Then you have not watched a gangster film. I highly recommend it.
Excuse my ignorance, but which ones are not considered great films anymore?
Blasphemy, take that back.
(Sorry, it’s one of my favorite movies ever)
The Greatest Show On Earth for one. It wasn’t considered all that great even at the time, but the Academy wanted to honor Cecil B. Demille (Not that the film is bad – it’s entertaining soap opera).
Gladiator is a more recent one, but it was up against a particularly weak field (only Couching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was better than so-so).
I agree with RealityChuck about The Greatest Show on Earth and Gladiator.
Opinions are going to vary, of course, but I would also add these to the list:
Oliver!
Around the World in 80 Days
In the Heat of the Night
Terms of Endearment
Rocky
Driving Miss Daisy
Actually, I would add others, but some are considered “sacred cows” and I haven’t the nerve.
I liked Dances With Wolves. The story was entertaining and beautiful. The mood of the country was right and Costner was gorgeous.
I think Rocky was the best sports film ever made, but I understand that’s not saying a whole lot. 
I agree about the others, though I think the performances of Sidney Poitier and in particular Rod Steiger were so outstanding in *In the Heat of the Night * that it has earned a place among Great Films.
I would say that the following are generally considered to be somewhere between mediocre and pretty good but not nearly great.
Wings
The Broadway Melody
The Great Ziegfield
The Life of Emile Zola
You Can’t Take It with You
How Green Was My Valley
Mrs. Miniver
Going My Way
The Lost Weekend
Gentlemen’s Agreement
All the King’s Men
The Greatest Show on Earth
Marty
Aroung the World in Eighty Days
Gigi
Ben-Hur
Tom Jones
In the Heat of the Night
Oliver!
The French Connection
Ordinary People
Chariots of Fire
Out of Africa
Rain Man
Driving Miss Daisy
Dances with Wolves
Forrest Gump
The English Patient
(and any Oscar winners after that point I would consider too recent for any stable critical or popular consensus to have been established as yet)
I AM NOT GOING TO ARGUE WHETHER ANY ONE OF THESE FILMS IS GOOD OR NOT. So please spare me your snide comments about my taste. Of course for any one of these films there is someone somewhere who thinks it’s a great film. Of course it’s possible that I’m wrong about the general critical and popular consensus about some of these films. I’m not going to spend the days of work it would take to survey critical and popular tastes and establish a definitive list of the Oscar winners that are less than great. If you have the time, watch all the Oscar winners and come back to us with your more definitive list of which ones are less than great. The list I give above is merely the best I can do in a few minutes using my memories of having read a vast number of lists of great films and my many years of watching movies.
“Crash”… it’s not good.
Wendell Wagner - not to argue with you, but just to present an opposing view, I would say these movies on your list are still considered “great” by most critics and movie buffs:
Ben-Hur
The French Connection
Chariots of Fire
Hmm, I thought I would disagree on more but I guess not. Some of the early ones were very good (The Great Ziegfield comes to mind) but nowadays are very dated.
Oh, I also meant to say that the Oscar discussion is a bit of a hijack. Very few people would argue that DWW is better than Goodfellas, but that still leaves a lot of room for DWW to be a very good movie.
Yeah, but Crash wasn’t good when it was released; it’s not a matter of “aging poorly.”
Whether Crash is good or not, it has the same problem as Dances With Wolves - it beat out a critical favorite (Brokeback Mountain) in the Oscar race, which sours many people’s opinions of it.
No one’s mentioned Titanic yet.
Costner’s subsequent movies are part of the problem for DWW. In retrospect, in light of The Postman and Waterworld, DWW fits the same mold of Costner as tediously self-righteous, self-aggrandizing hero. In other words, we were willing to buy that shtick for one movie, but it’s gotten old.
No, I didn’t like Crash immediately. Before it won the Oscar. I have no idea how it even got nominated.
Now DWW, you would be very surprised if it didn’t get nominated.
The film had very different portrayals of Native Americans than that group normally gets in big movies and yes the cinematography is really the star of the show.
I really like Scorsese but I too, have never watched Goodfellas. I’'m not sure why. I’ve seen parts of it but I guess I’m burned out on ‘Mob Movies’. I don’t get emotionally drawn into the story. I don’t ‘like’ The Godfather. It is a great movie and very well made but I don’t like it because I don’t give a shit about the characters. Actually I want to see them all sent to jail for a very long time. I just can’t sit and watch a movie where I just want them all to fail.
That’s one of the limitations of awards like “Best Picture”. Both Goodfellas and Dances are great movies IMHO, but they are completely different types of film, and comparing them in any other context (than award show) is just weird. Both films set out to accomplish different sets of goals, and both wildly succeed in accomplishing them. Which one is better? They are both better than the other at different things. I guess what I’m trying to say is that after crossing a certain threshold of quality it becomes increasingly difficult to compare works of art and literature in terms of superlativeness without drowning in subjective preference. Goodfellas’s cinematography is more daring and inventive than Dances, but would daring and inventive camera work have made Dances a better film? No. Traditional, sweeping, sentimental shooting is what Dances needed for its themes, and vice-versa.
