I came across This list and found it most interesting.
The top 10 worst Best Picture winners:
10. The English Patient
Gigi
Chariots of Fire
Forrest Gump
The Departed
Cavalcade
How Green Was My Valley
Driving Miss Daisy
Around the World in 80 Days
Chicago
Discuss.
mmm
Crash should be on there somewhere
Absolutely. Saw the title immediately thought Crash.
Don’t you all gang upon on me, but even with the air embolism suicide scene, I did not like One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest.
An I hasten to add, the Crash you are referring to is not the Cronenberg masterpiece Crash, but rather the LA/racism film of the same name.
I have to agree. While I thought some of those films (Forrest Gump and The Departed at least) did not deserve to win Oscars, how Crash was even nominated bewilders me. It was midway between a made-for-TV movie and an after-school special.
Screw you, I like Driving Miss Daisy.
I don’t understand the dislike for How Green Was My Valley. I don’t see anything wrong with it, other than there were a lot of great nominees that year. I didn’t find it “lackluster” or “tedious”. I’ve probably seen it a dozen times, thanks to it being one of my late father-in-law’s and my husband’s favorite movies. It was more a movie of its time than ours, I think. I never read the book, but I can’t see how the movie could have been any better at telling the story it told, though I acknowledge that it does seem rather a relentless trek to misery. I imagine the book was the same. The singing coal miners are a joy.
I disagree with him about Chicago, too.
I’d probably vote for(against) Terms of Endearment. Who, when finding out their friend has cancer, says, “But, you’re my touchstone!” Or something like that.
Beause the people who vote, vote because they “approve” of a movie, not because it’s even good, elt alone the best of the year. Crash played all those effete Hollywood heartstrings like a fiddle.
Yeah, but one of those nominated movies was Citizen Kane, the dislike is mostly for the Academy’s decision, I think.
Just the title alone drives me up the wall: imagine the unbelievable, lazy, selfish entitlement of a director who would name his movie the same exact name as another movie that came out 10 years earlier, with a passionate following of its own, by an acclaimed director. Paul Haggis is an unbelievable hack of the highest order; every movie he’s made has been a piece of shit. Cronenberg possesses a unique, visionary, aesthetic genius the likes of which Haggis could never and will never experience even a small fraction of, in all of his detested life.
No, the author specifically thinks it’s one of the 10 worst Best Pictures.
Chicago? I can understand not liking musicals perhaps, but calling it the worst best picture winner ever destroys all credibility, especially considering several musicals have won the award (Oliver, Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, etc.). I could watch it all day before seeing Crash or Rocky or You Can’t Take It With You again, none of which were nominated. I liked Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind and Out of Africa well enough when I saw them but never had any desire to see them again, but they’re also not on the list.
The title of the article is ‘10 worst best pictures’, but it’s clear even before he gets to the list (which opens with his saying that he LIKES the #10 choice, The English Patient) that the actual topic is ‘the 10 films that least deserved to win the Oscar, considering what else was released in the same year’ - see his explanations for not including Titanic or A Beautiful Mind - both boil down to ‘it’s not a good movie, but nothing else that came out that year was any better, so, whatever’ (with an added ‘from a technical standpoint, great’ for Titanic).
Once he gets to his list, the explanations for which include a list of the movies that were better than the listed films, it becomes even clearer. Some of them (like How Green…) he doesn’t like, but being a bad film (either from an objective POV, or an admittedly subjective one) is clearly not a requirement.
How Green Was My Valley is easily one of the ten best Best Picture winners, and I find it hard to believe that anyone who has seen it would believe otherwise. The rest of that list is anything but representative of the worst of Oscar history. No Gladiator, fr’instance.
(bolding mine)
Maybe I am missing something, but every film you mention has not only been nominated, it has won BP.
mmm
They won BP, but weren’t nominated for the ‘10 worst’ list. (Which just means they weren’t the least deserving films of their year, in the writer’s opinion.)
I believe the reference Sampiro is making to “being nominated” refers to the list of worst Oscar winners, and not to the Oscars themselves.
This, basically. The only possible reason for it being on the list is that it beat Citizen Kane, which is a silly reason. Not least because it’s a better film than Kane, at least in terms of writing and acting. As for the fancy direction, John Ford did that a couple of years earlier in Stagecoach, which Wells claimed as a major influence on Kane.
I’m not saying Kane is a bad movie mind, and it’s influence is undeniable. But How Green Was My Valley is the greatest director in cinema history at the peak of his powers.
Ahhh, I see. So I was missing something. 
I dunno if HGWMV is a better film than Kane (wait, yeah I do, it’s not), but ‘Valley’ is a fantastic movie and certainly does not belong on this list.
mmm