Let’s start with the granddaddy of them all. Ben-Hur is a chariot-racing epic that’s older than your parents, and honestly, it still holds up. It won eleven Oscars back in 1960, including Best Picture, and it didn’t even have CGI—just a lot of horses and a very determined actor.
Imagine being nominated for a dozen categories and actually winning eleven of them? That’s a 92% success rate, which means they basically brought a spare trophy for the bathroom break. The film’s famous chariot race alone is worth the price of admission, and it’s still the benchmark for “how to not kill your stuntmen.”
Fun fact:
Ben-Hur holds the record for the most acting nominations for a single film that didn’t win any acting Oscars. It won everything else, but the actors just had to settle for a lifetime of “hey, weren’t you in that movie?”
