Awards bestowed upon the team's films include 101 Academy Award nominations including three for Best Picture (Howards End, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Capote) and 24 Academy Award winners including Best Actor (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote), Best Actress (Emma Thompson, Howards End), Best Supporting Actress (Marcia Gay Harden, Pollock), Best Original Screenplay (Pedro Almodóvar, Talk to Her), and Best Documentary Feature (Fog of War, One Day in September, Anne Frank Remembered). Other major Oscar nominations include Best Actress (Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married; Melissa Leo, Frozen River; Penelope Cruz, Volver; Annette Bening, Being Julia; Julie Christie, Afterglow; Catherine Deneuve, Indochine; Isabelle Adjani, Camille Claudel), Best Actor (Ed Harris, Pollock; Sean Penn, Sweet and Lowdown; Gerard Depardieu, Cyrano de Bergerac). Nine of their films have won the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award (Babette's Feast, Indochine, Belle Epoque, Burnt by the Sun, Character, All About My Mother, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The Lives of Others, The Counterfeiters). Nine of their titles have been the Opening Night Presentation at the New York Film Festival.
Honors bestowed on Barker and Bernard include the annual Honors Award from the Director’s Guild of America, The Chevalier Order of Arts and Letters from France’s Minister of Culture, The Gotham Industry Lifetime Achievement Award from the IFP (Independent Feature Project), the FINDIE Award at the IFP/West Spirit Awards, the GLAAD Media Award, and a retrospective at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. At the Sony Global Management Assembly, Sony Pictures Classics received the distinguished Special Recognition Award two years in a row for their continued success and achievement.
Sony Pictures Classics has also played a significant role in preserving film’s heritage. Together with the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and the Merchant Ivory Foundation, they have restored and released nine of master filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s greatest works. They have also preserved and reissued Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger and Vittorio de Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. In 2006, SPC re-released eight Pedro Almodóvar masterpieces in a festival called Viva Pedro! in theaters throughout the United States.