Welcome to a new multi-part series in which I will tackle something that is both daunting and fun all at once...especially in the early stages as I get to be very catty.
With the rewarding of Sian Heder's Coda as Best Picture of 2021 this past year, we now have 94 films that have won this prestigious honor. A lot of film buffs and historians will bemoan how certain films either lost or won or weren't even nominated in the first place...and now comes the time for me to show you just how wrong the Academy gets it nearly year after year.
I am going to tell you right now that there are a lot of films on these lists that I like, but in the end, they come nowhere near being the best that their particular year had to offer.
In some cases, a truly strong film won but it wasn't the film I felt deserved it in the end...which comes back to the whole "art comparison" ordeal I wrote about recently.
I will be going through 94 different films which is why this will be a multi-part series divided up with the following ranking order:
94-80
79-60
59-40
39-20
19-1
Just to clarify, even though I will be mentioning several films that I find to be more deserving than most of these actual winners, this ranking is simply based on the quality of the film as it compares with the other films within the ranking.
So, let's get started with the film I consider to be the absolute WORST Best Picture winner of all time...and we will take a trip back to 1933.
#94 - CALVACADE (1933)
Directed by Frank Lloyd
Written by Noel Coward
Look at that tagline: Great as Life Itself....
We might as well end it now, then.
As written by Noel Coward in easily his worst effort, Calvacade tells the story of the well-to-do Marryot family of London and the tragedies that befall them from the turn-of-the-century to then present 1933.
I have always "likened" the film as something of a precursor to Forrest Gump (another Best Picture winner of questionable quality) in that every seemingly big major historical event that occurred in the first third of the 20th century affected the Marryot family in melodramatic fashion.
Do you want the death of a long-serving monarch? Here's the death of Queen Victoria!!
Do you like war? Not only do you get the Baer War but you also get The Great War (World War I)!!
Do you want to see a newly married couple on their honeymoon? Here you go! They are on their honeymoon...on the Titanic...and they will die!
Want to see the family grieve about it? Too bad! It will only get the tiniest bit of a cursory mention as the film progresses!
Calvacade winning this award seems very much in line with the kind of films that many expect the Academy to honor.
However, I have never seen a film that managed to feel so dull and lifeless while also somehow coming off as a melodrama in my life.
It also contains some of the worst performances I have seen in a life that was deemed worthy of prestigious awards.
As the leads, Diana Wynard and Clive Brook have about as much charisma as a soaked beige piece of cloth sitting in a dumpster.
So yeah...I didn't have to think twice about this selection.
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#93 - CIMMARON (1931)
Directed by: Wesley Ruggles
Written by: Howard Estabrook & Louis Sarecky
The Academy of the first decades of its existence were a group heavily influenced by the heads of the major Hollywood studios...and with that came a lot of winners that were pushed more for a quest to seek profits rather than necessarily merit.
When looking at a movie like Cimmaron, you probably don't even know what the hell it is. It is mostly known by most hard-core film buffs as being the film that put Irene Dunne on the map but it is also a film that managed to win Best Picture while classics such as City Lights, Limite, Little Caesar, and M weren't even nominated.
Cimmaron is also the first of only 4 westerns to win the Best Picture category (Dances with Wolves, Unforgiven, and No Country for Old Men...and yes, I will consider the latter a western in this case). The fact that Dances with Wolves is not the weakest film on a list such as this is a pretty big feat in of itself.
So yes, the film does contain a lovely performance by Irene Dunne, but it is still a bloated epic western that is riddled with so many offensive stereotypes that it is simply too hard to avoid cringing.
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#92 - THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH (1952)
Directed by Cecil B. DeMille
Written by Frederic M. Frank, Theodore St. John, and Barre Lyndon
The win by
The Greatest Show on Earth was so hated even at the award ceremony in 1953 that several people walked out upon its announcement.
This film managed to beat High Noon and The Quiet Man while other movies like Singin' in the Rain were snubbed entirely.
Film director Stanley Kramer was once quoted as saying that he felt this film barely squeaking out a Best Picture win was a political decision as this was during the early stages of the Hollywood Blacklist movement and there was a lot more comfort in rewarding a conservative Republican (DeMille) for his work as opposed to High Noon whose producer, Carl Foreman, was blacklisted.
To quote the "Critical Consensus" on Rotten Tomatoes: "The Greatest Show on Earth is melodramatic, short on plot, excessively lengthy and bogged down with cliches, but not without a certain innocent charm."
I guess I could say there is a charm to it...but it certainly isn't enough to make me like the film in any way.
