Here’s Koob’s worst four Best Picture winners. Believe it or not, I’ve only seen one of them. It was Shakespeare in Love. I liked it, but it wasn’t great. Winner pics coming later this afternoon. Of course all three guys hated the same film. I’ll post it a little later today as well.
Ordinary People. Not a terrible movie and it was actually very well acted. Timothy Hutton won a deserving Best Supporting Actor Oscar and Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Sutherland were both great as his parents. It’s more on this list because it beat out Raging Bull which is a far superior movie.
Driving Miss Daisy – This was a pretty weak year for Best Picture noms. Once again, not a terrible movie, and very well acted, but pretty cliche and forgettable when all is said and done.
Shakespeare in Love – A pretty forgettable romantic comedy with some good acting performances and some genuinely funny moments, but this was probably the biggest Oscar robbery of all time when this movie won Best Picture over Saving Private Ryan.
Million Dollar Baby. This might come as a surprise to some people, but I just did not like this movie at all. I thought it was a pretty good underdog story with the gritty Hillary Swank convincing the crotchety Clint Eastwood to become her boxing trainer up until the last third of the movie which I don’t want to spoil in case you haven’t seen it, but it just seemed to be one of those plot twists that was manipulative just for the sake of being manipulative and making people cry. At least this movie finally got Morgan Freeman a much deserved Oscar.
These are terrible picks, based entirely on cliched notions of what “should have won,” and void of any meaningful criticism re: the films themselves.
I’m not sure it’s fair to say that Ordinary People and Shakespeare in Love are the worst Oscar winners because they weren’t as good as other movies nominated that year. Firstly, by that standard, How Green Was My Valley and All About Eve both beat movies that were definitely better than Saving Private Ryan (I’ve not seen Raging Bull, so I can’t say for certain, but I’d imagine Citizen Kane is definitely better than it).
More broadly, though, a list of best and worst Oscar winners should be about comparing those movies with one another. Who cares if Ordinary People wasn’t as good as Raging Bull? That’s not what we’re comparing it to. Is it actually worse than Cavalcade, The Greatest Show on Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, and so forth?
Also, Saving Private Ryan is not actually that good a movie. The first half hour is great, certainly, and Spielberg deserved best director for that alone. But the only thing I remember other than that is some cliched “American soldiers from different backgrounds bond during the war” business, which was old in 1950, and a terrible epilogue with the old man version of Matt Damon.
Well, I haven’t seen many of the Best Picture winners that are considered the worst of all time such as Oliver! & The Greatest Show on Earth and it’s also pretty rare that I absolutely hate a movie. I enjoyed Titanic despite the cheesy love story and I even really liked Crash despite the heavy-handed messages and the ridiculous coincidences. I would say that these movies are the Best Picture winners that I enjoyed the least of the ones o have seen. I guess I could have picked Cavalcade or Cimarron but that wouldn’t have made for a very interesting list as Junior and Mike Minion are the only two other people in Philadelphia to have seen those movies. My list should really only consist of two movies ; Dances With Wolves and Million Dollar Baby. The other three that I picked were not bad movies. They were just the least memorable and enjoyable for me out of the movies that I’ve seen and they also happened to beat out movies that I thought were much better.