5 Times the Oscars Picked the Wrong Movie for Best Picture (And We're Still Mad About It)
The list could be much longer.
Despite endless scandals, accusations of bias, and bizarre decisions by the Academy, the Oscars remain the world's premier film awards.
Nearly ten thousand people from across the industry vote for movies that often go unnoticed by ordinary viewers, with PR campaign budgets playing a decisive role.
Consequently, the winner isn't necessarily the best film, but rather, the most universally acceptable one – the movie that no one will object to.
1. 'A Beautiful Mind', 2001
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 74%
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A Beautiful Mind is a biographical drama about Nobel Prize-winning economist and schizophrenic mathematician John Nash. Ron Howard based the movie on Sylvia Nasar's Pulitzer Prize-nominated book of the same name.
Howard combined the biopic genre with the mindfuck genre, which was popular in the 2000s, but he failed to excel at either. As a biopic, the movie was too artistic and bore no relation to Nash's real life.
And for a mindfuck film, it was too predictable. However, mediocre movies that don't stand out in any way are often the ones that win Oscars.
2. 'Chicago', 2002
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 87%
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The Academy has historically favored musicals. During the genre's surge in popularity in the early 2000s, the Academy awarded Chicago six Oscars, including Best Picture.
The movie features alternating drab, bleak prison scenes and colorful musical numbers in which the main characters perform songs while imagining themselves on stage.
While the filmmakers clearly drew on the Hollywood tradition of the 1930s, the result was far more one-dimensional and superficial. Moreover, that year, much more significant movies were nominated for Oscars: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Pianist, and Gangs of New York.
3. 'Argo', 2012
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 96%
Argo, a 2013 Oscar favorite, falls into two categories beloved by critics: the industrial drama genre and complementary industry portrayal.
Based on a true story, Argo recounts the rescue of six diplomats from Tehran amid heightened tensions between the US and Iran in 1979. Tony Mendez, a CIA exfiltration expert, proposed a risky plan: disguise the diplomats as a film crew and smuggle them out of the country under this pretext.
Directed by and starring Ben Affleck as Tony Mendez, Argo is a skillful and gripping drama that quickly fades from memory after viewing.
4. 'Crash', 2004
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 73%
Does anyone even remember Crash or its creator, Paul Haggis? It won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2006 and other contenders for the award included Brokeback Mountain and Steven Spielberg's Munich – films that remain relevant and poignant to this day.
Crash, on the other hand, is a didactic and moralizing movie consisting of several short stories about Los Angeles residents. The stories are connected by the characters' encounters with dangerous situations, such as a car accident, a shootout, and a robbery.
Under the pressure of these circumstances, the characters are forced to reconsider their beliefs.
5. 'Spotlight', 2015
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 97%
Tom McCarthy's industrial drama is based on real events, specifically a series of publications in The Boston Globe and the Spotlight team's investigative journalism.
In the early 2000s, The Boston Globe published materials about widespread sexual abuse by Catholic priests and corruption in the Boston Archdiocese.
In 2016, the movie impressed the Academy enough to win the top prize, but it has since faded into obscurity. It's a solid, coherent drama about investigative journalism that doesn't offer anything new to the genre or the world beyond a well-written discussion of crimes within Catholic institutions.