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#91 - CRASH (2004/5)
Directed by Paul Haggis
Written by Paul Haggis & Bobby Moresco
I wanted to single out Thandie Newton, who manages to be the absolute best thing about
Crash. She managed to elevate herself from the material and I immediately took notice of her at the time.
And to continue with the film...
Crash is one of the most heavy-handed and self-righteous films ever made...and bashing it here would almost be too easy because nearly everyone else has done just that.
I would go as far to say that the film is incredibly offensive in how it portrays many of these characters.
You have Ludacris and Larenz Tate as Anthony and Peter, who basically end up carjacking District Attorney Rick Cabot and his wife Jean (Brendan Fraser and Sandra Bullock) in what practically feels like them doing strictly because she gave them a fearful look...and that leads to a scene in which Sandra Bullock goes off on a tirade because she's convinced that the very sweet Latino guy changing the locks on their door is going to sell their keys to his "gang banger" friends.
Bullock's performance in this is interesting because on one hand, she comes off as looking completely ridiculous and yet, I don't really blame her for that because the way the dialogue was written and how she was directed sets her up to come across as a caricature.
It is made even more pathetic when she has a fall later in the film and she has a change of heart towards her feelings on people of color.
Crash winning Best Picture happened at a time when I was deeply obsessed with movies and awards. I also vividly remember the ceremony as it occurred during my junior year of high school and how all of the momentum seemed to be going towards Brokeback Mountain.
When Jack Nicholson announced the winner, lifted his eyebrows, looked into the audience and mouthed "Whoa!", I think he represented the majority of the world in that moment.
They also snubbed my favorite film of that year for a Best Picture nomination: The Squid and the Whale, which did at least net a Screenplay nom.
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#90 - AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS (1956)
Directed by Michael Anderson
Written by James Poe, John Farrow, and S.J. Perelman
Is there a certain charm to a movie like
Around the World in 80 Days?
Yes.
Does that charm mean it should beat films like Giant and The King and I for Best Picture?
NO!!
I can't really say much about this one. It is a very slight film that is all surface-based and offers no real worth to the world.
It is truly one of the most baffling wins of all-time and I will leave it at that.
Meanwhile, the likes of movies such as The Man Who Knew Too Much, Aparajito, The Searchers, and The Killing are nowhere to be found.
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#89 - TOM JONES (1963)
Directed by Tony Richardson
Written by Tom Osborne & Henry Fielding
The Academy is often ridiculed for not recognizing more genre pictures, particularly something as basic as a comedy.
However, whenever they actually do reward comedies, the results are sort of like...why the hell did you want to single this one out?!?!
Tom Jones, a comic British import at a time when the Oscars were eating that up (and frankly I think a lot of Americans were in the 60s if evidenced by other successful films and musical groups), was not one of the better selections from the Academy...but I also found 1963 to be a rather sluggish year for film.
Look at the five films nominated that year:
America America
Cleopatra
How the West Was Won
Lillies of the Field
Tom Jones**
What a waste of five slots. I feel like Lillies is most remembered for being the film that netted the historic win for Sidney Poitier and Cleopatra is such an extravagant mess.
This was a year in which international cinema wiped the floor with Hollywood. The three best films of that year for me were Fellini's 8 1/2, Bergman's The Silence, and Kurosawa's High & Low.
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#88 - BRAVEHEART (1995)
Directed by Mel Gibson
Written by Randall Wallace
The year that
Braveheart won Best Picture was one of those erratic award seasons in which nothing seemed to make sense in terms of reliable statistics.
Apollo 13 and Sense & Sensibility seemed more viable going into the ceremony although both films were snubbed in Best Director which, at that time, was seen as more of a hurdle for a film to win the top prize.
I was never upset about Braveheart winning because of the films it beat out, but rather the fact that it just simply wasn't that great of a film to begin with. Also, none of the other Best Picture nominees from that year would even make my personal top 5.
Mel Gibson winning Best Director continued the trend of actors winning the prize which happened a fair number of times starting with Robert Redford winning for Ordinary People followed by the likes of Warren Beatty, Richard Attenborough, and Kevin Costner. He certainly didn't deserve this award (although I am not even sure who I would give the award to out of the nominees), but I can commend him trying to make the film work...especially considering how historically inaccurate and poorly paced the script is. The sad thing is that the Screenplay did have a viable chance of actually winning the Oscar but thankfully the voters had enough since to give to The Usual Suspects, which unfortunately was not up for Best Picture.
