Many of 2020’s Academy Award-nominated films hold a mirror up to contemporary American society with strikingly modern stories, if sometimes told through a lens of not-so-distant history. Movies tackling issues like sexual assault (Promising Young Woman), immigrants seeking the American Dream (Minari), the fallout from the Great Recession (Nomadland), racial violence (Judas and the Black Messiah), social protest and clashes with police (The Trial Of The Chicago 7) and American culture during COVID-19 (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm) all forge conversations on urgent subjects. 

Here’s a look at four past Best Picture nominees that enlightened audiences by tackling timely, often provocative subjects through stark confrontation or deft satire. But while timelessness is often a virtue in classic movies, it's troubling that the messages these films impart are still relevant today.

The Great Dictator (1940)

Unsurprisingly, WWII-related films struck a chord with audiences – and the Academy, too. Nominated movies captured the worldwide wartime experience from the home front (1942’s Mrs. Miniver, 1943’s The Human Comedy) to the battlefield (1942’s 49th PARALLEL) to veterans’ homecoming (1946’s THE Best Years of Our Lives).

In The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin dared to use his voice – literally, for his first all-talking picture – to condemn and lampoon Adolf Hitler and fascism in dual roles as both a Jewish barber and a dictator. Despite being banned in many countries, the film made $5 million globally upon its release, according to Jeffrey Vance’s Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema; Hitler reportedly even saw it – twice. While it continues to influence modern cinema (most recently 2019’s Jojo Rabbit), Chaplin admitted in My Autobiography that he “could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis” if he’d understood the devastating scope of the Holocaust. Satire aside, Chaplin utilized his platform to deliver a climactic, rousing entreaty for peace, urging people to reject hate and intolerance with such enduring lines as: “More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness.”

Gentleman’s Agreement (1947)

Anti-Semitism wasn’t confined to Europe. Gentleman’s Agreement and Crossfire, two of the five movies nominated for 1947’s Best Picture Oscar, directly dealt with the subject in the United States.

That year’s winner, Gentleman’s Agreement, was based upon Laura Z. Hobson’s book about a reporter who poses as Jewish for a story about anti-Semitism. For years, Hollywood studio heads, many of whom were Jewish, refrained from Jewish storylines for fear it would be perceived as propaganda – or worse, provoke even more anti-Semitism. In this case, attempts were made to dissuade producer Darryl F. Zanuck from making Gentleman’s Agreement, but he and director Elia Kazan prevailed. Years later, Kazan remarked of the movie’s significance: “It was saying to the audience: You are an average American and you are anti-Semitic." Though the way the film portrayed the Jewish experience may be dated today, Gentleman’s Agreement still stands as a groundbreaking movie.  

The Defiant Ones (1958)

“I don't make films to stir the world,” Stanley Kramer remarked in a 1960 interview. That said, the independent producer/director was known as a “message filmmaker,” according to his 2001 New York Times obituary. Many of Kramer’s movies tackled socially pertinent subjects, including The Defiant Ones, Judgment at Nuremberg (’61) and Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner (’67), all of which netted Best Picture Oscar nominations.

At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Kramer embarked on The Defiant Ones, in which two escaped convicts, a white man (Tony Curtis) and a Black man (Sidney Poitier), must work together to survive. In conveying such powerful, oftentimes controversial stories, Kramer frequently clashed with studio heads who wanted him to tone down his messaging, and THE DEFIANT ONES was no different. In fact, according to AFI, the film’s divisive subject matter prompted the need for a closed, secure set during production. Despite the hurdles, Kramer’s eternally salient anti-racism message landed – evidenced by the Protestant Film Council’s integrated screenings that encouraged “understanding between the races” and even backed up by Curtis insisting that Poitier share top billing with him.

Network (1976)

The eerily prophetic ways in which Paddy Chayefsky’s outrageous, biting satire about the television news industry nails our modern media landscape have been widely commended – and rightly so. From the rise of reality programming to dehumanized corporate culture to the sickening drive of exploitation as entertainment, the very scenarios Chayefsky and director Sidney Lumet cautioned about over 40 years ago have materialized in ways darker than perhaps they could have imagined.

Chayefsky began his career in television in the 1950s, but he soon became disconcerted with the direction the medium was headed in. In 2011, The New York Times shared some of the writer’s notes, including his musings from a 1968 comedy pilot he penned about rebels working within a television network. “We are not dealing with a human institution,” he perceived. “We are dealing with an enormous profit-making machine.” In observing how the increased negativity of world events seeped into newscasts, such as the Watergate scandal, which fellow 1976 Best Picture nominee All The President’s Men covered, he identified how the seething anger he saw on the news boiled over to viewers. Indeed, in today’s cutthroat drive for enthralling content, news and entertainment networks have propelled so far towards Howard Beale-esque rage-as-entertainment that it’s becoming hard to discern real news from fake.