Worst Best Pictures of All Time

THE ABSOLUTE WORST OF THE LOT:
1. 2005 - “Crash”
2. 2004 - “Million Dollar Baby”
3. 1990 - “Dances with Wolves”
4. 2001 - “A Beautiful Mind”
5. 1997 - “Titanic”
6. 2002 - “Chicago”
7. 2000 - “Gladiator”
8. 1972 - “The Godfather”
9. 1974 - “The Godfather Part II”
10. 1954 - “On the Waterfront”

VERSUS
THE ABSOLUTE BEST OF THE LOT:
1. 1943 - “Casablanca”
2. 1991 - “The Silence of the Lambs”
3. 1987 - “The Last Emperor”
4. 1999 - “American Beauty”
5. 1977 - “Annie Hall”
6. 1969 - “Midnight Cowboy”
7. 2008 - “Slumdog Millionaire”
8. 1960 - “The Apartment”
9. 1948 - “Hamlet”
10. 1970 - “Patton”

...continued

Around the World in 80 Days (1956): Just about any movie from that year would have been a better choice to replace this stinker as best picture, even though it was a pretty slim year for movies. My choice: Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

My Fair Lady (1964): Audrey Hepburn was woefully miscast in this movie. She couldn't convincingly pull off the Cockney flower girl part, and she couldn't sing at all. The studio, however, was afraid to cast Julie Andrews, who originated the role on Broadway but who was still an unknown quantity in Hollywood (she would have her revenge the next year with The Sound of Music). Better choice: Dr. Strangelove.

A Man for All Seasons (1966): This isn't a bad film, but I've always considered the directing ponderous and Paul Scofield's performance in the lead role soporific. I imagine that it was a safer bet for Academy voters than the far superior Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Rocky (1976): Sylvester Stallone mumbling his way through two hours of a formulaic boxing picture that had everything except a little orphan kid and his puppy (that was The Champ). This was the year of Taxi Driver and Network, two movies that will live long after people forget Rocky.

Gotta' run. More later...

HAVEN'T ACTUALLY SEEN:
10) Ordinary People;
8) Around The World In 80 Days
7) How Green Was My Valley
6) Rebecca
4) Chariots Of Fire
2) The English Patient


I'VE SEEN THESE TWO FILMS...
and I like them. But there were much better films out there that deserved the award for their respective years:
9) Shakespeare In Love
3) Forrest Gump

When I saw Titanic I WANTED to die.

Tsar just reminded me how much I hated Chicago!!!

Oh, and what about that Manon de Source, or whatever it was?

... and finally:

Chariots of Fire (1981): a beautifully filmed but utterly prosaic sports story -- its Rocky with everyone speaking like a tosh and with a bit of Gentleman's Agreement thrown in -- that won as much on the strength of its score as on its merits as a motion picture. Raiders of the Lost Ark probably lost because: (1) it wasn't a high-class British import; and (2) it was extremely popular and made lots of money.

Dances with Wolves (1990): What would a movie look like if all the main characters were Reagan-era bleeding heart liberals suddenly transported to the high plains of the 1880s? Well, if you think it would be Back to the Future III, you're close. Scorsese should have won for Goodfellas, but I suppose that film didn't make the voters feel so supremely smug about themselves as Dances with Wolves did.

Braveheart (1995): Surely some other movie must have been better than this laughably hamhanded and wildly inaccurate confabulation of William Wallace's life, even though the competition that year wasn't very strong. The Brady Bunch Movie came out in 1995 -- let's give that the Oscar instead.

The English Patient (1996): My feelings regarding this picture have been expressed elsewhere. Fargo is vastly superior, although it took eleven more years before the Academy finally accepted the Coen brothers.

Slumdog Millionaire (2008): What a piece of crap that was! The framing device of the game show doesn't really work, the connections are too strained and unbelievable, and the characters' motivations don't always make sense. I haven't seen all of the other nominees from that year, but Milk was far superior to Slumdog.

