Here, I’ll dump on Crash some more. All the other movies had SOMETHING memorable- some iconic scene(s), some great acting, an exciting action or hilarious comic sequence- I remember something from all of them.
Except Crash. I vaguely recall Don Cheadle in it and he’s always a great actor, yet the dialogue they gave him to say must have been so bad, I recall none of it. I recall NOTHING of any note from that movie.
It was also hugely expensive to make - potentially studio-endingly so - but it made gigantic amounts of cash. It’s not hard to see why Hollywood types voted for it.
And it’s a damn good film. OK, it’s a big old melodrama with great FX rather than an experimental meditation on the human condition, but there’s nowt wrong with that - it genuinely moved people in very large numbers. As one film critic said “It’s Jim Cameron’s love letter to a big hunk of metal”, but it’s more than that too - there are loads of moments of love and fear and courage and horror and loss.
It’s no A Night To Remember though, so it’s only the second best film about the maiden voyage of RMS Titanic.
No one is being pedantic. Someone was using irony to be funny. Obviously, your funny bone didn’t pick up the broadcast. :rolleyes:
I haven’t seen Crash in a goodly number of years (close to ten), and I recall almost the whole movie. So clearly it had the ability to make an impact. Whether or not it does is of course where the milage varies.
So boring that I quit watching it halfway through on a flight to Europe… at like 10 pm, with all the lights out. It was more rewarding to try and sleep, knowing that I never actually manage to sleep on airliners than to grit out that movie.
I dont think so, I just think he didn’t understand how the polling worked, due to poor Op instructions. You’re not Some Call Me… Tim, so I don’t know how you can say what he was trying for. I think his post was dead serious.
Note the lack of a emoticon which would have indicated otherwise.
It’s a tie between American Beauty and The English Patient. Both pretentious bullshit. I gave it to American Beauty but I wanted to pick both.
Hey, if sitting through one of her movies would get me laid by Gwyneth Paltrow, I’d do it too!
Amazingly, it’s not usually necessary to use emoticons/emojis to indicate humor. Intelligent people usually pick up on it regardless. Deadpan humor is a staple of English humor, for example. But whatever.
Leaving aside Crash (and some LOVE this movie so it’s very YMMV), I can see reasons for the runners up. Shakespeare in Love(too lightweight), Birdman (too pretentious), Forrest Gump (hamfisted references to every event of 60s,70s,80s)…still these had their moments…YMMV
I haven’t seen all of them, but at least 15 and have some sense of what most of the other ones are like.
Chicago by a mile.
I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it. But the plot is about as deep as that in Titanic, minus any technical achievement s, minus any notable cinematography, minus any particularly great acting or singing. The best one can say for it is that they didn’t ruin the musical (see: Les Miserables, The Phantom of the Opera, Sweeney Todd, etc.) but I wouldn’t view that as a notable achievement. Sure, most musicals have failed the transition spectacularly, but so did most comic book movies until the directors stopped being determined morons. It’s not actually that hard, just don’t hire actors who can’t sing, don’t change the plot significantly, and don’t change the style of the original significantly.
I thought it was the worst best picture – all opinions are, by definition, personal. so why is this literally against what the OP said? I’m not sure you understood. If I’m wrong, explain, because I don’t really get what how I didn’t answer properly.
The OP asked that you remove considerations about the quality of BP winners against its competition that year. Saying that you wished Pulp Fiction prevailed against Gump and that affected your vote goes against the conditions outlined in the OP.
In other words: Here is a set of 40 films, linked by the fact they won Best Picture over the last 40 years. Which is the worst?
Right, Not “Was there a best Picture that you thought should have won, instead?” , which is rather different.
There are a surprising number I have seen that, if they were the only thing available to watch I wouldn’t bother turning them on:
*The English Patient
Crash
The Hurt Locker
The Artist
Spotlight
Driving Miss Daisy
Argo
*
But I guess Crash is not just a poor Best Picture choice, it is a really execrable movie anyway. So it gets my vote.
The message of Crash is that Racism Is Bad. See?
I hated Crash, but I ended up voting for Slumdog Millionaire. I first saw it several years after it came out, and remember wondering how it even got nominated. The story gets more preposterous as it goes on, and by the end it was a real eye-roller.
I really liked Birdman. For one thing, it was funny. I liked the aspect of the main character trying to reinvent himself while being dogged by the only success he’d ever had. I can see why some people think it’s pretentious, but I didn’t have that reaction to it. I do think the Academy loves movies about show business, which probably affected the voting.
George Orwell once wrote a review of a historical anthology of English poetry in which he pointed out that the editors’ judgment on what to include got worse as they approached their own era. People’s wisdom about the new and the recent is often poor. We can see this reflected in the choices for best picture.
There used to be a problem with the voting system. They would always have five nominees, and each Academy member got one vote. This meant that a movie could win with just over one fifth of the vote. Several years ago they changed the voting for best picture to a ranked choice/instant runoff type system, which reduces the chances of a winner that most people dislike.
I’ve suspected for a long time that Academy voters pick the types of movies they want to see made. A movie like Titanic has something in it for everyone in Hollywood: the actors, stunt people, songwriters and singers, special effects people, editors, directors, costume designers. . . In a political sense, it’s a big tent movie.
Interesting the films that have zero votes - all historical dramas (except the one starring Kevin Costner), and 2 tough hardbitten Western set movies. (Spotlight I don’t count, since barely anyone saw that movie.)
It would appear that you are /not/ judging based on the quality of the score.
For me, the music is perhaps the most important single element of a film.
It didn’t do that bad: Spotlight (film) - Wikipedia
Actually, I said that I thought it was the worst winner. The fact that I thought that Pulp Fiction was so good and ought to have won is what made it personal.