From ‘The Broadway Melody’ to ‘Crash’ to ‘CODA,’ the Most Hated Best Picture Oscar Winners and What Should Have Won Instead

It’s no secret that the Oscars are prone to getting it wrong. Since 1929, the annual ceremony has had no shortage of head-scratching decisions as to which film will get handed that venerated little golden statue—from Bohemian Rhapsody winning Best Film Editing, to Rami Malek winning Best Actor, to winning both sound categories, to—okay, okay, Bohemian Rhapsody isn’t the only movie to receive some undeserved wins from the Academy, just one of the most egregious. But while the awards see a collection of debatable winners across all categories every year, Best Picture is the main showcase and therefore the category under the most scrutiny. The Oscars have had some Best Picture winners and snubs that have gone down as legendary in their misguidedness, often putting the legitimacy of the program into question among film fans before inevitably giving the award to the “right” movie the following year and redeeming themselves in an endless cycle. For this list, we’ve put together the 16 most controversial Best Picture winners, and what should have won in their stead. Because some movies just deserve a little gold man more than others.

Year: 1929

What Won: The Broadway Melody

What Should Have Won: Speculatively, The Patriot

In defense of The Broadway Melody, it was an important achievement for the time. The second-ever Best Picture winner is the first talkie to ever win the award and was a huge success upon release, essentially ushering in the advent of the Hollywood musical with the production figuring out the logistics of this new era of sound on the fly. But it is fair to say that the film just doesn’t have much to offer modern audiences in the way other films from the era do, an example of a film made exclusively for the period it was released without much lasting appeal. A dull love story is bogged down by dull musical numbers that all seem to mostly exist as a showcase for the advancement of sound technology in the film industry, but just not an altogether pleasant one. It’s hard to say what really should have won Best Picture this year, as none of the nominees have really stood the test of time, but it’s worth noting that one nominee has been conspicuously lost: Ernst Lubitsch’s The Patriot. Already a well-established director during the silent era who would go on to grow his reputation during the advent of talkies, it’s hard to reckon with the fact that The Patriot seems to be lost forever—especially in the face of something like The Broadway Melody winning in its stead. 

Year: 1931

What Won: Cimarron

What Should Have Won: City Lights

Cimarron is often considered one of the absolute worst films to win Best Picture, and it’s not hard to see why. It is a film of excruciatingly dated ideals of American exceptionalism, dramatizing the supposedly inspirational and stirring dream of Manifest Destiny by following Yancey Cravat (Richard Dix) and his wife Sabra (Irene Dunne) as they settle in the boom town of Osage amid the Oklahoma land rush. Watching a film from 1931 about two white imperialists settling on the land of the Osage in a world where Killers of the Flower Moon now exists is uncomfortable enough, but Cimarron doubles down on being decidedly of its era by engaging in dire stereotyping of its Black and Native characters while encouraging its the audience to sympathize with the white settlers at the center of the film. It just doesn’t play today and, besides its antiquated themes, the story here just isn’t very engaging—a sprawling, exciting, epic Western feels neither exciting nor epic, and whose extended scope of forty years in following these characters feels unwieldy and disjointed. Its only real value is in educational and historical purposes to reveal the dark truths of what America was built on, lest we forget this film was a massive success upon release. This is another one where it’s hard to say what should have won out of the nominees, but nowadays it seems like a major oversight that Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights was passed over entirely, due to Chaplin making a silent film after talkies had taken over which rubbed the Academy the wrong way.

Year: 1941

What Won: How Green Was My Valley

What Should Have Won: Citizen Kane..?

