Ten Films That Give Oscar a Bad Name

[HarryGoldfarb]

What's still most surprising to me, though, is that Brokeback lasted as long as it did without a backlash, surviving all the way to the very...last...second before losing the biggest prize of all. I continue to be surprised at the immediate backlash against Crash, but I am glad that critics and commentators have taken the Academy to task on what will only be seen as an embarrassing choice, both aesthetically and politically, in years to come.

This got me thinking about this year's race. With last year's outrage over Crash's win and the accusations of homophobia within the Academy as well as its overall irrelevancy as an institution based on recent missteps, what sort of corrective measures might this year's crop of winners reflect? The most immediate things I can come up with are rewarding age and color since there don't seem to be any gay characters to make things up to this year, unless Ed Begley, Jr. somehow pulls off a nod for For Your Consideration which is highly improbable.

Helen Mirren's performance in the The Queen has been almost unanimously praised and she appears to be almost unstoppable from a pre-cursor standpoint. I'm in no rush to declare winners at this point in the game, however, as has been stated here by others, rewarding the best performance regardless of age or hot babe status, might be seen as one of the ways the Academy might right itself.

Rewarding a virtual unknown African-American performer in supporting (I was thinking Hudson in what I can see being a very emotional moment at the podium) or a juvenile performance that's stood the test of time (Abigail Breslin) are two other possibilities that might have some legs.

This is what I call predictive quality...

[HarryGoldfarb]

On the other hand, I, too, would replace Ben-Hur and The English Patient with Braveheart and A Beautiful Mind.

Me too, anytime.

[OscarGuy]

I'll give you Driving Miss Daisy. I WILL NOT give you Crash. None of the roles in Crash were considered support. It was an ensemble cast. Even Matt Dillon could have been considered lead but was nominated supporting.

The point still stands, nonetheless. It's a despicable history and one which could benefit from a "realignment of purpose".

[flipp525]

In the Heat of the Night is the only film with a black actor in a major leading role to win Best Picture...

Driving Miss Daisy would also qualify in this category (Morgan Freeman is the male lead in the film).

[FilmFan720]

OG, Crash would fit that bill. Although not all-black, it also has African-Americans in lead roles (Cheadle, Newton, Howard).

Tripp

[OscarGuy]

Think about this: No all-black-cast picture has EVER won Best Picture. In the Heat of the Night is the only film with a black actor in a major leading role to win Best Picture...this could be the Academy's chance to rectify past errors...

[flipp525]

What's still most surprising to me, though, is that Brokeback lasted as long as it did without a backlash, surviving all the way to the very...last...second before losing the biggest prize of all. I continue to be surprised at the immediate backlash against Crash, but I am glad that critics and commentators have taken the Academy to task on what will only be seen as an embarrassing choice, both aesthetically and politically, in years to come.

This got me thinking about this year's race. With last year's outrage over Crash's win and the accusations of homophobia within the Academy as well as its overall irrelevancy as an institution based on recent missteps, what sort of corrective measures might this year's crop of winners reflect? The most immediate things I can come up with are rewarding age and color since there don't seem to be any gay characters to make things up to this year, unless Ed Begley, Jr. somehow pulls off a nod for For Your Consideration which is highly improbable.

Helen Mirren's performance in the The Queen has been almost unanimously praised and she appears to be almost unstoppable from a pre-cursor standpoint. I'm in no rush to declare winners at this point in the game, however, as has been stated here by others, rewarding the best performance regardless of age or hot babe status, might be seen as one of the ways the Academy might right itself.

Rewarding a virtual unknown African-American performer in supporting (I was thinking Hudson in what I can see being a very emotional moment at the podium) or a juvenile performance that's stood the test of time (Abigail Breslin) are two other possibilities that might have some legs.

[Heksagon]

My list of worst choices is on another thread, so here’s what I think are most ridiculous choices. I can tolerate A Beautiful Mind winning, because although myself (and most other people on this board) dislike it, most people do admittedly (and disappontingly) think it’s a good film, and I can tolerate choices like Around the World in 80 Days, Gandhi and Gladiator as "epic" choices that Academy likes to award as a sign of craftsmanship, but here’s a number of choices for which there is no other explanation than bad taste:

Broadway Melody - haven’t even seen it myself, I figure it’s bad
Cimarron
Grand Hotel
The Great Ziegfeld
You Can’t Take It with You
The Greatest Show on Earth
Driving Miss Daisy
Shakespeare in Love
A Beautiful Mind - I changed my mind after writing the above. There really is no excuse for this.
Crash

runners-up: Around the World in 80 Days, In the Heat of the Night, The Sting, maybe Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, probably Cavalcade (which I haven’t seen either)

[Dennis Bee]

The Worst (in chronological order):

