentially surprising. Anyway, CODA definitely isn’t the worst Best Picture winner, but it’s also unlikely that many would call it one of the best. It works decently enough as a crowd-pleaser, stands as something feel-good while still retaining enough by way of honesty and realism, and it’s a solid low-key film (even if West Side Story, Drive My Car, and maybe even Dune – all nominated for Best Picture that year – would’ve been more deserving winners).

2

‘Ben-Hur’ (1959)

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ was a novel originally published in 1880, and it was adapted into a silent epic in 1925, with that film having the same title as the novel. 1959’s Ben-Hur is more well-known, though, and is sometimes called a remake of that movie from 1925, even if you could also make a case for it not being a remake, and instead being a new adaptation of the 1880 novel. For present purposes, it’s a remake. And it’s a really good remake, not to mention one that feels significantly different from what came before, owing to the leaps forward in technology when it came to filmmaking between 1925 and 1959. What felt epic in the former year didn’t feel as epic by the standards of the late 1950s, and so a remake made sense here. And it’s a testament to how well 1959’s Ben-Hur stands up that the 2016 film of the same name (another remake, in effect) doesn’t impress nearly as much, nor feel like a necessary update/remake the same way 1959’s Ben-Hur did.

This one really earned its Best Picture win, to cut to the chase, and the Best Director win for William Wyler also felt like a no-brainer. Ben-Hur is an epic that’s partly about revenge, partly about religion, and partly about redemption, plus a whole host of other things it has more than enough time to tackle, since the runtime here is about 3.5 hours all up. They pass by pretty well, especially because the big sequences in Ben-Hur (especially the chariot race, which is almost impossible to overlook or not mention when you’re talking about Ben-Hur) are so monumental. It’s a massive production, and even the fact that it slows down a bit in its final act feels forgivable when so much of what came before was so great. This felt like the definitive epic for its decade, and even if some epics from the 1960s might’ve ended up being better (like Lawrence of Arabia), very few felt genuinely bigger (at least until the Soviet four-part version of War and Peace). Ben-Hur still holds up, and even if you’re not wild about older movies, it’s hard to imagine many people watching this and not getting anything out of it.

1

‘The Departed’ (2006)

Image via Warner Bros. Pictures

Since there are plenty of great filmmakers who never directed a Best Picture winner, it’s good to be thankful that Martin Scorsese did it at least once, even though winning Best Picture and Best Director for The Departed felt long overdue, by 2006. He got to win for one of his gangster movies, though, so that’s kind of cool, and The Departed is also pretty cool/great in general, working extremely well as a remake of Infernal Affairs (2002), which was a Hong Kong film. Both Infernal Affairs and The Departed are worth one’s time, and you can pretty much flip a coin when it comes to trying to pick out which one’s best. They have the same premise, which involves an undercover cop trying to infiltrate the mob, and a person affiliated with the mob kind of doing the same thing, but flipped. He’s a criminal who’s gone undercover within the police force.

And both these men figure out that there’s another mole at play, so both these movies end up being about a pair of guys trying to out the other. As you might expect for a movie about that, The Departed is high on suspense, and it also manages to keep things moving at a very brisk pace (albeit not quite as brisk as the pacing in Infernal Affairs, but that movie is much shorter, and also borderline too fast, at least at first). Also, there are differences when it comes to the endings here, so that furthers the ease with which one can recommend that both are watched. As for The Departed specifically, it’s just a really great thriller that also works as a gangster movie, and to date, it stands as the best remake to have won Best Picture. When being crowned in that manner involves being triumphant over a movie that’s as much a classic as Ben-Hur (1959), then that’s certainly saying something.

The Departed

Release Date

October 6, 2006

Runtime

151 minutes