Worst Movies to ever win Best Picture Oscar

Cafe Society
41

Most of my worst Best picture winners have already been taken, but I’ll have a go at them anyway. By the way, I’ve seen 68 of the best pictures, but I have not been able to steel myself to go and see Titanic : the trailers give me heartburn, and I dislike Céline Dion’s voice with a passion.

Gladiator: one of the most boring movies I saw that year, its only redeeming feature the choreography of the fights, and the muscle-bound bodies of the gladiators. Russell Crowe can act, but in that movie, his range was from D to D-.

The English Patient combined with Gone With the Wind might be used as a form of torture devised to make me confess horrendous crimes, begging for mercy. The first one is unutterably boring. The second is perhaps an important American film, but it certainly does not portray America in a very favourable light and the acting just stinks. It’s an overblown and tacky Harlequin romance.

Saving Private Ryan may have deserved an Oscar for the first 20 minutes of the movie, but the rest of it really sank it. Clichéed, schmaltzy. Am I the only person who is getting tired of having my heartstrings pulled by Stephen Spielberg? His handling of certain topics seems downright manipulative.

I guess I could go on grumbling, but I’ll stop now, since I realize that a lot of people do love movies I thoroughly despise, and some of the most hated movies on other lists are favourites of mine. For instance, The Deer Hunter is one of the best war movies of all time, in my opinion.

Thank goodness that yesterday afternoon’s ceremonies for the Independent Spirit Awards gave us an reminder that movies with imagination and creativity still exist out there.

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Just want to second (tenth) * Out of Africa * (“I had a fahm…in…Ahf…ree…kah.” Egads.), Shakespeare in Love (cute, but best picture? Did anyone think Paltrow looked convincing as a man?), and * The English Patient * (beautiful lighting but boooorrrrring.)

Thought Titanic’s plot was absurb but the special effects were so well done that it made you feel as if you were there. It struck an emotional chord. Had it been about a fictional shipwreck I think it would have been laughed off the screen.

43

Someone actually thought The Shining was good? Are we talking about the same movie? I’m only familiar with the one starring Jack Nicholson and the wooden, stick figure Shelly Duval. Surely you can’t be talking about the same movie. Christ, even Stephen King hated that adaptation and he wrote the damn book.

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I guess the Academy voters listened to you here. “Private Ryan” didn’t win Best Picture, losing out to the aforementioned “Shakespeare in Love”.

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Stephen King doesn’t know a goddamned thing about movies. Two words: “Maximum Overdrive.”

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Here are the worst movies ever to win Best Picture Oscars, in chronological orders:[ul]*
[li]Around the World in 80 Days[/li][li]Ordinary People[/li][li]Terms of Endearment[/li][li]Platoon[/li][li]Rain Man[/li][li]Dances With Wolves[/li][li]Schindler’s List[/li][li]Forrest Gump[/li][li]Braveheart[/li][li]Titanic[/li][li]Gladiator*[/li][/ul]
–and here they are in order of worthlessess: worst to least worst.[list=1]
[li]Forrest Gump[/li][li]Schindler’s List[/li][li]Braveheart[/li][li]Dances With Wolves[/li][li]Around the World in 80 Days[/li][li]Terms of Endearment[/li][li]Rain Man[/li][li]Titanic[/li][li]Gladiator[/li][li]Platoon[/li][li]Ordinary People[/li][/list=1]

–in case anyone was wondering what the correct answer to the OP was.

47

Pretend I previewed.

Sheesh.

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I just don’t understand the hatred towards “Forrest Gump.” Never have, never will. What a terrific movie that was.

And lissenner… Schindler’s List? No offense, but your answer isn’t the right answer… it’s a joke answer.

49

No offense taken, since you’re wrong. :smiley: But thanks for playin.

FYI, Schindler’s List is one of the single most offensive movies I have ever seen, and Forrest Gump is just about the most insulting movie I’ve ever seen.

50

What is wrong with Schindler’s List? It’s one of the most powerful movies I have ever seen… I think it deserved the award.

Add my votes for Gladiator and Titanic. Both were entertaining flicks, but not Best Picture caliber.

51

As May Sarton said, “one must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.” In Schindler’s List, Spielberg confuses the two, and portrays a “merely decent human being” as a hero. This is the least of my complaints about the movie, but it kind of sets the platform for the rest of my argument.

The real story about Oskar Schindler is not that he did what he did, but that the moral vacuum of WWII Germany presents a backdrop against which acts of simple human decency stand out likes acts of heroism. That’s a tragedy, but Spielberg, never one for moral ambiguity, uses it instead as a vehicle for an Indiana-Jones-style story of heroism and triumph. He even puts Schindler on a white horse for one scene. (If I were to make a film of this story, I think I would make it take place in the parlors of the other Germans, the ones who didn’t behave like decent human beings. I would have Oskar Schindler exist only as the subject of gossip, while we listened to the other Germans deride and dismiss him out of a defensive sense of their own repressed guilt.)

Consider too the context in which the film was made: imagine that a German filmmaker chose, out of all the millions of stories to have come out of the Holocaust, a story with an Aryan hero at its center, and a story in which the Jews involved come through the war pretty much unscathed (relatively speaking). It would be denounced as an outrage, and as a minimization of the real tragedy of the war. Imagine such a film made by an American non-Jew: same reception, surely. So here comes Stephen Spielberg, and chooses a story whose Jews coast through the war in relative comfort and security, watched over by a paternal Aryan. (In the scene where Schindler brings the women home from their amusement-part ride to the, as it turns out, cleansing showers of Auschwitz, he is shown by Spielberg to be a head taller than they, his diminutive, child-like charges.)

