Back when movie musicals were common there were stars who specialized in them: Astaire and Rogers, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, Julie Andrews. . . There was no loss in star power when they cast these actors. Today there is no “bank” of musical stars to draw on, so they often cast movie stars and teach them to sing, or they cast singers and teach them to act. There are exceptions—Anna Kendrick is a legitimate musical performer—but the fact that musicals are no longer a staple of the movie business has changed the economics of casting them.
I have seen them all (actually, I’ve seen *all *the Best Picture winners). If you want to see awful, IMHO, we need to go back much earlier than 1979.
Here is my list using Bullitt’s format:
Favorites
Amadeus
The Silence of the Lambs
Schindler’s List
No Country For Old Men
The King’s Speech
Moonlight
Very Good
Rain Man
Driving Miss Daisy
Unforgiven
Slumdog Millionaire
Argo
12 Years a Slave
Birdman
Pretty Good
Chariots of Fire
Platoon
The Last Emperor
Shakespeare in Love
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Million Dollar Baby
Spotlight
The Shape of Water
Decent
Kramer v. Kramer
Ordinary People
Gandhi
Terms of Endearment
Out of Africa
Dances with Wolves
Forrest Gump
Braveheart
The English Patient
Titanic
Gladiator
A Beautiful Mind
Chicago
The Departed
The Hurt Locker
The Artist
Pretty Bad
American Beauty
Crash
Awful
I have developed a pretty reliable sense of what movies will interest me and which ones will be (subjectively) bad, and go out of my way to avoid seeing the (presumed) bad ones. So it’s nearly certain that the worst one on the list is one of those I haven’t seen, and am forbidden, under the rules, from speculating on.
That said, Hollywood has a tendency to favor movies about Sensitive Artistes or Big Important Topics, so it’s probably something full of itself.
Interesting discussion about casting movie musicals. Since it didn’t win best picture, I’ll only make one observation from Les Miserables- Russell Crowe, excellent actor but his singing? Yeowtch. Such may be what other posters have noted about ZetaJones and Zellweger with Chicago.
I’ve seen something like 27 of the list. There’s surely a bias of me avoiding films I’m not likely to enjoy, but, that said, the two stinkers are probably Forrest Gump and Braveheart (the latter is speaking as a Scotsman).
What’s personally noticeable is that they’re not only consecutive, but that they are followed by a run of pictures that I found perfectly reasonable winners - The English Patient through to Gladiator - but which all have hordes of online naysayers. The Nineties being a bit odd all round?