It’s almost Oscar time again, and I’ve followed the Academy Awards for long enough now to know that they don’t always represent the quality and scope of the year’s best movies. Yet, there’s something about the award season’s glitziest bash that turns me into the film buff equivalent of a WWE fan, who knows deep down that the fighting isn’t actually real, but can’t help going mental when the contenders start hurling themselves from the top turnbuckle.

In anticipation of the 88th Academy Awards nominations, here’s a list of Oscar’s worst and weirdest oversights in the Best Picture category.

10 Films That Should’ve Won Best Picture

#10. Pan’s Labyrinth

Dark-hued, dangerous and melancholy, Guillermo del Toro’s visionary fairytale grows in stature year by year, already looking like one of the films of the young century. It is a deeply textured masterwork, creating a fully realised reality and alternative reality for its young heroine Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), who seeks refuge from the horrors of post-civil war Spain in a fantasy world, only to find it as dark and violent as real life.

Evoking the primal, ancient morality tales of old rather than the sanitized hokum of Disney, it strikes a resonant chord in our deepest wishes and fears. It was probably a bit too obscure for voters—foreign language films rarely get much recognition in the Best Picture category, although lightweight fare such as Il Postino has made a showing in modern times. Martin Scorsese’s The Departed took Best Pic, and it had the misfortune to go up against the excellent The Lives of Others in the Best Foreign Language Film category. I’m sure time will separate Pan’s Labyrinth from both movies significantly.

#9. Pulp Fiction

Quentin Tarantino’s burst of pure cinema is arguably the most influential film of the past twenty-five years. It changed the way people made, wrote and thought about movies ever since. Two decades later, QT is an auteur who can make whatever he wants, please the critics (most of the time), and pack out theatres across the world. Hell, he could even adapt his grocery list for the screen and it would still be a hit.

Pulp Fiction was the perfect blend of attitude, style, music, dialogue, set pieces, dance moves, top shelf performances, and sheer, balls-out bravado. It was sensational, and struck at exactly the right time.

#8. Field of Dreams

The 62nd Awards were arguably the nadir for Oscar, with the twee Driving Miss Daisy beating a strong field including Born on the Forth of July, Dead Poet’s Society, My Left Foot, and my pick, Field of Dreams to Best Picture.

You don’t need to be a baseball fan to be enchanted by this tale of Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner), compelled by ghostly voices to build a baseball diamond over his crops. Told straight and featuring Costner at his most disarming and sincere, it’s a wonderful piece of modern myth-making. It’s a film about nostalgia and regret, but also an optimistic, magic hour celebration of the dreamer in all of us.

#7. The Killing Fields

Losing to Milos Forman’s grandiose, gaudy and rather campy Amadeus, Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields is an impassioned yet sensitive depiction of the apocalyptic Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. It’s centred on the relationship between two journalists, American Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterson) and Cambodian Dith Pran (Dr. Haing S Ngor) caught amid the brutal regime change.

Working from a grown up screenplay by Bruce Robinson (Withnail & I), Joffe captures the chaos and turmoil of those years in great detail, with escalating panic as the US ditches its Cambodian allies. Schanberg is reluctantly forced to follow suit, leaving Pran to fend for himself in Year Zero. Ngor’s dignified, resolute performance is humbling—a first-time actor, he survived the ordeal in real life before making it to the States in 1980.

#6. Raging Bull / The Elephant Man

Take your pick, either film would have been a worthier winner than Robert Redford’s Ordinary People, which no one has seen since it took the Best Picture trophy at the 53rd awards. Both biopics shot in wondrous black and white, Scorsese and David Lynch’s films examine opposite ends of the human spectrum—Robert De Niro’s repugnant, self-destructive Middleweight Champ Jake La Motta, and John Hurt’s gentle and intelligent John Merrick, trapped inside a hideously deformed body.

Raging Bull is brutal and depressing, The Elephant Man ethereal and heartbreaking. Both have become modern masterpieces.

#5. The Exorcist

William Friedkin’s iconic horror has lost some of its shock value over the years, and I think it is all the better for it. Once you’re over all the head-spinning and spider-walking, you can concentrate on the story itself, and it always amazes me each time I see it how positive the film is. The Exorcist is a good movie in the purest sense of the word, and I think that you can draw encouragement from it no matter what your theological standpoint.

