Let me be the first to add to the list of the worst BP winners A Beautiful Mind.
I think it’s likely that no matter which of the five nominees won in 2002, somebody would have posted that one as an undeserving winner.
I don’t believe there is any film which everyone likes.
Capacitor, you are way wrong about Out of Africa. the only thing it has in common with Tarzan is the African setting.
Maybe you missed the part where Redford told Streep, “We’re only visitors here.”
The underlying subtext of the story was that the whites didn’t really belong in Africa.
Anyway, I’ve never seen Oliver or Greatest Show on Earth (but they both look pretty bad), so I’ll just nominate two best picture winners I’ve seen and been underwhelmed with:
Ben-Hur
Gone With the Wind
But I don’t understand why so many people rate Gone With the Wind as one of the worst movies to ever win best picture. Gone With the Wind is one of the best American movies ever made. It may have fallen out of disfavor with some due to popular sensibilities. But that doesn’t make it any less of a great movie.
I’m going to have to agree with Around the World in 80 Days, Titanic, American Beauty, and GLadiator as being poor choices.
Marc
Just wanted to add my disdain for Titanic. Fabulous special effects though.
Forrest Gump IMHO was one of the best movies of all time. I find other people would like it if they weren’t such fans of ShawShrink
Perhaps it’s because I’m too young to have seen it when it was released, but the French Connection was an incredibly boring movie. Even the car chase scene everyone talks about isn’t that fantastic to me. I can understand that is changed the way action movie were perceived and the way cops were portrayed on film and the way violence was handled. Still after all the Lethal Weapon s and Die Hard s, it just bores me.
Well I was going to disagree with some of the comments here, but then I looked at the list and realised… I’ve only ever seen six of the seventy-five Best Picture winners.
I’m so not qualified to judge here!
Well, I’ve seen 48 of the Best Picture winners (thank you Netflix). What I find is that the Academy has a very good track record for picking movies that stand the test of time; how many older movies do you see that haven’t aged well at all?
Times and preferences change, which may render a pick 40 years ago incomprehensible (look at all the musicals that won in the 50s, early 60s), but they really have picked very few bad movies (whether they picked the best movie of that particular year is a completely subjective question – no matter what film they select there will likely be a majority of people that would have picked other films).
Bad:
Forrest Gump (1994)
The Deer Hunter (1978)
Midnight Cowboy (1969)
Tom Jones (1963) – The WORST of them all
Going My Way (1944)
I can’t believe no one has mentioned Ordinary People (1980). (Directed by Robert Redford.)
Check out the list of now-classic movies which also came out that year:
[list][li]Raging Bull. (nominated for best picture but didn’t win)[/li][li]Coal Miner’s Daughter. (nominated, didn’t win)[/li][li]The Elephant Man. (nominated, didn’t win)[/li][li]The Shining. (not even nominated)[/li][li]The Empire Strikes Back. (not nominated, and maybe not Oscar material, but still better than Ordinary People)[/li][li]Brubaker. (If the Academy just had to kiss Robert Redford’s ass, this would have been a better reason to do it.)[/li][li]Airplane. (Oscar hates comedies. OK, maybe not Oscar material. Still better than Ordinary People.)[/li][li]The Blues Brothers. (Ditto.)[/li]
From the above list, I would cite Raging Bull, Coal Miner’s Daughter and The Shining as serious movies which were head and shoulders above Ordinary People.
Rain Man won Best Picture? That’s hard to believe. Looking back it seems like just another standard 80’s movie with Tom Cruise.
This is a great list of Oscar injustices, but I must point out that naming the greatest Oscar injustice requires a slight hijack of the OP. Of course, I am speaking of the 1974 Oscar for Best Actor.
The winner: Art Carney for Harry and Tonto
The other nominees:
Jack Nicholson - Chinatown
Al Pacino - The Godfather Part II
Dustin Hoffman - Lenny
Albert Finney - Murder on the Orient Express
Pacino should have won it by a mile. Nicholson I could plausibly accept as an alternative. But Art Carney? The mind boggles…
I hated Gladiator-it was so bloody stupid and Russell Crowe is a moron.
I would say The Sound of Music beating Doctor Zhivago. I HATE TSOM. I hate Julie Andrews. Dammit.
