Best Pictures by Beutler Ink

In advance of the 86th Academy Awards, Beutler Ink created a poster commemorating each of the past Best Picture winners. The list includes those certified classics you’ve seen a million times—like Casablanca (1943) and Godfather II (1974)—and those forgotten gems buried in your Netflix queue. Rather than simply using reproductions of the movies' posters and promotional art as stand-ins for each film, we decided to to use minimalist icons representing notable images, props, or costumes from each film. For example, we used Scarlett O'Hara's red hoop skirt from Gone with the Wind (1939), Poor Yorick's Skull from Hamlet (1948), Jon Voight's Stetson jacket from Midnight Cowboy (1969), the silver dog tags from Platoon (1986), and the wind-blown plastic bag from American Beauty (1999). Our team also decided that black and white films—including nearly all of the winners until 1955, and Schindler's List (1993) and The Artist (2011) later on—should be represented with grayscale icons.