The WORST 'Best Picture' from the Oscars You've Ever Seen

Citizen Kane

Chariots of Fire was one of the first movies I rented - for my Betamax! After 30 minutes, I started to leaf through a magazine. After 45 minutes, I shut it off. I guess the rental fee was the equivalent of ten bucks today. 

For quite a few of the past years I haven't even seen the winner as they seem to be mostly political choices.

However, my vote is Chariots of Fire or American Beauty. 1999 was kind of weak year though so I'm not sure what should have won in its place (maybe the Insider).

Reds or Raiders definitely should have won over Chariots of Fire though. Geez.

I haven't seen Shakespeare in Love but I can't imagine how anything beat out Saving Private Ryan or the Thin Red lINE.

Just for grins, I'll also throw out Kramer Vs. Kramer as I still believe that Apocalypse Now was a much superior and more remembered film.

A Beautiful Mind.

But isn't it considered the greatest movie made of all time?

Well, it is nice that some of you have seen an Oscar winner earlier than the 1990s.

“Shakespeare In Love” won because it was a colorful historical romantic comedy/drama effectively directed and which boasted one of the best scripts of the decade by four-time Tony Award winning playwright Tom Stoppard. Acting was quite wonderful all around. BUT “Shakespeare In Love” did not win Best Director.

That award went to “Saving Pvt. Ryan” and it should have. “Ryan” is a director’s picture. Other aspects, well, acting with just a couple of exceptions (i.e. the two Toms, Hanks and Sizemore) didn’t rise above yeoman level and the script was War Movie Cliché City. It was the two battles that bookended the long talkie middle that won for Spielberg. The move deserved Best Director but not Production.

One final word about “Shakespeare” vs. “Ryan”: just because you loved “Ryan” doesn’t mean that the movie that did win was bad.

As for worst Best Picture, there are two that I dislike. For the second Oscar year of 1928-1929 (the Oscar calendar ran from September 1 of one year to August 30 of the next for the first six years), the arrival of sound was celebrated by “The Broadway Melody” whose tag line was “All Talking. All Singing. All Dancing.” That the talk was banal, the singing just OK, and the dancing kind of clunky, just didn’t matter. The Talkies had arrived.

Next we jump from the 2nd Annual Oscars to the 74th and Ron Howard’s would-be tear jerker “A Beautiful Mind” which prominently featured a perfectly awful performance from Russell Crowe, so bad it turned me against him forever.