# The 14 Best War Films That Won Best Picture

> Silent-era dogfights, trench horror, desert epics and modern bomb squads: the Academy has rewarded battlefield stories across nearly a century, and not every winner aged equally well.

*By YPB Team · Published October 23, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-14-best-war-films-that-won-best-picture*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Schindler's List** — score 1000/1000
   Spielberg's 1993 black-and-white drama about a businessman who saved over a thousand Jews in the Holocaust.
2. **Patton** — score 594/1000
   The 1970 biopic of the Second World War general, anchored by George C. Scott's Oscar-winning turn.
3. **Lawrence of Arabia** — score 514/1000
   David Lean's 1962 epic about T. E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt of the First World War.
4. **Braveheart** — score 466/1000
   Mel Gibson's 1995 epic of William Wallace and the Scottish wars of independence.
5. **Dances with Wolves** — score 411/1000
   Kevin Costner's 1990 Western about a Civil War officer who joins a Lakota community.
6. **All Quiet on the Western Front** — score 348/1000
   The 1930 adaptation of Remarque's novel about German schoolboys broken by trench warfare.
7. **Wings** — score 348/1000
   The 1927 silent First World War aerial epic that won the very first Best Picture Oscar.
8. **The English Patient** — score 274/1000
   A 1996 wartime romance told through the memories of a burned pilot in an Italian villa.
9. **The Deer Hunter** — score 274/1000
   A 1978 drama following three steelworkers before, during and after the Vietnam War.
10. **From Here to Eternity** — score 274/1000
   A 1953 drama of soldiers in Hawaii on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
11. **Mrs. Miniver** — score 187/1000
   A 1942 wartime drama following an English family through the early years of the Second World War.
12. **Platoon** — score 187/1000
   Oliver Stone's 1986 Vietnam War film drawn from his own service as an infantryman.
13. **The Hurt Locker** — score 0/1000
   Kathryn Bigelow's 2008 thriller about a bomb disposal team in Iraq, the first Best Picture for a female director.
14. **The Bridge on the River Kwai** — score 0/1000
   David Lean's 1957 tale of British prisoners forced to build a railway bridge for their Japanese captors.

Tags: movies, war, classics, awards, oscars