Going My Way
My Fair Lady
The Sting
Chariots of Fire
Out of Africa
Driving Miss Daisy
Forrest Gump
Braveheart
A Beautiful Mind
Crash

It's depressing that most of these are from the last twenty-five years, but Magilla's point that around the late-1970s things stop making sense is all too persuasive. I think the consensus starts to slip out of American culture and then when the indie revolution starts threatening from the mid-1980s, the Academy starts panicking and things really get crazy. Pre-1980s only occasionally is the consensus choice unforgivably dreadful, as with My Fair Lady. You read the reviews and everyone seems to be responding to a different film than the one we've seen now. And yes, I've seen it a couple of times on the big screen and it just sits there inert. Vincente Minnelli should have directed it, as he always wanted to; Julie Andrews should have been hired and Rex Harrison should have been dropped for an actor closer to Higgins's age (30s) in Shaw's script. I think Peter O'Toole or Richard Burton would have done nicely, even Albert Finney might have clicked.

[HarryGoldfarb]

Interesting comments, but I thought Farber list would make us do our own lists... where are our lists of ten best films that give Oscar a Bad Name? No one is asking me but here's mine:

- An American in Paris, I don't care if it's already part of American Pop Culture or Iconography.
- The Greatest Show on Earth
- Oliver!
- The Sting
- Rocky
- Chariots of Fire
- Dances with Wolves
- Braveheart
- A Beautiful Mind
- Crash
I could have mentioned other films simply beacuse they won instead of others I prefer, but these 10 are the films I like the least... If I have to rescue just one of them, it would be The Sting. I haven't seen Around the World in 80 Days since a long time ago (10 years maybe) but I remember enyoing it quite a lot, or at least watching the whole thing without too many complaints; maybe it was because at the age of 15 I saw it thinking: "wow, I'm watching a Best Picture winner from the 50's, amazing!...". Maybe, if I watch it now my mind can change and would replace The Sting with it...

[Dennis Bee]

A problem with the "historical context" thing is, even in such contexts, there would be dissenters (as in 1941, and, here, 1999). How much deference we give to the predominant view can by governed by whether we were there at the time to be part of the dissent. I'd say, for instance, Forrest Gump was the overwhelming popular phenomenon of 1994, yet I don't hear much rush to defend its best picture win, because lots of us were on-scene to be disheartened by its choice. We may not feel the same about Around the World in 80 Days because it was before most of our times.

1956 was really the year when the blockbusters officially took over. The first--and only year until 1967--when all the nominees were in color, three of the nominees topped out at over three hours; The King and I and Friendly Persuasion were "short" at about 130 minutes or so. All five were very popular, but even with a Picture/Director split (George Stevens got credit for shepherding a huge, ambitious, personal production), Around the World in 80 Days appears to have been a consensus choice. One thing to remember is that most of the country had not seen it; the film had an incredibly slow rollout; the roadshow production took nearly a year after its Oct. '56 NY release to open all over the country. A great many theaters installed 70mm projectors in order to show it. So the Oscar became a large part of the films' marketing and anticipation.

Certainly there was much dissention out there about Forrest Gump; no one, including me, thought the Academy would ever go for something as outrageous as Pulp Fiction. Oddly, if Shawshank Redemption, a disappointment theatrically but a phenomenon on video, had been released early in the year, it might have been the one to threaten Gump.

One thing that has occurred to me: contrary to conventional wisdom about late-year films always having the upper hand, there have now been four early-year films in the last fifteen years that came from relative oblivion to upset for Best Picture in a late surge--Silence of the Lambs (Feb.), Braveheart (May), Gladiator (May), and Crash (May). Conversely, pre-Labor Day releases that became early front-runners (Apollo 13 [June], Saving Pvt. Ryan [July]) tended to peak too soon and faded by Oscar time. Forrest Gump (July), in a fluke year when the latest release among the BP nominees came out in Oct., held up as the front-runner all year, as did Unforgiven (Aug.)

[Penelope]

1981 was the first Oscars I ever watched (I was 12), and a week later, my stepmother took me to see Chariots of Fire. I haven't seen it since; I probably should see it again, because I remember very little of the film--the opening credits and Ian Holm sitting a room during the Olympics. I had seen Raiders of the Lost Ark and On Golden Pond prior to the ceremony, but I had no rooting interest in such things as of yet.

I got around to seeing Atlantic City and Reds as an adult, and adore both films; Raiders holds up quite wonderfully, but On Golden Pond hasn't.

Other films from 1981 that I cherish include Mommie Dearest, S.O.B., Gallipoli, Blow Out, History of the World Part I (if only for the French Revolution and Inquisition sequences), Das Boot, Body Heat, Scanners, Eye of the Needle, and Zorro, the Gay Blade.

[Damien]

Although it's far from a perfect movie (the first half is wonderful, but then after the intermission it sinks into David Lean territory), