Least deserved Oscar

I’ve seen all kinds of threads complaining that some deserving actor or film DIDN’T win the Oscar. So apparently there must be a lot of statues on the shelves of people who shouldn’t have won.

Who didn’t deserve their Oscar?

Jim “King of the World” Cameron.

Cecil B DeMille’s flatulent epic The Greatest Show On Earth.

Gladiator springs to mind. Not that it was that bad of a film, but Best Picture? C’mon!

ROTK for Best Adapted Screenplay. Did the voters actually see the movie? More to the point, did they see City of God? I have to admit that, after a lifetime of being shocked and dismayed at some Oscar winners, I was still totally dumbstruck when ROTK won for its screenplay. Naive of me, I suppose.

Gladiator… what a stupid movie.

The English Patient.

Titanic

This year, Sofia Coppola for Best Orig. Screenplay.

There were great things about Lost in Translation, but the writing sure wasn’t one of them.

Return of the King: Best Editting

I enjoyed this movie. I can even support it winning best movie. But the editting was awful. Poor choices throughout. The Oscar sweep only proves that academy voters are lazy.

The least deserved Oscar has got to be Oscar the Grouch. What did he ever do to deserve an extradimensional trash can?

An old baddie but a goodie: Cimarron.

First thought is the already mentioned Titanic winning Best Picture over LA Confidential, a film that also should have won for Best Director and Best Cinematography (also lost to the boat flick).

As much as I like Judi Dench, she didn’t deserve Best Supporting for her 8-minute turn in Shakespeare in Love. Heck, she gets more screen time and more complexity as “M.”

The only year where I can remember the Best Picture Award going to a film worse than all four it was nominated against was Shakespeare in Love.

It beat(hold your breath) Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Lif is Beautiful, and Elizabeth.

:confused:

Sean Penn, this year, for his awful emoting.

Shakespeare in Love was the most deserving best Oscar choice in the past twenty years; unquestionably the best movie of the year, and possibly the best script ever written for the screen. Judi Dench probably didn’t deserve an Oscar for it, but her choice was no worse than Beatrice Straight for Network, whose role wasn’t much bigger and, unlike Dench, made no impression at all.

Worst choice for Best Picture may have been Greatest Show on Earth, but of those I’ve seen, The Deer Hunter would be my choice. It won because it was an epic film dealing with Vietnam. It did it very poorly, but the Academy wanted to show a recognition of the war, and the vastly superiou Apocalypse Now was released a year later (and lost primarily because they didn’t want to give it to another Vietnam film).

Not that there was a stellar list on nominees in 1989, but Driving Miss Daisy was a thoroughly mediocre film by Best Picture standards. One film not even nominated that year was Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, one of the best films of the last 30 years, and it was as if the Academy decided they had to give the award to a film with a black person in the cast.

Other nominees that year:
Born on the Fourth of July
Dead Poets Society
Field of Dreams
My Left Foot

Has there ever been a weaker set of nominees?

Forrest Gump and Tom Hanks for “Best Picture” and “Best Actor in a Leading Role”, respectively. I managed to watch it once and couldn’t watch it again (and I’ve tried). Terrible performance by Hanks, coupled with some terribly stupid scenes. This film caused me to loathe Hanks for a long time afterwards. (He’s since regained my confidence.)

I’d also mention Eric Roth’s win for “Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium” for Gump, but I haven’t read the novel. But, I read the sequel and didn’t get very far before I had to put it back on the shelf. I can only think of one other book that I seriously attempted to read but gave up on (Martin the Warrior by Brian Jacques).

Anyhoo…

I have, and I’ll add that one to the list. To his credit, Roth took a bad book and made it slightly better (he left out most of Forrest’s wrestling career, for example… a Good Thing), but it’s still a pretty flatline script. “Not quite as bad as the source material” isn’t saying much, in this case.

What’s always killed me is that Gump won “Best Adapted Screenplay” over The Shawshank Redemption, which was not only the best screenplay adaptation that year, it’s one of the best ever.

Grrr. Bad Academy.