This thread has produced at least ten films that were selected by 2 or more A2Kers as the worst films to win the Best Picture Oscar:

Titanic
Gladiator
Around the World in 80 Days
The Greatest Show on Earth
Braveheart
Slumdog Millionaire
English Patient
Dances with Wolves
Chicago
How Green Was My Valley

I would disagree with the original list on the following films:

Ordinary People (1980): Admittedly, this film hasn't held up so well over the years, and lots of folks would say that Raging Bull should have received the Oscar. But Ordinary People is still a good film with a powerfully understated performance by Mary Tyler Moore, while Raging Bull, in my humble opinion, just isn't as good as people think it is. In the end, I don't think that Raging Bull (or some other film) was so obviously superior to Ordinary People that this choice should rank as one of the worst.

Shakespeare in Love (1998): Again, what was better? Saving Private Ryan? Sorry, I don't think SPR is all that superior. Once the action leaves the beach at Normandy (which, if you think of it, isn't really important to the story), it becomes A Walk in the Sun.

Rebecca (1940): OK, this may not be the greatest Hitchcock movie ever made, but what was it up against? Of the nine other films nominated that year, the best was The Grapes of Wrath, and I don't see that as so vastly superior to Rebecca to make it a bad selection.

Crash (2005), or "One Damned Thing After Another in LA." Not a great movie, but not so markedly inferior to the competition that its selection can't be defended.

Forrest Gump (1994): I disagree with the author: I think Forrest Gump still holds up pretty well. And the competition? I think Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption are good films but flawed, and Quiz Show just isn't even a serious choice (although it features one of the worst accents in film history -- Rob Morrow's attempt at a Baaahston accent).

A Beautiful Mind (2001): I think this is a really good film. The notion that it's just another "disease of the month" movies misses the point: there are good disease movies and bad disease movies, just as there are good sports movies (e.g. The Natural) and cliche-ridden, formulaic sports movies (e.g. Rocky). Far from being a bad choice, I think this was a pretty good one.

What?!

A critic once called her "the reincarnation of Sandra Dee, only without the comic timing."

You'll have to explain your last three selections. What, for example, would have been a better choice than On the Waterfront in 1954? Seven Brides for Seven Brothers?

I agree that Taxi Driver is a better movie (I haven't seen Network), but I don't agree that these two movies will live long after people forget Rocky. People haven't forgotten Rocky. It's still shown regularly on the cable television networks I think more people would say that they've seen, or at least heard of, Rocky than they'd say they've seen, or heard of, the other two movies.

I found the Godfather twins and overripe Marlon Brando vehicle On the Waterfront to be insanely boring. In all three movies, I couldn't find a single character, no matter how minor to be a sympathetic character. If I can't find a single sympathetic character (even at a shallow level) I tend to find the movie a waste of time to watch.

Regardless of the acting and alleged quality of the cinematography.

And I haven't had the pleasure or displeasure to have seen Seven Sisters to Marry their Seven Brothers or whatever that film's supposed to be called.

Well, I never said that people have forgotten Rocky already. As it is, just being awarded the Oscar for best picture confers a certain immortality on a movie, despite its inherent flaws. After all, it's unlikely that people would remember Cavalcade or Cimarron were it not for the fact that they won the Oscar. At the very least, winning the Oscar insures that movies like Rocky will continue to be mentioned prominently in lists of the worst best picture award winners.

That would make for a very interesting movie.

This may be a case where our definitions collide. From my perspective, an award winner is a bad choice if there is a significantly better choice available. It's not enough, therefore, to say "I didn't like this film" if it was still better than its competitors. The academy award, remember, isn't given to the best picture ever, it's given to the best picture for that year. So to say that you didn't like On the Waterfront doesn't really address the issue of whether it was a bad choice for the 1954 Oscar. There had to be something better than On the Waterfront that year that you consider to have been more worthy of that honor.

How about Rear Window or The Caine Mutiny?

Both good choices, but I wouldn't say that they are significantly better than On the Waterfront.