This is an interesting instance where the Best Picture winner was absolutely deserving, but coincided with another film released the same year that is now seen as so monumental and revolutionary to the world of cinema that it’s hard to think that it didn’t win Best Picture. John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley is an amazing film, an insightful and effortlessly detailed and textured character study about life within a Welsh mining village at the turn of the 20th century, filled with wondrous notions of worker collectivism and featuring some of the most beautiful images ever put to screen. And yet, the revelatory and boundary-pushing Citizen Kane has done its fair share of work to overshadow John Ford’s film. This is not to imply a rivalry between directors Ford and Orson Welles—in fact, at one time when asked who his favorite filmmakers were, Welles responded with, “Well, I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.” Both are some of the most important filmmakers that we as audiences were lucky enough to have taken hold of the craft. But there’s assuredly a general notion these days that Kane was the deserving winner of Best Picture. It’s important to remember that Kane only gained its current status as the de facto best movie of all time with age. It certainly received critical acclaim upon release—and, yes, was nominated for Best Picture—but had its fair share of doubters as well, and it wouldn’t become a wider cultural hit until years after the fact in 1956 when the film started to play on television and received a theatrical re-release. Our understanding of Kane is colored by context that didn’t exist at the 1942 Academy Awards. Thus, the greatest movie ever made only received one award: Best Screenplay. But if you’re going to lose to anyone, it’s hard to argue against John Ford. 

Year: 1952

What Won: The Greatest Show on Earth

What Should Have Won: Singin’ in the Rain

Apologies to Steven Spielberg, but the movie that the filmmaking titan often cites as being the entryway into his love for cinema is…not that good. Admittedly, the sequence that stuck out the most to him seeing the film as a child of a violent train crash, which he mythologized in his autobiographical The Fabelmans, is indeed an impressive piece of miniature effects work that helps to bring the feature to a memorable close. The only problem is the minute amount that could be considered similarly memorable across the span of Cecil B. DeMille’s two-and-a-half-hour exposé on the backbreaking work and melodramatic tension that comes with working the circus. I say “exposé” because large chunks of the film feel like a newsreel, with an inconsistent narration coming in and out describing the grueling manual labor of organizing a circus and over-extended sequences of the circus itself that feel like they’re padding the runtime in between the dull love story that populates the rest of the film. Charlton Heston is doing his best to bring some life to this—as is James Stewart in his bizarre and slightly creepy role as Buttons the clown who is actually a man incognito and on the run from the authorities—but this feels like a film out of time, whose contemporaries in 1952 were already far removed from the antiquated structure of a film that feels more suited to have been released in the ‘30s. Fittingly, DeMille was a director whose heyday was in the silent period, and it’s often theorized that the Academy gave him the award to honor his body of work, and to recognize his contribution to the awards as one of the founding members of the Academy. It beat out several worthy contenders for Best Picture including High Noon and The Quiet Man, but the most egregious exempt nominee has to be Singin’ in the Rain, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s now-iconic musical and Hollywood satire. 

Year: 1956

What Won: Around the World in Eighty Days

What Should Have Won: The Searchers

One has to think that Around the World in Eighty Days won Best Picture based on pure spectacle alone. It would be hard to fault the voting Academy if this was indeed their prerogative this year, as Lionel Lindon’s sweeping landscape photography is one of the only highlights in a film that plays as the sluggish and uninspiring travelogue ever devised by any human being. I almost hate to be too harsh to Michael Anderson’s Jules Verne adaptation—on the surface, it does feel like quite the dazzling display of a studio throwing all the money they can on a three-hour, lightweight globetrotting adventure saga that essentially feels like an excuse to shoot some of the most beautiful locales in the world while incorporating an extensive roster of A-list talent to dot the story in cameo appearances. But man oh man is it tough to ignore just how much of a slog this is to get through. What should feel like a zippy, fast-paced race against the clock instead feels like a languid car ride with stopovers in notable countries where the script can exploit damaging stereotypes, such as depicting Indians and Native Americans as ruthless savages that our protagonists must do their best to thwart. The substantial runtime just bogs this down to a nearly unsalvageable degree, so tedious is the stop-and-go journey we venture on with these characters. This is another case where many would argue the truly deserving winner wasn’t even nominated: John Ford’s revered Western The Searchers.

