At the 1st Academy Awards ceremony (for 1927 and 1928), there was no Best Picture award. Instead, there were two separate awards, one called Most Outstanding Production, won by the epic Wings, and one called Most Artistic Quality of Production, won by the art film Sunrise. The awards were intended to honor different and equally important aspects of superior filmmaking, and in fact the judges and the studio bosses who sought to influence their decisions paid more attention to the latter - MGM head Louis B. Mayer, who had disliked the realism of King Vidor's The Crowd, pressured the judges not to honor his own studio's film, and to select Sunrise instead. The next year, the Academy instituted a single award called Best Production, and decided retroactively that the award won by Wings had been the equivalent of that award, with the result that Wings is often listed as the winner of a sole Best Picture award for the first year. The title of the award was eventually changed to Best Picture for the 1931 awards.

Since 1944, the Academy has restricted nominations to five Best Picture nominees per year. As of the 82nd Academy Awards ceremony (for 2009), there have been 474 films nominated for the Best Picture award. Throughout the past 82 years, AMPAS has presented a total of 82 Best Picture awards. Invariably, the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director have been very closely linked throughout their history. Of the 82 films that have been awarded Best Picture, 60 have also been awarded Best Director. Only three films have won Best Picture without their directors being nominated (though only one since the early 1930s): Wings (1927/28), Grand Hotel (1931/32), and Driving Miss Daisy (1989). The only two Best Director winners to win for films which did not receive a Best Picture nomination are likewise in the early years: Lewis Milestone (1927/28) and Frank Lloyd (1928/29).

However, in 2009, The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced that the number of Best Picture nominees would be increased from five to ten. The expansion was a throwback to the Academy's early years in the 1930s and '40s, when anywhere between eight and 12 films were shortlisted (or longlisted). "Having 10 Best Picture nominees is going allow Academy voters to recognize and include some of the fantastic movies that often show up in the other Oscar categories but have been squeezed out of the race for the top prize," AMPAS President Sid Ganis said in a press conference. "I can't wait to see what that list of 10 looks like when the nominees are announced in February" .

One point of contention is the lack of consideration of non-English language films for categories other than Best Foreign Language Film. Very few foreign language films have been nominated for any other categories, regardless of artistic merit. To date, only eight foreign language films (and three partly foreign language films) have been nominated for Best Picture: Grand Illusion (French, 1938); Z (French, 1969); The Emigrants (Swedish, 1972); Cries and Whispers (Swedish, 1973); Il Postino (Italian/Spanish, 1995); Life Is Beautiful (Italian, 1998); Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Mandarin Chinese, 2000); and Letters from Iwo Jima (Japanese, 2006), which was ineligible for the Best Foreign Language Oscar because it was an American production. The only partly foreign language films to win Best Picture are The Godfather Part II (English/Sicilian, 1974), The Last Emperor (English/Mandarin, 1987) and Slumdog Millionaire (English/Hindi, 2008).

Another point of contention is the recent extreme bias toward 2-plus hour films: Crash (2005, 112m) is the shortest film to win Best Picture in the past 20 years. It has been criticized for ignoring films that were huge commercial and critical successes. Furthermore, no animated film has won the award (Disney's Beauty and the Beast and Disney-Pixar's Up were nominated), and only one comedy (Shakespeare in Love, 1998) has won in the last 30 years.

To date, ten films exclusively financed outside the United States have won Best Picture; all ten were financed, in part or in whole, by the United Kingdom. Those films were, in chronological order: Hamlet, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Tom Jones, A Man for All Seasons, Oliver!, Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, The Last Emperor, and Slumdog Millionaire.

No Best Picture winner has been lost, though a few such as All Quiet on the Western Front and Lawrence of Arabia exist only in a form altered from their original, award-winning release form, usually due to editing for reissue (and subsequently partly restored by archivists). Other winners and nominees such as Tom Jones and Star Wars are widely available only in subsequently altered versions. The 1928 film The Patriot is the only Best Picture nominee that is lost; The Racket was believed lost for many years but a print existed in producer Howard Hughes' archives and it has since been shown on Turner Classic Movies. Wings and Sunrise were the only silent winners of a Best Picture-equivalent award, although a part-silent version of All Quiet on the Western Front was created for foreign-language release and survives.

In the list below, the winner of the award for each year is shown first, followed by the other nominees. Except for the early years (when the Academy used a non-calendar year), the year shown is the one in which the film first premiered in Los Angeles County, California; normally this is also the year of first release, but it may be the year after first release (as with Casablanca and, if the film-festival premiere is considered, Crash). This is the year before the ceremony at which the award is given; for example, a film exhibited theatrically during 2005 was eligible for consideration for the 2005 Best Picture Oscar, awarded in 2006. The number of the ceremony (1st, 2nd, etc.) appears in parentheses after the awards year, linked to the article (if any) on that ceremony. Each individual entry shows the title followed by the production company, and the producer. For foreign language films, the original title is also shown. Until 1950, the Best Picture award was given to the production company; from 1951 on, it has gone to the producer. The official name of the award has changed several times over the years:

For the first ceremony, three films each were nominated for two separate awards similar to the Best Picture Award. For the following three years, five films were nominated for the award. This was expanded to eight in 1933, to ten in 1934, and to twelve in 1935, before being dropped back to ten in 1937. In 1945 it was reduced back to five. This number remained until 2010, when it was once again raised to ten.