The Longest & Shortest Best Picture Winners At The Oscars

In the entire history of the Academy Awards, only six Best Picture winners have been 100 minutes or less. It seems that traditional, Oscar-bait "prestige" pictures tend to run long, attracting Academy voters with their sheer volume. Extra-long films are also a little rare, though, as only five Best Picture Winners are 200 minutes or more. Additionally, a whopping 18 Best Pictures have been between 160 and 195 minutes, so voters clearly don't mind longer movies. Indeed, the average length of a Best Picture winner is 136 minutes. In terms of cinematic storytelling, that seems to be the sweet spot. 

Of course, Roger Ebert's adage needs to be mentioned. The famed critics once posited that no good movie is too long, and no bad movie is short enough. The actual length of a film doesn't really matter, so long as it's a quality picture, and it makes good use of its time. Personally, I feel that the ideal movie length is either under 89 minutes, or over 240. Extra-short and extra-long are the best. Anything in between likely needs to shave itself down, or let itself breathe. 

The longest film ever to be nominated for Best Picture remains 1964's "Cleopatra," the expensive disaster starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. "Cleopatra" is 251 minutes long. Other notably long Best Picture nominees include "The Ten Commandments" (at 220 minutes), "The Irishman" (at 209 minutes), "Killers of the Flower Moon" (at 206), and "Giant" (at 201). 

The longest film to ever win Best Picture is ... well, there are several ways to measure it, and we'll get into the nitty-gritty below. The shortest film to win Best Picture is, however, uncontested. Delbert Mann's sweet romantic comedy film "Marty," released in 1955, remains the shortest at a brisk 90 minutes. 

When it comes to the longest movie, as mentioned, there are several ways to measure length. As one might expect, Victor Fleming's controversial 1939 Civil War film "Gone with the Wind" is technically the longest film to win Best Picture, as it runs a full 238 minutes. However, that 238 minutes includes an overture, a full intermission, an entr'acte, and exit music, all of which combined tack on 16 minutes of runtime. Without the music and intermission, "Gone with the Wind" only runs 221 minutes. 

Meanwhile, David Lean's 1962 Best Picture winner "Lawrence of Arabia" only runs 232 minutes with its musical elements, making it shorter than "Gone with the Wind." But, with its musical elements removed, "Lawrence" runs 222 minutes, nosing out "Gone with the Wind" by a single minute. 

There is no interference from the next longest-running film to win Best Picture, as William Wyler's biblical epic "Ben-Hur" runs 212 minutes with all of its musical elements. 

If one would like to consider the longest Best Picture winner that doesn't have an intermission, that honor belongs to Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," which won in 2003. The theatrical cut of the film runs an impressive 201, which played straight through. If one wants to be persnickety enough to count the straight-to-video Extended Cut of "Return of the King," however, then it is the uncontested length winner, hands down, running 251 minutes without an intermission. That 251 minutes, however, does include a 10-minute credits reel that listed hundreds of Charter Members of the official "Lord of the Rings" fan club. 

Of course, even without the credits reel, the Extended Cut of "Return of the King" still wins at 241 minutes.

Of course, not all Best Picture winners tip the scale. Some are of a perfectly decent length. As mentioned, "Marty" is the shortest Best Picture winner, but 1977's "Annie Hall" only runs 93 minutes. F.W. Murnau's "Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans," one of two films to win Best Picture at the first Academy Awards in 1927, is only 94 minutes long, and golly is it worth every minute. 

Also jaunty is "Driving Miss Daisy," which closes after 99 minutes. The 1929 revue film "The Broadway Melody" is a brisk 100, which is tied with the unexpected 2011 Best Picture winner, "The Artist." All under about 110 minutes are "In the Heat of the Night," "On the Waterfront," "Nomadland," "Casablanca," "It Happened One Night," "The Lost Weekend," and "Kramer vs. Kramer." As one can see, these measures of length are mere intellectual gauges. Length is rarely a mark of quality. 

When we include Best Picture nominees, however, there are so brisk-ass movies in the mix. The Mae West vehicle "She Done Him Wrong" was nominated for Best Picture in 1934, and it speeds by at 65 minutes. The excellent 1945 anti-Western "The Ox-Bow Incident" tops out at 77 minutes, and the whimsical musical comedy "One Hour with You," starring Maurice Chevalier, only runs 78. 

Most of the shortest Best Picture nominees come from the 1930s when films, in general, ran shorter. "One Hundred Men and a Girl" (1938) is 81 minutes, 1930's "The Divorcee" (starring my fake movie star girlfriend Norma Shearer) is only 82, and it's tied in length with 1932's  "Shanghai Express."

Of course, the shortest film ever nominated for an Academy Award remains the 2012 animated film "Fresh Guacamole," by PES. That film is 104 seconds. Meanwhile, the longest film ever nominated for an Oscar is the documentary "O.J.: Made in America," which runs 467 minutes.