Year: 1988

What Won: Rain Man

What Should Have Won: I guess maybe Dangerous Liaisons…but they probably should have just not discounted animated films for Best Picture and nominated My Neighbor Totoro

Rain Man, a road trip drama between Dustin Hoffman’s autistic savant Raymond Babbitt and his asshole yuppie brother Charlie (Tom Cruise), begins a trend that will be seen across entries on this list: a film whose popularity has been betrayed by time. Barry Levinson’s film fits into a couple of familiar and fool-proof niches that the Academy likes to reward, that of the strikingly sentimental but maudlin character drama and films that feature actors giving a showy performance in their role about a character who overcomes a disability or obstacle. Also fitting for the ceremony that typically crowns films that ineffectually convey their social issues is the fact that the film is only superficially about the humanization of the cartoonishly depicted, stereotype-ridden portrayal of Raymond, and more directly about him being used as a tool for growth for Charlie’s self-absorption and objectionable worldview. It’s a movie for sheltered neurotypical people to nod at and feel proud for recommending because of the supposedly “brave” way it tackles its delicate subject matter—that is, by touting the not-so-revolutionary idea that “hey, maybe autistic people are people too,” a fact Charlie only acquiesces to after learning he can use Raymond’s talents in a get-rich-quick scheme in Vegas to pay off his debts. But don’t worry, he loves his brother now! It’s tasteless and now doesn’t play as much more than an artifact of its time. The Best Picture nominees for 1989 were pretty middling down the board, which is why I am personally giving My Neighbor Totoro the honor that the Academy never did. It has won Best Picture in my heart. Congratulations to Hayao Miyazaki. 

Year: 1989

What Won: Driving Miss Daisy

What Should Have Won: I’m axing all the nominees again and giving it to Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing

I feel like saying that Driving Miss Daisy won Best Picture while Do The Right Thing wasn’t even nominated pretty much tells you all you need to know, no? Bruce Beresford’s sentimental social drama about a cranky, stubborn, casually racist old white lady in the 1950s Daisy Werthan (Jessica Tandy) who has to learn to put up with her new chauffeur played by Morgan Freeman was well-received upon release but has largely fallen out of fashion for its simplistic vision of the reconciliation of race relations in the American south. Freeman is forced into pure caricature as Hoke Colburn, who possesses an eternal sense of patience and good-natured spirit in the face of Daisy’s incessant protests and accusations against him. Of course, by the end, the two learn a thing or two about a thing or two and suddenly their petty squabbles and differences of skin color are far behind them—one might say that the rearview mirror in Miss Daisy’s car could be a certain metaphor for something. Give me a break. Turn on Do The Right Thing so I can listen to the smooth sounds of Mister Señor Love Daddy. 

Year: 1994

What Won: Forrest Gump

What Should Have Won: Pulp Fiction

Out of all the films on this list, Forrest Gump may be the one that has most successfully sustained a positive reputation—the one that some people will roll their eyes at while reading this list and wonder when the critical revaluation of Forrest Gump being Bad, Actually started. But the truth of the matter is that Forrest Gump has always been Bad, Actually, though it may have taken the slow trudge of time to reveal it. It’s a quintessential Best Picture winner that beguiled voters in similar manners to several other films on this list: it has a great ensemble cast, it speaks to some vaguely important notion about America, and it’s sickly saccharine enough to not allow any of its themes override the emotion of the film with genuine confrontation. It’s an utterly safe and cloyingly sentimental feel-good movie, with notes of drama and tragedy that do the requisite amount of tugging at your heartstrings, as well as being a huge commercial hit. But being tender, nostalgic, and popular isn’t a crime. What is a crime is how this film’s misty-eyed, corny idealism is wrapped up in regressive notions of conservative nihilism, which communicates to the viewer that we operate in a world where nothing bad can ever be fixed and that we as individuals are meant to follow the status quo lest we want to suffer grave consequences, just as we see happen to Robin Wright’s character Jenny, one of the most mistreated women characters in any film I’ve seen. Not only that, but a film like this just doesn’t have the deft hand or careful tact to handle a mentally disabled protagonist like Forrest, too often relegating him to an infantilized punchline and stand-in for misjudged politics. This far removed, it’s clear that the award probably should have gone to Quentin Tarantino’s influential and now-iconic Pulp Fiction, a film so brazenly original that it inspired an abundance of inferior imitators and whose poster acted as a mainstay on college dorm room bedroom walls for years to come.

