In February 2024, Dame Helen Mirren stood at the podium of the 37th Annual American Cinematheque Awards at the Beverly Hilton and delivered a line that cut through the entire awards season discourse with the precision of a stiletto. Asked by Entertainment Tonight about the controversy surrounding Barbie‘s Oscar snubs – Greta Gerwig overlooked for Best Director, Margot Robbie absent from Best Actress – Mirren offered not a defence but a demolition of the premise itself. “You can’t get upset about things like that, honestly,” she said. “What is fantastic is that Barbie was the highest-grossing film that Warner Bros has ever had in their lives and do you remember who won best film of the year before last?”
The question was rhetorical. The answer, for most people, is no. The Best Picture winner at the 94th Academy Awards in March 2022 was CODA, a modest, warmly received Apple TV+ acquisition about a hearing child of deaf adults. It was the first film from a streaming platform to win the top prize. It was also, for many cinemagoers, essentially invisible – a film whose victory was noted, discussed for a news cycle, and then absorbed into the great sedimentary layer of Oscar history that nobody actively revisits. Before that, the 2023 winner was Everything Everywhere All at Once, a film that at least had the virtue of being genuinely strange and commercially successful. But ask someone on the street to name the Best Picture winner from 2021 (Nomadland), or 2019 (Parasite, which most people can name precisely because it was the first non-English-language winner), or 2018 (Green Book, a film whose cultural footprint is essentially a footnote about controversy), and Mirren’s point proves itself with each passing year.
Why Mirren’s Credentials Make This More Than a Soundbite
The observation carries a particular weight coming from Mirren, who is not merely a passing commentator on the Academy Awards but one of its most decorated participants. She won the Best Actress Oscar in 2007 for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen, a performance of calibrated restraint that remains one of the great demonstrations of screen acting in the 21st century. She has been nominated three further times – for The Madness of King George (1994), Gosford Park (2001), and The Last Station (2009) – giving her a cumulative relationship with the Academy that spans decades and encompasses both triumph and near-miss.
But Mirren’s distinction runs deeper than Oscar statistics. She is the only performer in history to have achieved both the American and British Triple Crowns of Acting – an Academy Award, a Tony Award, and an Emmy Award in the US, mirrored by BAFTA, Olivier, and television BAFTA equivalents in the UK. She has won four BAFTAs, three Golden Globes, five Primetime Emmy Awards, a SAG Life Achievement Award (2022), and the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 2026 Golden Globes. She was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2003. When such a person tells you that awards memory is fleeting, she speaks from a position of authority that few in the industry can match – not as a disgruntled nominee, but as someone who has stood at the podium, held the statuette, and understood afterwards that the holding changed nothing about the work itself.
The Best Picture Amnesia Problem
Mirren’s challenge – “do you remember who won best film of the year before last?” – is not merely a rhetorical flourish. It describes a measurable phenomenon in cultural memory. A 2019 study published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creative Arts, and Art by researchers at the University of Toronto found that Best Picture winners from the previous decade were recalled by general audiences at significantly lower rates than Best Picture winners from the 1970s and 1990s. The researchers attributed this to the fragmentation of shared cultural experience: in an era of streaming, algorithmic curation, and the collapse of the monoculture, fewer films occupy the same collective headspace simultaneously.
The numbers bear this out. Between 2015 and 2023, the Best Picture winners were Birdman, Spotlight, Moonlight, The Shape of Water, Green Book, Parasite, Nomadland, CODA, and Everything Everywhere All at Once. Of these, only Parasite (a genre-redefining masterpiece with a universal theme of class warfare) and Moonlight (a film whose cultural significance transcended its Oscar) have achieved the kind of lasting recognition that casual cinema audiences can recall unprompted. The rest occupy a curious liminal space: admired in the moment, technically acknowledged, but not remembered in the way that The Godfather, Schindler’s List, or even Forrest Gump are remembered – films that have become part of the fabric of popular consciousness regardless of their Oscar pedigree.
This is not to say the recent winners are inferior films. Moonlight is a masterpiece. Nomadland is a quietly devastating portrait of American precarity. Everything Everywhere All at Once is an audacious work of genre invention. But there is a meaningful difference between critical esteem and cultural permanence, and Mirren’s point – whether she intended it as provocation or simple observation – is that the Oscar for Best Picture has less to do with the latter than the Academy would like to believe.
