The five best years in Oscars history

It is rare enough to have a showdown at the Oscars between two great films, as we are getting this year with Gravity and 12 Years a Slave.

To qualify for true crème de la crème status, a year wants strength across the whole field with no filler, no embarrassments.

Here is our pick of the five best rosters ever.

1939

Best picture: Dark Victory, Gone with the Wind, Goodbye Mr Chips, Love Affair, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Of Mice and Men, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights

Winner: Gone with the Wind

It was a famously landmark year in Hollywood, with an immortal winner and archetypal genre achievements right down the list. What stands out, given the overwhelmingly manly bent of many best picture fields, is how female star power, and not just the megawattage of Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, drives so many of these. From Bette Davis's tragic bravura in the fine Dark Victory and Greta Garbo's self-parodic image shift in Lubitsch's marvellous Ninotchka to Judy Garland's incandescent charm in The Wizard of Oz and the contributions of Irene Dunne and Greer Garson to their respective films, it was a great year not just for Hollywood, but for Hollywood feminism. In fact, it is one of very few years where all five best actress nominations were received for films also up for best picture.

1972

Best picture: Cabaret, Deliverance, The Emigrants, The Godfather, Sounder

Winner: The Godfather

It is remembered as the year when The Godfather triumphed in the sense of winning best picture, but Cabaret outdid it by winning eight Oscars overall to that film's three. It is also an amazingly strong and provocative line-up all over. Not only did the runners-up include John Boorman's Deliverance, a risky and shocking parable of machismo gone native, but Martin Ritt's now sadly neglected Sounder, a richly moving piece of work about the lives of poor black sharecroppers, and the magnificent, thematically similar The Emigrants.

1975

Best picture: Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, Nashville, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Winner: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Stanley Kubrick, Sidney Lumet, Steven Spielberg, Robert Altman, Milos Forman. Four vividly contemporary American classics tackling the counterculture, authority, political disillusionment, country music, psychiatry and a very hungry great white shark. Barry Lyndon looks like the odd film out, but even Thackeray's disillusioned rogue, as played by Ryan O'Neal, chimes with the cynical, feckless modern sensibility all the others put on display. A singular year, even if the winner turned out to be the movie that has arguably dated least well.

1993

Best picture:The Fugitive, In the Name of the Father, The Piano, The Remains of the Day, Schindler's List

Winner: Schindler's List

It is easy to knock The Fugitive as too obviously commercial - maybe hindsight would swap in Groundhog Day? If that manhunt thriller sticks out as the least awards-y of the five, it is still a totally solid, unpretentious genre hit. Spielberg's Holocaust epic was always going to sweep all before it, but the performances on show across the board here are awe-inspiring: Jane Campion's, Holly Hunter's, Pete Postlethwaite's, Liam Neeson's, Jim Sheridan's and, obviously, Fugitive director Andrew Davis's. Not quite Merchant-Ivory's (or their stars'), but the next best thing. And the choices belonged to such varied filmmaking traditions - this was a credible list with both breadth and depth.

1996

Best picture: The English Patient, Fargo, Jerry Maguire, Secrets and Lies, Shine

Winner: The English Patient

It was pitched as "the year of the independents", because only the $50-million Jerry Maguire had serious studio clout behind it, but it was also a testament to just how far your movie dollar can stretch. After 20th Century Fox (and Demi Moore) jumped ship, Miramax funded The English Patient to the tune of $27-million and producer Saul Zaentz made up the shortfall out of his pocket.

That still seems a remarkably frugal figure for a film of this ambition and scope. When you add the bills for Shine, Secrets and Liesand Fargo, it brings the total cost for all five to way under half a single Titanic. The Oscars' most cost-effective year? It was also another one driven by splendid lead performances and so stylistically diverse you could barely credit a single frame to the wrong film by mistake. - ©The Daily Telegraph, London