Year: 1998

What Won: Shakespeare in Love

What Should Have Won: Saving Private Ryan or The Thin Red Line

No matter how much you like, dislike, or (like me) have complete apathetic ambivalence towards Shakespeare in Love, there’s no denying that its Best Picture win is besmirched by some contentious history surrounding its dark-horse win. The success of John Madden’s so-so historical romance over the clear front-runner, Steven Spielberg’s enormously popular Saving Private Ryan, was largely the result of a smear campaign at the hands of one of the film’s producers: Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein did everything in his power to sway the temperature of the Voting Academy from Spielberg’s war epic to his decorous period drama, including the initiation of criticisms toward Ryan that he worked to spread throughout the industry, as well as having his cast work extreme overtime on the publicity circuit. The problematic, manufactured popularity that Weinstein constructed for the film is, these days, even further amplified by the former Hollywood mogul’s now-widely known and reported horrific sexual assault crimes, some of which were brought to light by Shakespeare in Love star Gweneth Paltrow herself. As for the film itself, it’s a fine costume drama that feels perfectly calculated to try and win awards, and if it had won without any controversy behind it it likely would have gone down as a fairly forgettable and only mildly conspicuous example of another instance in which the Oscars got it wrong. Saving Private Ryan was thwarted out of a victory it largely deserved though I may argue that, if we’re voting purely on quality, Terrence Malick’s competing ensemble war film The Thin Red Line is the true winner of this crop.

Year: 1999

What Won: American Beauty

What Should Have Won: The Insider or The Sixth Sense

Back in 2000, it wasn’t necessarily such a contentious prospect for American Beauty to win Best Picture: it was an all-around critical darling upon release and one of the most highly lauded films during awards season in general. Its perception of the crushing malaise of being mid-life, middle class, and adrift in suburban America was largely viewed as refreshingly timely and strikingly acidic—there’s no question that critics and audiences saw something of their own lives in 1999 reflected within writer Alan Ball’s seemingly penetrating commentary. Time has not been kind to the Sam Mendes-directed film, and it has become one of the prime examples of a Best Picture winner whose victory looks painfully shortsighted in retrospect. Watching the film today exposes a glaring sheen of faux-important artifice that drowns out any genuine sense of insight into the uniquely American condition that it’s trying to communicate, becoming a self-satisfied shell of a better movie that would actually find something worthwhile to convey about its subjects. This is all blunt signposts and smug platitudes in a screenplay that’s convinced it’s uncovered some great, singular truth. 

It doesn’t help matters that Kevin Spacey’s character Lester Burnham’s driving focus for the story is a newfound infatuation with his teenage daughter’s best friend, a characterization that nowadays hews a bit too close to Spacey’s real life for comfort. 1999 has also since gone down as a landmark year for movies, populated with the likes of The Matrix, Fight Club, Being John Malkovich, Eyes Wide Shut, The Blair Witch Project, and a plethora of other iconic films that, in many cases, have only become more fondly remembered with age—the exact inverse of American Beauty. Though, as far as the films actually nominated for Best Picture from this year, I’d have to say Best Picture was owed to either Michael Mann’s invigorating The Insider, which took home exactly zero of the seven Oscars it was nominated for, or M. Night Shyamalan’s horror phenomenon The Sixth Sense, which also pulled a goose egg with six nominations, though I guess spending 5 weeks as the number one film the country isn’t a bad consolation prize. 