Speaking of films that were snubbed, in addition to The Usual Suspects, you have:
Toy Story
La Haine
To Die For
Before Sunrise
Maborosi
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#87 - SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE (2008)
Directed by Danny Boyle
Written by Simon Beaufoy & Vikas Swarup
When Slumdog Millionaire came out, I was a sophomore in college. This would've been right at the beginning of when I began taking somewhat of a sabbatical from film obsession and began focusing more on adapting to adult life and also a new relationship and a theatrical acting career.
I remember watching this film in theaters and sort of wondering "This is it?".
It was one of the first instances I can recall watching a film and almost feeling embarrassed because it seemed like everyone and their mother was raving about this film; I just didn't have the same level of admiration. I tried to act like I did, and I fought hard to try to justify reasons for liking it.
In the years since, I feel like the film's level of strong reception has greatly dimmed so I have tried not to hide that I didn't find much to praise about the film...and I feel like despite its awards sweep and the recognition for Danny Boyle, this was a step back for him as a filmmaker. Plus, I am not sure he should be directed Bollywood-style film sequences.
Of the nominees, Milk was the easy winner for me, but this was the infamous year that there was immense outrage over the snubs of The Dark Knight and Wall-E at the expense of a movie like The Reader.
Other films that missed the lineup that I greatly preferred:
Happy Go Lucky
Waltz with Bashir
Rachel Getting Married
I've Loved You So Long
Revolutionary Road
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#86 - OUT OF AFRICA (1985)
Directed by Sydney Pollack
Written by Kurt Luedtke
Smack dab in the middle of Meryl Streep's Accent-vaganza that was the 1980s, here we watch her tackle the Danish accent of Karen Blixen.
Streep does pretty good work in this one...and she works well with Redford and Klaus Maria Brandauer...which it is ironic that he lost the Oscar when the film swept in the manner that it did. I also think that the film benefits from great cinematography and a lush musical score.
Those attributes are worth giving praise to, but in the end, the film once again suffers from an overlong runtime and a sluggish script that make for a brutal watch. I remember first watching the film on a sunny summer afternoon and within the first half hour, I was already done with it...and keep in mind, I was someone who was already into filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman at that point.
Out of Africa is most known for beating out The Color Purple but I personally felt like my favorite nominees of that lineup was Witness.
Other films that got snubbed that were far superior to Out of Africa:
After Hours
Back to the Future
Brazil
Come & See
My Life as a Dog
The Official Story
The Purple Rose of Cairo
Ran
Shoah
...and you know? Screw it, Pee Wee's Big Adventure
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#85 - BEN-HUR (1959)
Directed by William Wyler
Written by Karl Tunberg
As one of the three biggest winners in Academy history, Ben Hur is a movie that screams Oscar Favorite: an overlong epic.
Led by Charlton Heston in a performance that won him a very undeserved Oscar, Ben Hur is one of those films that still has its admirers and therefore this choice of ranking might be low for some.
The chariot race is certainly a very well-directed scene (though many have stated that Wyler was not as involved with it as one might expect) and it seems particularly thrilling considering it is now over 60 years old, but it was simply a case where the film mostly suffers by its run-time and a leading performance that I simply didn't find to be that good.
Of the actual nominees, I would probably vote for Anatomy of a Murder but the real winners were all snubbed:
The 400 Blows
Some Like it Hot
Apur Sansar
Hiroshima Mon Amour
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#84 - THE BROADWAY MELODY (1929)
Directed by Harry Beaumont
Written by Sarah Mason, Edmund Goulding, James Gleason, and Norman Houston
The Broadway Melody is historic in that it was the first talkie and musical film to win Best Picture...but that isn't as striking a statistic when you realize it was the second film overall to win the prize.
For 1929, this film was since as groundbreaking and revolutionary with its use of sound and flashy musical numbers. In fact, it even contained one of the first uses of technicolor in a film for one sequence though it only survives in black-and-white form today.
It garnered a strong profit for MGM so when you take all of this into account, it isn't surprising that they would want to acknowledge it with the top prize.
I suppose that the film does seem admirable for its time period (though this argument holds less weight when you see the quality of the winner of 1930 which will be coming up a lot later in this ranking), but it just comes off as a melodramatic and cheesy musical that perhaps has lost its appeal over time.
Maybe it isn't fair to bash it based on that fact, but as a film, it doesn't really offer anything aside from a couple of classic songs (like "You Were Meant for Me") and an interesting snapshot of the early Talkie era.
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#83 - GLADIATOR (2000)
Directed by Ridley Scott
Written by David Franzoni, John Logan, and William Nicholson
"Are you not entertained?!"
No, Russell Crowe, I'm not. Give your Oscar to Ed Harris or Javier Bardem now, please.