If you’re a person of faith, it makes great propaganda for the church, showing the Devil as crude and debased, while God’s humble servants selflessly lay down their lives to save a possessed little girl. If you’re agnostic, you can be buoyed by the sheer decency of the human characters in the film. If a bomb goes off in a public place, there are always people who run towards the explosion, disregarding their own safety in the hope of saving others.

That’s what the characters in The Exorcist are like, especially old and dispirited Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) and young and doubting Father Karras (Jason Miller)—on blind faith they ride to the rescue with no evidence that God has their backs. Despite its diabolical reputation, I find The Exorcist such an incredibly uplifting film.

#4. Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Like Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick didn’t get much love from the Academy—between them, they won a grand total of zero awards for Best Director. 2001: A Space Odyssey wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture, but I’m listing Dr. Strangelove because I absolutely hate the film that beat it, George Cukor’s smug, shrieking My Fair Lady. (Interesting side note: Audrey Hepburn sported one of two dodgy Cockney accents in the Best Pic category that year, along with Dick Van Dyke’s chimney sweep in Mary Poppins.)

Perhaps coming a little too soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Strangelove‘s acerbic satire has become synonymous with the insanity of war. Comedy madman Peter Seller’s three performances are rightly celebrated, but it is the supporting trio of Sterling Hayden, Slim Pickens and George C Scott that really stick with you, ultra believable as crazed military men deliriously willing to push the world over the brink of mutually assured destruction to get one over on the Ruskies. Kubrick observes all this madness with a sardonic, deadpan gaze, and the film concludes with one of the most terrifyingly beautiful scenes of all time – the end of the world set to Dame Vera Lynn’s We’ll Meet Again.

#3. Vertigo

No popular filmmaker quite flaunted his kinks and fetishes on the screen quite as obsessively as the Portly Pervert (aka Master of Suspense) Alfred Hitchcock. Vertigo, his most personal vision, was met with a mixed reaction by critics and making little impact at the Oscars, only picking up a couple of technical awards.

These days we’re all amateur psychologists, so I think the modern audience is better positioned to appreciate Hitchcock’s masterpiece. It’s the eerie, twisted tale of a detective ruthlessly shaping a shop girl into the object of his obsessions, an icy blonde (what else in Hitchcock?) that he couldn’t prevent committing suicide because of his fear of heights. James Stewart is magnificent, tainting his good guy image to queasy effect.

#2. The Third Man

Orson Welles already had the greatest film of all time under his belt (Citizen Kane), and a few years later he gave us the greatest movie entrance of all time in Carol Reed’s funny, thrilling and fatalistic The Third Man. We follow Joseph Cotten’s gullible pulp novelist through the noirish, expressionistic underworld of post-war Vienna in search of his old best friend Harry Lime (Welles), wanted by the authorities for peddling dodgy penicillin. Anton Karas’s fabulous zither theme perfectly captures the tone of the film, managing to be jaunty and slightly sinister at the same time. A thing of joy.

#1. Citizen Kane

Although regarded as a cornerstone of modern cinema, Orson Welles’s masterpiece lost out on Outstanding Motion Picture to a film well-regarded but little-seen these days, How Green Was My Valley. Maybe it isn’t so difficult to see why – the Oscars have always been a popularity contest, and I think you need to be a bit of a cinephile to get the most out of Citizen Kane. The film is like Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu, a magnificent, chilly mausoleum to its creator’s limitless talent, ambition and vanity. A miraculous piece of film making, but there’s little warmth within.

Also worth mentioning is another losing Best Pic nominee at the 1942 ceremony, a tight, atmospheric detective thriller called The Maltese Falcon. While small in scope, it crystallised our notion of noir, and its influence can be seen in movies as diverse as Chinatown, Blade Runner and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Hollywood has long loved to peer into its crystal ball and imagine the many ways humanity may meet its end. Turns out grand scale destruction tends to be surprisingly cinematic, and morbidly entertaining. So in honor of the release of Darren Aronofsky’s film Noah, that most epic of apocalyptic tales and arguably the first due to its biblical origins, the Way Too Indie staff have compiled a list of our top 13 films depicting the end of the world as we know it.

