Colleen Atwood won her second Oscar for dressing a story set in Kyoto and Gion, filmed almost entirely in California. The kimonos were deliberately inaccurate, brighter and more revealing than anything a real geisha would wear in the 1930s. Arthur Golden's novel got pushback from actual geisha before the movie even started shooting. Atwood built costumes for a fantasy of Japan, and the Academy rewarded the fantasy anyway. | © Sony Pictures
There's a war rig chase across the Namib desert that took 138 days to film, and editor Margaret Sixel had barely worked on an action movie before. She cut Mad Max: Fury Road like a silent film, leaning on rhythm instead of dialogue. The Oscar win for editing surprised people who assumed a movie this loud needed a different kind of craft to win. Sixel had never watched the previous Mad Max films before cutting this one. | © Warner Bros. Pictures
Alexandre Desplat had been nominated seven times before The Grand Budapest Hotel finally won him an Oscar in 2015. The score leans on balalaikas and yodeling choirs, sounds that feel more like a novelty than film music. Some of Wes Anderson's regular collaborators call it his most playful work ever recorded. Whether "playful" and "best of the year" belong in the same sentence is still argued in scoring circles. | © Fox Searchlight Pictures
Alan Turing died in 1954, convicted under laws that criminalized his sexuality, and got a royal pardon only in 2013. The Imitation Game turned his codebreaking work at Bletchley Park into a tidy thriller with a tragic bow. Graham Moore's script won Best Adapted Screenplay in 2015 despite historians flagging invented characters and compressed timelines. Turing's actual story didn't need the embellishments, and that's precisely what people won't let go of. | © The Weinstein Company
A boy, a tiger, and a lifeboat carried Ang Lee to his second Best Director win in 2013. Life of Pi ran on visual effects so dense that Rhythm and Hues, the studio behind the tiger, filed for bankruptcy during awards season. Lee got the golden statue while the artists who built Richard Parker pixel by pixel were losing their jobs. The win and the industry it came from told two completely different stories that year. | © 20th Century Fox
Alfonso Cuaron won Best Director for Gravity in 2014, beating Steve McQueen for 12 Years a Slave. The film that took the top prize that night was not the one he directed. That split has never sat well with people who think the two awards should point at the same movie. Cuaron's long takes and George Clooney spinning into the dark earned the technical praise while the acting story went elsewhere. | © Warner Bros. Pictures
Jean Dujardin won Best Actor for a silent film in 2012, which by itself tells you how unusual that year was. The Artist has almost no dialogue, and Dujardin communicates most of his performance through his face and a dog named Uggie. Some actors spend a whole career chasing that kind of physical control. Whether silence counts as harder work than delivering lines is still the argument nobody settles. | © The Weinstein Company
Frances McDormand produced and starred in Nomadland, then picked up her third Best Actress Oscar for it in 2021. Chloe Zhao cast real nomads alongside her, blurring where the documentary ends and the fiction starts. That blend is exactly what makes the Best Picture win feel shaky to some people. A movie built on real people's actual lives took the top prize meant for a scripted story. | © Searchlight Pictures
A woman falls in love with a fish man, and in 2018 that movie won Best Picture. Guillermo del Toro had been building toward The Shape of Water for years, citing Creature from the Black Lagoon as a direct influence. Voters clearly saw a fairy tale about loneliness. Others just saw the premise and couldn't get past it. | © Fox Searchlight Pictures
Martin Scorsese finally won Best Director in 2007, on his sixth nomination, for a film that is not even his most acclaimed work. The Departed took Best Picture the same night, beating Babel and Letters from Iwo Jima. People close to Scorsese have called it a make-up win for Taxi Driver and Goodfellas being passed over decades earlier. The trophy went to the right man, just maybe for the wrong movie. | © Warner Bros. Pictures
Some Oscar victories were celebrated instantly, while others sparked debates that have never really cooled down. Here are 15 Oscar wins that still divide the Academy and film fans alike.