I had remembered the press Shakespeare in Love had gotten when it won Best Picture in an upset two years prior, but when Gladiator won, I was a little more invested in the ceremony and hoping to see a win for Steven Soderbergh's Traffic.
When Crowe managed to win Best Actor in something of an upset, I suddenly worried at the prospect of Gladiator winning too...and it did...sadly.
I found solace in Roger Ebert at that time, who was one of the more prominent people who gave the film a negative review.
I never felt the least bit invested in the story and on top of that, the film was just visually drab and awful to look at. You could say that a film can't hide its setting, but I certainly wouldn't call a movie like Spartacus to be visually awful to look at.
My hatred towards Gladiator has cooled in recent years, but I am still not a fan of it. I do have to commend Joaquin Phoenix as his villainous Commodus was a delectably vile performance.
Some truly great films came out that year:
In the Mood for Love
Yi Yi
Almost Famous
Best in Show
Dancer in the Dark
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#82 - THE GREAT ZIEGFELD (1936)
Directed by Robert Z. Leonard
Written by William Anthony Maguire
Much like
The Broadway Melody, there is no surprise that Hollywood ate up the glitz and glamour and insane spectacle of
The Great Ziegfeld.The Great Ziegfeld was also the first musical film to warrant an acting Oscar win with that of Luise Rainer, who won Best Actress for her role as Anna Held, the first wife of Ziegfeld.
Rainer's performance is relatively brief in the overlong running time, but her performance is often singled out for her telephone scene in which she congratulates Ziegfeld on his second marriage and while she is trying to appear to sound happy over the phone, we can clearly see she is crying.
In many ways, her performance, while solid, didn't really scream Oscar worthy, but this was the scene that many say put her over the edge which led to the creation of the term: Oscar scene.
As I sort of mentioned, the film is entertaining enough but still far too long and reliant on the aesthetics rather than truly interesting story ideas.
Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times was robbed here. That film still holds up.
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#81 - GREEN BOOK (2018)
Directed by Peter Farrelly
Written by Peter Farrelly, Nick Vallelonga, and Brian Hayes Currie
When Roma lost Best Picture to Green Book, the internet erupted in a fury.
So did I. Not because of Roma...that movie is overrated and I was a passionate supporter of The Favourite...but because of the fact that Green Book was a film that did not deserve any kind of recognition.
First of all, the big joke is that it is Driving Miss Daisy with the races reversed and with two men...but that is essentially what it is.
Spike Lee was up for Blackkklansman that year and when they announced Green Book as the winner, he actually tried to walk out on the ceremony but was told to return to his seat (which I find rather insulting to him, but I shouldn't be shocked). He later brought this up in the press room and he made the comment: "Why am I always losing to films about black and white people driving?!".
Lee's magnum opus Do The Right Thing was infamously snubbed by the Academy only for them to honor Driving Miss Daisy instead...a film which takes on racial discord in the most flaccid way possible this side of The Blind Side.
Spike Lee's distaste with the selection is not unfounded. The estate of Don Shirley and his family loathed the movie for how it portrayed him.
Was the movie entertaining enough? For the most part, yes. I have certainly seen films that were far less enjoyable...some of those I have already mentioned here!
Nothing about it was particularly remarkable except for maybe the chemistry between its two leads...but Mortensen has been better elsewhere.
In 2018, the Academy voters mostly got it all wrong. Some of the best films that year were overlooked entirely like Burning, Shoplifters, or got only a couple of nods like Can You Ever Forgive Me, First Reformed, or Sorry to Bother You.
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#80 - GOING MY WAY (1944)
Directed by Leo McCarey
Written by Leo McCarey, Frank Butler, and Frank Cavett
The last film in this volume is, perhaps, the first film I will mention that has dropped quite a bit in my personal esteem since I first viewed it years ago.
Going My Way perhaps responded to me growing up due to its Irish trappings and it isn't without its charm and wholesome appeal...but I sort of found myself slipping further away from it when I began to struggle with my own faith.
I do think it winning Best Picture was another example of the climate it came from during WWII. Its immense popularity seemed to be a way to bolster morale, especially from a religious standpoint, at such a trying time in our history.
Maybe that isn't a bad thing necessarily, but I am not sure that automatically means that they need to reward it.
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CONCLUSION:
Coming up in Volume 2: 79-60
A couple of highly popular films will be featured in the next volume, but their wins are certainly debatable amongst film fanatics. We will also have couple of "classic" hated wins making their appearance in this volume which just goes to show how bad some of the above films must've been....eeek, indeed...
For easy access, here are links to the rest of the ranking below:
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