12 Best Apocalyptic Films

#12 – Shaun of the Dead

When the end of the world comes in the form of a zombie apocalypse, leave it to the Brits to take it in stride and not make a fuss. Edgar Wright may not be the first to have noticed the absolute hilarity inherent in slow, dead people roaming the streets, but he certainly executes it best. Best friends and serial slackers Shaun and Ed find themselves in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. Together they form a plan to win back Shaun’s put-out girlfriend, save his parents, and make their way to the Winchester, the neighborhood pub that seems about as good a place as any to ride out the end of the world. What makes this film a must-see is it’s ability to maintain placeholders on both comedy and horror “Best Of” lists, with both serious laughs and serious scares in abundance. [Ananda]

#11 – La Jetée

The pinnacle achievement of Chris Marker’s career, La Jetée (The Pier) glimpses a post-WWIII Paris in which we follow a man subjected to time travel experiments by underground mad doctors. After a harrowing testing period, he’s sent into the past where he meets the woman of his dreams. When the experiment concludes he’s given the opportunity to visit a new world by a future race of beings, but he passes it up to be with the woman. The film’s gut-wrenching ending haunts me to this day. Told entirely in still black and white photos (save for one revelatory sequence), the sci-fi experiment still stands as an unequaled landmark in the history of film. [Bernard]

#10 – Logan’s Run

Admittedly the line between apocalyptic and dystopian can get a bit blurry. And a world where what’s left of humanity are all beautiful young people scantily clad in bright colors and living pleasure-filled lives, including sex on-demand and orgy clubs, doesn’t sound half bad. So long as living past 30 isn’t a priority. This 1976 sci-fi film stars Michael York as Logan 5, a Sandman tasked with catching Runners, people who try to escape their fate of Carrousel, the ritual that involves allowing oneself to be vaporized at the age of 30 in the hope of Renewal. Logan 5 finds a strange symbol on a runner and begins asking questions of the city computer. He finds out that outside the city is a place called Sanctuary and he is asked to find Sanctuary and destroy it. Adding to his urgency, the hand crystal tracking his age begins blinking red, meaning his time has run up. So he and his new friend Jessica 6 decide to run, making the hunter the hunted. The score, with its digital bee-boo-bops, sounds like a computer synth gone haywire, and the miniature scale models of the city hardly seem worthy of the Visual Effects Oscar the film won, but it’s exactly those dated details that make Logan’s Run a fun look at the future of the past. [Ananda]

#9 – A.I. Artificial Intelligence

What could be considered a modern-day tale of Pinocchio, Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence centers on a futuristic robot that yearns to become a real boy so that his human caretaker (his mother) will love him again. Surrounding the film is an apocalypse caused by melting polar ice caps that flood major cities. While the film is a bit overlong and has a conclusion that will divide audiences, Artificial Intelligence creates an audacious fantasy world that only a collaboration between Stanley Kubrick and Spielberg could produce. This dazzling visual masterpiece includes such a deeply emotional story that you won’t leave with dry eyes. [Dustin]

#8 – The Stand

I’ll be the first to say I’m beyond excited this Stephen King tome is getting a remake soon (even if Ben Affleck is no longer helming, sigh). The mini-series, which originally aired on ABC in 1994, just didn’t have the budget to do the epic tale much justice. But the elements are all there, which is why this movie can still hold its own in the realm of the apocalyptic film. The near-end of the world comes in the form of a deadly disease accidentally released by the military, offing 99% of the population. Those who are immune begin to have visions calling them to either Denver to join a mysterious old woman named Mother Abigail, or to Las Vegas to join the sinister antichrist Randall Flagg. So they trek, finding one another as they go. It’s his characters that make Stephen King’s stories so intriguing and because of it’s 6 hour length, The Stand is able to foster quite a few of them. The added element of the supernatural takes this apocalyptic tale beyond simple survival into epic good vs. evil warfare. [Ananda]

#7 – This is the End

At first glance, this self-aware film featuring celebrities playing slightly exaggerated versions of themselves, partying at James Franco’s place before a giant sinkhole starts to swallow people, seems more like a guilty pleasure inclusion on the list. But This is the End is completely worth mentioning here because the film hits all the intended comedic notes due to never taking itself too seriously. This is the End features an ending that will make you laugh until your sides hurt, resulting in one of the funniest takes to date on an apocalyptic story. [Dustin]