What Actually Endures
The films that endure are not always the ones that win. Consider the following: Do the Right Thing (1989) lost Best Picture to Driving Miss Daisy. Brokeback Mountain (2005) lost to Crash. A Clockwork Orange (1971) was not even nominated. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) received a single nomination – for Best Director – and lost. The Academy has a well-documented tendency to reward films that feel important in the moment rather than films that will feel essential in the future, and this gap between即时 significance and long-term resonance is precisely the space Mirren was gesturing towards.
The films that become permanently embedded in the cultural lexicon tend to share certain qualities: they tap into something universal about the human condition (The Godfather, Schindler’s List); they are formally revolutionary in ways that reshape what audiences expect from cinema (Citizen Kane, 2001); or they become objects of such overwhelming popular affection that their Oscar status becomes irrelevant (Titanic, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King). None of these qualities are reliably predicted by the Academy’s voting patterns.
Barbie itself may prove Mirren’s point in the long run. With a worldwide gross of approximately $1.46 billion, it became the highest-grossing film in Warner Bros history. It generated a global conversation about feminism, consumerism, and the cultural power of nostalgic IP. It spawned a parallel discourse about what counts as “serious” cinema – a discourse that the Oscar snubs for Gerwig and Robbie only intensified. Whether Barbie will be remembered in thirty years is impossible to predict with certainty, but its commercial and cultural footprint already dwarfs that of most Best Picture winners of the past decade. The Academy’s failure to recognise Gerwig for Best Director – a decision that Mirren called “so out there, it was so brave, it was something we’d never seen before” – may itself become the more memorable historical footnote.
The American Cinematheque Award: Recognition That Lasts
There is a certain irony in the setting of Mirren’s remarks. The American Cinematheque Award, which she received at the ceremony where she made the quote, is explicitly designed to honour artists “who are fully engaged in his or her work and committed to making a significant contribution to the art of motion pictures.” Unlike the Oscar, which is awarded for a single year’s achievement, the Cinematheque Award is a career-spanning recognition – a recognition that the body of work matters more than any individual performance within it. Harrison Ford, who presented the award, called Mirren “the kindest, funniest, wackiest broad,” and her husband, director Taylor Hackford, told the audience she was “the best actress alive today.”
Mirren was only the third British recipient of the award, following Sir Ridley Scott and the late Sir Sean Connery. The list of previous honourees – which includes Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, George Clooney, and Samuel L. Jackson – reads as a catalogue of artists whose cultural significance far exceeds their Oscar tallies. The award implicitly acknowledges what Mirren’s quote makes explicit: that the measure of a filmmaker’s legacy is not the number of statuettes on the shelf but the degree to which their work has altered the landscape of cinema itself.
Mirren’s Broader Argument: The Audience Is the Only Jury That Matters
Behind Mirren’s remark lies a broader philosophy of artistic value that has defined her career. In the same interview with Entertainment Tonight, she praised Greta Gerwig’s work on Barbie as “so out there, it was so brave, it was something we’d never seen before,” while also acknowledging that Christopher Nolan’s work on Oppenheimer – which ultimately won Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards – was “spectacular, extraordinary.” The point was not that one film deserved the award over the other, but that the award itself is a poor proxy for the conversation a film generates, the communities it builds, and the way it reshapes its audience’s understanding of what cinema can be.
This is, in many ways, a more generous and more accurate framework for evaluating films than the one the Academy offers. The Oscar for Best Picture is a snapshot of industry consensus at a single moment in time. It is determined by approximately 10,000 Academy members, most of whom work in the film industry, many of whom have financial or professional relationships with the films under consideration. The audience – the millions of people who actually watch films, who argue about them, who return to them, who let them change the way they see the world – is a far larger and more honest jury. And the audience, as Mirren knows, has a long memory for the films that matter and a short memory for the ceremonies that celebrate them.
The history of the Best Picture Oscar is, ultimately, a history of what the industry chose to celebrate in a given year. It is not a history of what endured. That history is written by audiences, by critics, by time, and by the stubborn, unpredictable way that certain films embed themselves in the collective imagination while others, despite their golden statuettes, simply fade. For a full account of the 96th Academy Awards – the ceremony at which Oppenheimer claimed the top prize – see our Film coverage. Helen Mirren, who has held one of those statuettes and watched it gather dust, understands this better than most. Her question – “do you remember who won best film of the year before last?” – is not a challenge to the Academy’s relevance. It is a reminder that relevance was never the Academy’s to give.
