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The Best Picture Academy Award: Trivia and Stats

© Nicholas Moreau

So which studio do you think has the most films which have won the Best Picture Academy Award? It's a tie, actually - Columbia and United Artists share the honor with 12 films each which have claimed Oscar's top prize.

That's just one of many facts in this week's article: stats on Best Picture. From time to time during the Oscar off-season, we will go through the Oscar categories and analyze them, and in doing so, can perhaps let you better predict the Oscars when they come around.

• Yes indeed, Columbia and United Artists have beat out the other big studios with 12 Best Picture winning films among them.
• Paramount is close behind, with 11 films winning Best Picture.
• MGM has 9 Best Picture winning films, but all of them were in the early years of cinema.
• 20th Century Fox owns 7 Best Picture Oscars.
• Warner Bros and Universal tie with 6 Best Pictures apiece.
• Orion has 4 and all were recent wins.
• One studio that no longer exists claimed two Best Pictures, RKO Radio.
• And the newest kid on the block, Miramax, now has two Best Picture Oscars to its credit, its second coming with 1998's win for Shakespeare in Love.

The typical Best Picture winner runs over two hours. Can you guess what genre of film tends to win Best Picture?

Dramas still outrank all others, and epic dramas like Lawrence of Arabia, The English Patient, and Titanic tend to win out also. 37 dramas have won Best Picture, which is about 52% of the time.

The second most honored genre is actually not honored at all anymore, and that's musicals. 9 Best Picture wins have gone to musicals, and the last time a musical won was Oliver! in 1968. War films have been perennial favorites, with 8 Best Pictures, all the way across the history of the Oscars, from All Quiet on the Western Front to Platoon.

And although some have said that comedies never win, 8 comedies have won Best Picture, as early as It Happened One Night in 1934, up to Annie Hall and Shakespeare in Love.

Only 3 Westerns have won Best Picture, one way back in the '30s, Cimarron, and two in the '90s, Dances with Wolves and Unforgiven.

Two action/adventure films have won, such as The French Connection. A thriller about a flesh eating serial killer has even won Best Picture, if you can believe it.

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