Year: 2001

What Won: A Beautiful Mind
What Should Have Won: In the Bedroom

Remember when we talked about Rain Man and Forrest Gump and how they were overly schmaltzy and misguided representations of individuals suffering from mental disabilities that time has done no favors for? Please make way for A Beautiful Mind, which grafts similar themes reliable for winning the Academy’s good graces onto a dull and cloying biopic—a genre that’s another typical easy sell for the Academy. Ron Howard’s film loosely follows the true story of John Nash, an ingenious yet withdrawn mathematician who begins suffering from bouts of hallucinations tied to a schizophrenia diagnosis. There’s something off-putting about the way this heightens and sensationalizes Nash’s disability, his hallucinations played as a twist on the audience as we realize, no, Nash was not working for top-secret intelligence agencies and was being tracked down by Russian spies: it’s all in his head! To be fair, the gambit appears well-meaning, mostly acting as an effort by the filmmakers to convey what it’s like to have your perceived reality ripped away from you, but it ultimately adds another layer of shallow exploration into a movie whose ultimate interests lie in “how do we fix this disabled person” as opposed to “how do we make him an empathetic, three-dimensional character so the audience can better understand him?” And anyway, this is mostly just the type of bland and sterile biopic that has become a joke for the way it plays purely as prestige Oscar bait. Maybe we would have more than three Todd Field movies by now if he had won this year for In the Bedroom!

Year: 2005

What Won: Crash

What Should Have Won: Brokeback Mountain

The big one. The reason Crash lives on as the most infamous Best Picture winner—the one that you can easily point to when you want an excuse to point out the fact that the Academy is frequently out of touch—is because of how recognizably bad the film is. It’s impossible to overlook when watching, as the film’s incompetence is written plainly on its face for all to bear witness to, desperately clinging to woefully miscalculated ideas of race relations and sociological tensions in America that it treats with a self-conscious aura of prestige importance. In reality, Crash’s depictions of acts of hate and prejudice are themselves racist, pigeonholing characters into offensive stereotypical archetypes as Paul Haggis’s and Bobby Moresco’s script attempts to subvert the very idea of such a thing. In an attempt to locate some grand truth about internalized personal bigotry writ large across the landscape of the country, Haggis and Moresco turn in a laughably melodramatic and ideologically abhorrent piece of filmmaking gone wrong. It should be shown in film school to study a film so earnest in its awfulness, a film firing on all cylinders so passionately, so fully committed to its ideas, all in service of something this bad.

All of that said, it’s not a complete mystery why the Academy went to bat for Crash. Though it won in 2006, the film was initially released in 2004 (a fun tidbit about this film is that it’s the only Best Picture winner to be released before the previous year’s winner, which in this case was Million Dollar Baby, ironically also written by Haggis), which meant that the country was that much less removed from the paranoid cultural temperament following 9/11. It’s easy to see how the film’s structure, that being a Los Angeles-set hyperlink film following the ignited tensions of a diverse group of people, combined with its weighty themes of xenophobia and violence, was able to resonate with voters: it was ostentatiously bold from a structure perspective and spoke to particularly salient domestic and global anxieties at the time of release, no matter how incoherently. Let us not forget that Crash received a generally positive contemporaneous critical reaction, and only with time has it broadly garnered its less desirable status. The 2006 award was clearly owed to Ang Lee’s affecting and progressive queer Western Brokeback Mountain (though there’s also a case to be made for Steven Spielberg’s Munich), but Crash’s victory and overall success is representative of a broader cultural moment in America at this point. It is a fascinating cultural artifact. It didn’t deserve Best Picture, but there may be no better indicator of where we were as a country in 2005 than the fact that it won. 