Judi Dench should have won the Best Actress award for Mrs. Brown.
Gladiator, hands down.
I often say of bad movies, “There goes two hours of my life I’ll never get back.” Gladitor, I feel, actually sent me into negative territory. It was, I am sure, six or seven hours of my life I’ll never get back.
Bad acting. And for me to make a blanket statement like that about a movie whose cast includes Derek Jacobi, you should understand that I really mean it.
Bad cinematography. Remember when that overexposed, hyper-saturated look was used for effect? Note to cameraman: go back to dropping acid if you want everything to look like that, and leave us out of it!
Bad script. I’d say more, but I’m already feeling queasy.
Bad directing. Did anyone ever think to mention to Ridley Scott that he’s a better director than John Woo, and that it is embarrassing for him to imitate a lesser director?
I know I’m in the minority on this board, but I actually liked both Titanic and Gladiator. Are they the best movies ever made? No, not by a long shot, but I think that they both deserved the BP award for their years.
I really liked Shakespeare in Love but it definitely did NOT deserve best picture. Saving Private Ryan was the best movie of the year, and perhaps the best movie of the past 5 years.
I think that Driving Miss Daisy was a rather dull film, but I saw it a long time ago, so I may feel differently now.
Other than that, I can’t really complain about many BP winners.
That dreary bloated chick flick to end all chick flicks Titanic .
-me
No offense, but I can’t believe people are citing movies like “Gladiator” and “Titanic” as the WORST Best Pictures ever. Bad choices? Maybe. Worsrt choices of all time? Not even close, unless by “all time” you mean “in the last ten years or so.” (And “Forrest Gump” was, IMHO, a magnificent film and fully deserving of the Oscar.)
Have a look at some of the Best Picture winners from the 50’s and 60’s. Dear God, there were some stupid choices. “Around The World in 80 Days” was ten times worse than “Titanic,” at least. It would be laughed off the screen today, even if you updated the technical aspects. “Tom Jones” was less funny than the average Adam Sandler film and wasn’t half the movie “Gladiator” was. As already mentioned, “Midnight Cowboy” was an absurd choice; if released today it would not be one of the thirty best movies of the year. A variety of ridiculous musicals have won the Oscar. But perhaps no turkey choice will ever top “Gigi.”
I sincerely hope not.
The great Chuck D said it best back in the day…
“God damn 'Driving Miss Daisy” was a number one jam. Damn if I sang it, you can slap me right here!"
On second thought, that’s suppossed to “Don’t Worry Be Happy”, not “Driving Miss Daisy” in that lyric, but o well. Chuck D dissed “Driving Miss Daisy” in one of their songs somewhere. I think he just says “Fuck Driving Miss Daisy man”!
Still, my vote goes for “Driving Miss Daisy”!
LOL!
Perhaps in judging the value of older winners in this category, one should keep in mind the circumstances within which the movie was nominated and won. For instance, older movies with what seem to be poor special effects by today’s standards might well be excellent by the standards of the day in which they won. For example, had The Wizard of Oz won in the year Gone With the Wind actually won, we might look at it today and think the special effects quite bland. At the time, the scene where Dorothy steps out of the house and sees Oz in color was quite a mind-blowing scene; color was not in much use in films at the time. And the flying monkeys were quite something, even if you could seem to see the wires on which they were suspended.
This perhaps explains the fascination for musicals, a genre which we now loathe for no apparent reason beyond the fact that we have long since stopped appreciating good music well sung, prefering instead the lyrics of songs and simple but catchy melodies scratched out of throats barely able to carry tunes. At the time, musical pictures were quite the thing, and this is reflected in the fact that six such pictures won in a span of 13 years starting in 1956. The knock against Moulin Rouge this year was that it was a musical!
Again, one has to look at pictures with an eye towards what was being done with films at the time. The stark “realism” of the late fifties and early sixties would never have flown in the war years of the forties, when the very good picture Going My Way won its award. So if you are going to criticize Cimarron do not do so until you have watched several other movies of the same era.
My list: Gigi and Tom Jones
The first is a second rate musical and the latter is, well, impossible to describe without really bad language… 
When I saw The English Patient in the theater that year, I knew it was a lock; I haven’t seen anyone produce a really GOOD film like that in years.