#6 – Melancholia

Leave it to Lars Von Trier to look at the end of the world and feel relief. Split into two parts, Melancholia begins with a wedding that ends up being a small-scale version of what’s to come. Justine (Kirsten Dunst, in her best performance to date) is the bride, and her intense depression during the ceremony leads her down a self-destructive path. At this point the titular planet (which eventually smashes into Earth, as seen in the jaw-dropping prologue and finale) is a small blue dot in the sky. In the second half, when the planet’s collision is mere days away, Justine’s now crippling depression is cured. In fact it’s her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), seen in the first half as level-headed and happy with her life, who becomes overcome with grief as she faces the end of everything. Melancholia is Von Trier at his best, accurately showing the devastating effects of depression while focusing on some truly fascinating ideas. It’s hard to think of another film that makes the apocalypse look this beautiful. [CJ]

#5 – 28 Days Later

Never standing still, Danny Boyle is a filmmaker constantly on the move, exploring different genres with each film in his catalogue. 28 Days Later is Boyle at his most vicious. Starring Cillian Murphy in a great performance, the horror-thriller journey movie is in an England overrun with zombies (they’re technically not zombies, but come on now…) on steroids: they’re capable of sprinting, making the film more intensely terrifying than creepy. Murphy’s odyssey across dilapidated, empty city streets and blood-splattered fields gets startlingly twisted and upsetting (especially in the film’s finale, where Boyle ratchets up the intensity to insane levels), but the likable actors and scattered moments of levity keep your heart in the fight. [Bernard]

#4 – Children of Men

Alfonso Cuarón’s vision of a ruinous, infertile near-future in Children of Men is a world rich with cinematic opportunity, and he seizes every one. His hero’s (Clive Owen) journey to deliver the only pregnant woman on earth to the coast of a demolished, war-torn Britain is fraught with intense, high-stakes encounters, and Cuarón’s now-textbook one-shot car chase sequence signified the emergence of one of the most influential visual filmmakers of our generation. In a time where too many filmmakers use coverage and editing to hide their shortcomings, Cuarón is a beacon when it comes to actually moving a camera. Children of Men is one of the most convincing versions of the future put to screen in movie history because it looks and sounds just like the world we know, only slightly closer to the precipice of full collapse that threatens us all. [Bernard]

#3 – Wall-E

I remember watching Wall-E back in 2008 and, even at the age of 16, I recall lighting up like a kid at Christmas. The only way to describe this movie is: utterly and completely adorable. However, we are still talking about end of the world stuff here, and amidst the terrifying depressive apocalyptic films we’ve listed, Wall-E stands alone in its ability to capture the hearts of all. In the film, a small waste collecting robot, Wall-E, embarks upon a space adventure with his new friend EVE (a sleek, yet dangerous reconnaissance robot). Together they will ultimately decide the fate of humanity, which has now resigned itself to life in space. This journey demonstrates courage, determination, love and affection–all of which we could do with witnessing a little more of.

The fact that the earth has gone to hell is not the main focus of this story, and in the face of all that has happened and that these characters are surviving, there’s nothing broken about the hearts of these two life-affirming robots. To me, Wall-E is an apocalyptic tale for the entire family and how often can you say that? [Amy]

#2 – The Matrix

Not only did The Matrix boldly inject a heavy dose of philosophy into an action movie structure, the film made a huge impact on the world of cinematography and special effects with its excellent choreographed martial arts. Case in point, the unforgettable “bullet time” scene where time suddenly slows down as the camera pans around the bullet allowing Neo to dodge it.

The film is all about questioning the reality that we think we know and entertaining the idea that it’s just an advanced computer simulation used to harvest energy from the enslaved human race in hibernation. At the age of 15 when the film was released, The Matrix had a profound impact on me being the first film that made me question perceived reality. Not only did The Matrix introduce imaginative concepts, but the film also presented them in an astonishing way, making The Matrix one of the most influential works of post-apocalyptic science fiction. [Dustin]

#1 – Dr. Strangelove

For a topic as dour as the apocalypse, it is a bit surprising that the best apocalyptic film also happens to be one of the greatest comedies ever made. Stanley Kubrick, a director who mastered every genre he worked in, ruthlessly made fun of the absurdity of the Cold War. The end of the world is triggered by one loony general’s actions, and as the president and his staff frantically scramble to avoid the inevitable Kubrick, along with his incredible cast (Peter Sellers is terrific in his three roles, but George C. Scott steals the show as Buck Turgidson), let audiences laugh at their own mutually assured destruction. Dr. Strangelove walks a fine line between satire and camp, but the complete lack of self-awareness throughout is what elevates this into a masterpiece. It’s still the gold standard of satire, and to this day no one has made the end of the world look this funny. [CJ]