1985 – Out of Africa
2005 – Crash
2001 – A Beautiful Mind
They were…*just bad *movies!
- Crash
- Forrest Gump
- Shakespeare in Love
I narrowed it down to:
1990 – Dances With Wolves (Goodfellas)
1994 – Forrest Gump (Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, Quiz Show)
1996 – The English Patient (Fargo, Jerry Maguire)
1998 – Shakespeare in Love (Saving Private Ryan)
2000 – Gladiator (Traffic, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon)
2005 – Crash (*Brokeback Mountain, Good Night and Good Luck, Munich, Batman Begins)
CTHD didn’t age nearly as well as Gladiator did (which I’m still not impressed with), so it was off. DWW wasn’t that much worse than Goodfellas, so off it goes. The English Patient was really tough - I HATED that movie. But I hated the rest (in comparison to their competition) much more.
I’ve seen few of these movies prior to about 1993, so I’ll start there:
- Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction in 1994
- Titanic over L.A. Confidential in 1997
- Chicago over The Pianist in 2002
I realize the OP didn’t propose this, but the idea that JFK (a boring piece of historical fiction with no more connection to reality than The Da Vinci Code) deserved the Oscar over Silence of the Lambs is silly.
First, I actively disliked:
Out of Africa
Forrest Gump
I never saw:
Titanic
Million Dollar Baby
Slumdog Millionaire
but I’ll likely get around to seeing Slumdog Millionaire. The first two don’t even interest me. I’ve seen enough clips that I could probably describe the plot without seeing them.
But then taking into account which ones they beat out:
Dances with Wolves --> Goodfellas should have won by a mile or three.
Driving Miss Daisy --> My Left Foot
Forrest Gump --> Pulp Fiction (although The Shawshank Redemption was also better)
English Patient --> Fargo
are what I see as the biggest travesties.
Which makes my first choice easy:
Forrest Gump
Dances with Wolves
The English Patient
are my top three, since when I examined the whole list of others I didn’t like or see, there was no clear “Crap, I can’t believe that didn’t win” factored in.
- Chicago
- Shakespeare in Love
- Crash
- Braveheart
- Forrest Gump
- Crash
Forrest Gump and Titanic. Two movies that thought they were saying more about the human condition than they actually were.
Titanic, especially, frustrated me to no end. Special effects-wise, an amazing film. If Cameron had stuck to the human drama of the ship sinking, and what happens to people who realize they probably only have an hour or so to live (or are seeing family members for the last time), it could have been brilliant. The star-crossed romance and ham-handed class warfare story lines were just awful.
My thought going into this thread was to have it go back 30 years, to 1979 (Kramer vs. Kramer over Apocalypse Now? Really???), but I thought we’d run into the problem of most people never having seen most of the nominated films from so far back. Of the 15 nominees from '84-'86, I’ve only seen 4 of them (and Best Picture winner Out of Africa isn’t one of them – is it good?). I’ve actually seen a much higher percentage of the nominees from '79-'83, but it still seemed like it would be tough to have an informed electorate if we went back that far.
I agree, but among the other nominees (JFK, Beauty and the Beast, Bugsy, and The Prince of Tides) it was by far the most noteworthy. However, taking a second look, I did miss an opportunity by failing to include Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which is probably the only 1991 film that even has a chance of deserving to be in the same conversation as Lambs.
- Rain Man
- Crash
- Forrest Gump
I like TVTropes’ name for this: Anvilicious.
1997 L.A. Confidential
2001 Gosford Park
1990 Goodfellas
And I thought that either ET or Tootsie would have been a better choice than Gandhi, based on their cultural significance.
The hard thing about this list is there are some just plain BAD movie years. For example, I sorta liked American Beauty but at no time did I ever think I was watching an oscar worthy movie. However the alternatives are even worse, so I guess I would give it the nod. I didn’t like A Beautiful Mind much at all, but I can’t see LotR winning best picture. So for my list I pick movies that clearly had a better movie that should have won that didn’t.
- Crash - Brokeback DEFINITELY should have won, and I don’t even like BBM that much. This was an awful movie in just about every respect.
- Forrest Gump - I could see the case made for Pulp Fiction or Shawshank, although to me it is no contest. Pulp Fiction was THE defining movie of the 90’s for me.
- Dances With Wolves - Goodfellas was a better movie, although I think they are both pretty overrated.
- American Beauty
- Crash
- The English Patient
- Crash
- Gladiator
- Crash again, because it’s just that bad.
The Worst Oscar Winners, From Worst to Least Bad
1985 – Out of Africa Snoooooze… (And why is Meryl Streep trying so hard to do a Danish accent when NOBODY else in the movie is trying to do their proper accent?)
1987 – The Last Emperor Yawn…
2000 – Gladiator I enjoyed this one well enough, but then saw it with a bunch of my male friends in the aftermath of a bachelor party. We treated it as our own “MST3K” and made wisecracks through the whole thing! (“Pizza pizza!” “Say Billy, you like movies with gladiators in them?”). The idea that this campy joke would win an OScar was beyond us.
1996 – The English Patient Tedious and immoral. A bad combination.
1999 – American Beauty Gosh, I’m soooo glas Hollywood made another movie showing how sterile and soul-linn ght suburbs are. It had been at LEAST ten minutes since we’d seen another movie with that theme.
Are we pretty much all agreed that Crash sucked?
I found it thought-provoking even though some of the characters were wooden. I haven’t seen Brokeback Mountain or Munich - although given my history with Spielberg movies I’d be unlikely to prefer Munich.
Nope.
Forrest Gump
Braveheart
Shakespeare in Love
Those are the three that just annoy me to think about.
- Forrest Gump (hate it with a passion because it is awful)
- Chicago (hate it with a passion because it is mediocre and overhyped)
- Gladiator (didn’t hate it, just a really weird choice)