Year: 2010

What Won: The King’s Speech

What Should Have Won: The Social Network

Critics and audiences fell head over heels for Tom Hooper’s aggressively genial biopic about how the mismatched pair of King George VI (Colin Firth) and his unconventional speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) allowed the former to overcome a debilitating, lifelong stammer as they developed an unexpected friendship between royalty and a common doctor. It was catnip for the Academy as well: of course a well-meaning, sugar-coated British period drama with ostentatiously sentimental performances would pick up 12 Oscar nominations and 4 wins—yes, including Best Picture. But even back then it wasn’t uncommon to come across dissent to the overly-safe film taking home the prize, and the film’s deficiencies have only become more conspicuous with age. It’s the kind of glazed-over, glorifying film-as-history-lesson that truncates all the intrinsically unsavory details of policy-making under a monarchy to warp any undesirable politics into a feel-good friendship story. It’s mostly suited for shoving in front of an eighth-grade history classroom when you don’t feel like teaching for the day, or for the senior crowd keen on historical dramas to rave about after they catch it at the 10:45 am showing on a Tuesday. The film was up against a middling Best Picture lineup in general, but there were a couple of obvious contenders that would have been more well-suited to win. It would have felt well-earned by Christopher Nolan’s Inception or the Coen Bros’s True Grit remake, but the obvious snub was David Fincher’s The Social Network—a film that plays as the exact opposite of The King’s Speech in how it turns its biopic formula into a rousing character drama that refuses to lionize its subjects for easy engineering of an emotional response.  

Year: 2018

What Won: Green Book

What Should Have Won: The Favourite or A Star Is Born

Green Book is another classic bad Oscar winner—one of the ones that curries the favor of the voting body by shallowly speaking to their white guilt through the veneer of a relatively watchable and feel-good heartfelt drama about friendship across racial lines and social structures that seek to forbid it. The sad part is that it is somewhat charming and, indeed, watchable, mostly thanks to the easy-to-digest presence of Viggo Mortenson and Mahershala Ali, bringing a pair of effortlessly endearing performances to a script that prioritizes agreeability over any meaningful investigation of race. Director Peter Farrelly’s film is the quintessential timely and important but superficial and banal piece of awards bait that the Oscars are known for falling head over heels for time and time again. Many people will tell you that Roma should have won this year, and a Best Director win for Alfonso Cuaron offered a glimmer of that being a possibility. I didn’t care for that film much either, and would much rather have seen the award go to Yorgos Lanthimos’s toxically hilarious send-up of English royalty The Favourite (to date, his best film) or Bradley Cooper’s surprisingly grounded and authentic remake of A Star Is Born.

Year: 2021

What Won: CODA

What Should Have Won: Dune or Licorice Pizza

To be fair to CODA, I don’t necessarily think it’s a movie worth getting too bent out of shape over. It’s a well-meaning and inoffensive crowd-pleaser that takes a story structured around the representation of the deaf community and grafts that onto an accessible boilerplate dramedy. But if we’re talking about films that should win Best Picture, terms like “well-meaning” and “inoffensive” don’t exactly inspire the most fervent enthusiasm regarding a potential winner. That being said, CODA is a classic middlebrow Oscar winner that seemed to speak to something vulnerable in voters’ hearts this particular year—perhaps the preceding years of pandemic turmoil led to the Academy just being happy to watch something that sought to uplift the world’s collective spirit. Still, this has to be the most forgettable winner of the big award in at least the past decade and, to be slightly more critical, a film with such manufactured, mawkish drama and a decidedly uncinematic televisual flavor hardly stands out as something awards-worthy. This wasn’t the strongest year for Best Picture nominees in general, but both Denis Villeneuve’s staggering adaptation of the first half of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic Dune and Paul Thomas Anderson’s hilarious and thorny coming-of-age story Licorice Pizza would have been more apt victors.

• Author
• Recent Posts

Trace Sauveur

Latest posts by Trace Sauveur (see all)

• The Parrot Isn’t Saying Anything: How the 2024 U.S. Election Has Proven ‘Under the Silver Lake’ to be Right All Along - November 12, 2024
• ‘Shocker’ at 35: Wes Craven’s Beautifully Bonkers Thriller About an Electric Serial Killer Lives On As an Underrated Gem [Retrospective] - October 24, 2024
• ‘Smile 2’ Review: Light Up Your Face with Gladness; Parker Finn’s Horror Franchise Sequel is Overly Familiar but Boasts an Impressive Sense of Style - October 16, 2024