While I can’t say I dislike gangster films, I will agree that they do need to stop making them. They’ve been done a thousand times, some bad, some great, but they really need to stop. I had absolutely no interest in seeing Public Enemies this summer.
The same can be said for vampire movies. Please, please just stop.
It’s funny with Titanic, before the movie was finished it was considered a failure then it was redeemed as a great film we misjudged now back to rotten. The public is fickle.
A couple of things that haven’t been touched on:
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The advantage that a film like DWW has is its scope of production. Making a movie like that means employing specialists is costume design, animal training, research, historical props, and various other fields that require more work than a film of less technical scope. As such, it employed people who worked very hard at details. Thus, there was a lot of talk among industry insiders about “how much work went into such and such”. Those insiders are the ones who vote on the Oscars, and very often they’ll vote based on what went into a film, not on its more apparent creative qualities like acting, writing, and photography. Sometimes a less intensive production like *Silence of the Lambs *can make it through, but a movie like *The English Patient *with a crew of thousands obviously has an advantage.
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At the time, there weren’t many films that had taken on the Indians’ perspective of the old west, and Costner’s work was seen as politically progressive. Tastes of this sort were changing very rapidly, however, and to some the film now seems condescending. *The Lost Weekend *and Gentlemen’s Agreement are other examples of this; both were considered very daring in their subject matter at the time, but would be considered tame today. The same might be said for In the Heat of the Night, but I think that holds up much better–or perhaps we’ve come much further in how we handle alcoholism and anti-Semitism than in how we approach race.
Crash was a brilliant film and one of Oscar’s better choices. The problem is that a lot of people were arguing for Brokeback Mountain for political reasons and started whining when they lost. It’s really sad that they have to tear down another film in order to confirm their own self-interest.
Other than that, I can’t see why there could be any objections to Crash; it said a hell of a lot more than most movies and I even see it being taught in classes at the college level, primarily because of how well it deals with the complexities of race.
This may seem like a petty distinction, but I think it needs making.
It’s NOT as if many people have changed their minds about “Dances With Wolves.” With rare exceptions, people who loved it when it was first released STILL love it, and people who hated it STILL hate it. And most people, who liked it but didn’t love it, STILL like it but don’t love it.
So, if the question is “How come everybody used to love “DWW,” but now everybody loathes it,” well, I think the question is misguided.
Now, if you hang out on the SDMB or among cinephiles, there IS a very good chance you’ve heard or read some vile diatribes directed at “DWW.” That may give some people a highly skewed idea of how popular or unpopular it is. It’s NOT true that “everybody” hates “DWW.” But it IS true that, in some small circles, it’s held up as the embodiment of cinematic crap. Why?
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First and foremost, “DWW” didn’t just win the Oscar, it won the Oscar INSTEAD of Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas.” Scorsese is a god to many cinephiles. If “DWW” had won the Oscar instead of, say, “The Last Emperor” or “Amadeus” or “Terms of Endearment,” practically nobody would still be griping about “DWW” today.
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More broadly, “Dances With Wolves” came to embody the type of movie that always seemed to win awards: the politically correct historical epic, filled with period costumes, lush cinematography and sweeping landscapes. For many years, if you wanted to win an Oscar, the perfect formula was to mix the visuals of David Lean with the earnest liberal messages of Stanley Kramer. Until a few years ago, Oscar voters were older folks who were very liberal politically, but very conservative artistically.
People who like edgier fare got sick of the epics that usually won Oscars. “Dances With Wolves” is hated as the embodiment of a genre, as much as for its own perceived defects.
Me? I’m a rarity. “Dances With Wolves” and “Goodfellas” are VERY different types of movies,but I liked both of them a lot, and had no strong preference for the Oscar. Either could have won, and I’d have been pleased.
Now, SINCE 1991, a lot has changed in the Oscar voting. The kinds of epics that USED to win awards no longer do. Over the past decade, the Academy has increasingly honored the same kinds of moviews that used to win the Indie Spirit awards. Except for “LOTR: Return of the King,” popular movies are increasingly shunned, and arthouse movies that nobody has seen tend to win.
We could be due for a DIFFERENT kind of backlash now. Indie film lovers have held a grudge against the more mainstream “DWW” for a long time now. But I could easily imagine hearing people spewing venom at “Slumdog Millionaire” for years to come, because IT embodies the newer Oscar trend. Not only did it win the Oscar, it won the Oscar over “the Dark Knight,” which the vast majority of moviegoers think was 100 times better.
“Slumdog Millionaire” may join “Dances With Wolves” as the Most Reviled Oscar Winning Film Ever.