The film is full of Spielberg’s trademark suspense-relief sequences. Again, the trip to Auschwitz as an example: the women are put into the cars, and we see their fear grow as they come to understand where they’re going, and what’s to become of them. Our fear grows with theirs as Spielberg shows us their faces, and takes us with them into the shower room. We feel their terror as Spielberg shows us a close-up of the killing shower heads, where the CyklonB will come. Yes, even now, we can hear the growing hiss. Our eyes widen with those of the women on the screen. The hiss grows, and suddenly—water! Beautiful, clean, safe water! We feel our stomach return to its accustomed place, like it does at the end of a rollercoaster ride, or when Indiana Jones makes it to safety.

I’m sorry, but a film that uses the Holocaust—the most inhuman, frightening icons of the Holocaust (cattle cars, Auschwitz, gas chambers!) to give the audience an amusement-park moment of relief is nothing more than reprehensible.

And I could go on, but I’ll leave it at that for now.

52

And blessed be whatever diety compelled you to give it up. What you sound like is someone trying to justify that firetrucks are green and that we’re all perceiving them incorrectly as red. It just doesn’t make sense. “…imagine that a German filmmaker chose…” Why? To my knowledge Spielberg isn’t German and is in fact Jewish, so if you’re trying to make the argument that Spielberg has created some kind of anti-semitic piece, well I find that odd.

Who’s May Sarton? Why do I care what she thinks? Maybe I’ll just start quoting people I know at random and assume everyone views that person to impart infallible knowledge.

Maybe you didn’t like “Shindler’s List”, but it sure as hell isn’t offensive and also is not the worst movie to win the best picture award. Far from it.

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Sometimes just being a decent human being is heroic.

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The movie version of Oliver was dull, but on stage the show was great. Live performance makes all the difference.
“Hello, I must be going.” --Groucho Marx

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Oh, my own picks for worst of the best:

Lawrence of Arabia, about six hours (wasn’t it?) of the insufferable Peter O’Toole (which name Dick Cavett once pointed out was “double phallic”) prancing around the trackless desert drinking from holes in the ground and eating camel dung (or was that at the theater snack bar?).

Unforgiven had it’s moments, but calling it best picture in any year, let alone best western ever made, is the height of hyperbole. Red River was a damn sight better.

56

I must admit that you are the first person I have ever heard, out of hundreds, to describe “Schindler’s List” as “a story of heroism and triumph.” I saw nothing of the sort. Perhaps the “Spielberg” name distracted you. I saw precious little heroism and no triumph, save that of lucky survival.

Suspence-relief sequences are not exactly a Spielberg thing. They have been a common part of cinema since the medium was invented. I get the sense your comments here are based more out of a dislike for Spielberg than anything else.

Was the shower scene manipulative? Sure, all movies are manipulative. It was a little much, but overall the movie was still excellent. To my mind, your political sensibilities are of no consequence, nor does it matter who made the movie. What matters is what’s on the screen, from the first frame to the last. Was the movie well-written? It was. Was it well-photographed? Was it well-acted? Was it well-designed? Was it well-edited? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Did the movie make the audience care about its outcome and identify with the characters? I felt it did. Was it original and did it try to do something that hadn’t been done before? It was certainly one of the grittier Holocaust films ever made. If you look AT THE MOVIE, rather than who made it, it’s a first-rate movie, crafted about as well as a movie can be made.

What I find remarkable, though, is your assertion that Spielberg confuses the idea of decency and heroism. Well, he didn’t write the movie, but that said, I think the movie’s point just flew over your head; the entire point is that Schindler just acted like a decent human being, not like a hero, but that it made a difference.

You may disagree that Schindler’s actions were heroic, but the movie didn’t say they were heroic. The message I got - actually, I thought it was very clearly spelled out in the ring scene - was that good can come out of mere decency. That’s the whole crux of the exchange between Schindler and Stern.

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I think here it helps to decide whether we are criticizing movies based on whether we disagree with what they set out to do or whehter they do poorly what they set out to do. I think lissener’s problem with Schindler’s List is in the former category, and I think most of the rest of us have been criticizing movies in the vein of the latter.

I agree with RickJay’s comment about manipulation. When I first saw the movie Mississippi Burning, I was outraged that I had been manipulated so shamelessly, and I disparaged the movie to everyone who would listen on those grounds. As time went by, I realized that I had to give credit to the filmmakers for provoking a reaction out of me, which is exactly was I have to assume they wanted to do. I have since watched the film and have been able to enjoy it for what it is: manipulative as hell and damn proud of it.

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I’m surprised that no one in this thread has mentioned How Green Was My Valley.

This was the movie that took the Best Picture Oscar away from Citizen Kane, fer cryin’ out loud.

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Perhaps not, but he seems to have a good idea of how he wants his books adapted. Six words: “The Lawnmower Man,” “The Running Man.”

60

Say, what’s with all the attacks on Rocky?

I know it’s “cool” to dump on Sylvester Stallone generally, but the first Rocky is a damn fine film. Give Stallone a little credit. (He wrote the script, if I’m not mistaken.)

I get the feeling that the reputation of Rocky has been dragged down by the crappy sequels, and by some of Stallone’s other (admitedly crap-tastic) work.

Rocky is a gem, though.