8. It Happened One Night (1934)
Directed by: Frank Capra
Written by: Robert Riskin
The other Oscars it won: Capra (Best Director); Riskin (Best Adapted Screenplay); Clark Gable (Best Actor); Claudette Colbert (Best Actress)
What it beat for Best Picture: The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Cleopatra, Flirtation Walk, The Gay Divorcee, Here Comes the Navy, The House of Rothschild, Imitation of Life, One Night of Love, The Thin Man, Viva Villa!, The White Parade
Could It Happened One Night be the most charming movie ever made? As directed by Frank Capra, Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable — playing, respectively, a famous heiress on the run from her controlling father and a surly newspaperman who sees her as his way back into employment — look like they're having more fun than any of us ever will in our lives. Comedy ages worse than drama, but It Happened One Night remains a warm, laugh-out-loud movie. It's as much of a love story between you and the movie as it is between the two lead characters.
7. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
Directed by: David Lean
Written by: Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson
The other Oscars it won: Lean (Best Director); Alec Guinness (Best Actor); Foreman, Wilson, and Pierre Boulle (Best Adapted Screenplay); Jack Hildyard (Best Cinematography); Peter Taylor (Best Film Editing); Malcolm Arnold (Best Score)
What it beat for Best Picture: 12 Angry Men, Peyton Place, Sayonara, Witness for the Prosecution
A different sort of World War II movie from anything else on this list — and there are a bunch, as you have probably noticed — David Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai tells the story of Col. Nicholson, as played by Alec Guinness, who won Best Actor. As a British officer being held in a Japanese POW camp in Burma, Nicholson is tasked with building the titular bridge, but the movie follows his descent into obsessive madness. It's a well-acted, exciting, smart film about how people lose perspective during war, with a thrilling and morally opaque ending. Interestingly, American movies in 1957, and the 1958 Oscars, seemed to be working out some feelings about Japan: Sayonara, in which Marlon Brando plays a pilot in the Korean War who falls in love with a Japanese woman, was The Bridge on the River Kwai's rival in a number of categories.