I think AKA23 means that not everyone will consider Unforgiven a masterpiece, not that they personally don't consider it a masterpiece.
Return of the King notwithstanding, aren't those movies you listed as examples ones that spotlight marginalised groups to one extent or another? A Beautiful Mind is about a schizophrenic, Dances with Wolves (and arguably Braveheart) are about the plights of colonised peoples, Million Dollar Baby changes its focus after a certain event happens to its protagonist, and Unforgiven is fundamentally about sex workers trying to find justice for one of their own. That's without mentioning the likes of Rain Man, The Best Years of our Lives, Midnight Cowboy, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Rocky, Forrest Gump, Schindler's List, etc. The Academy has a long history of choosing films that represent their values at least as much as they choose films for craftsmanship, but it only really seems to be noticeable when the films in question aren't sufficiently popular with a mainstream audience - again, the Morton's Fork of being either "out of touch" with audiences or pandering to them. That's a divide that I'm not about to blame on the Academy making active choices so much as them trying to deal with an increasingly atomised pop culture where popular films' actual merits are even more debatable than those of prestige films - Avengers: Endgame was the biggest hit of 2019 but I question how much you can really argue that the Academy are out-of-touch elites for choosing Parasite.
Iroquois, while what constitutes a Best Picture is inherently a subjective determination, I think quite a few Best Picture Oscar winners historically, in the not too distant past, are closer to that than you might think. Historically, Best Pictures used to be pretty widely liked and widely seen. If you think about movies that won like "A Beautiful Mind," "Return of the King," "Braveheart," "Million Dollar Baby," "Unforgiven," "Dances with Wolves," etc. these were movies that even if everyone might not agree they were artistic masterpieces of the highest order, most people would agree that they were entertaining, that they were good films, and that they reflected aspects of the human condition that resonated with a broad, representative cross section of the American people.
The Academy has increasingly been moving further away from that as they cleave to films that are more insular, that center more around spotlighting marginalized groups than they do universal themes, and that serve more as messages that the Academy wishes to promote. They often seem to be more about representation or the promotion the Academy's own values, politically, socially, culturally etc, even when that results in the promotion of movies that don't necessarily serve as an exalting of what most people outside of elite critics and the Academy membership might broadly consider to be the Best Picture of the year.
The Academy has increasingly been moving further away from that as they cleave to films that are more insular, that center more around spotlighting marginalized groups than they do universal themes, and that serve more as messages that the Academy wishes to promote. They often seem to be more about representation or the promotion the Academy's own values, politically, socially, culturally etc, even when that results in the promotion of movies that don't necessarily serve as an exalting of what most people outside of elite critics and the Academy membership might broadly consider to be the Best Picture of the year.
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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0
I really just want you all angry and confused the whole time.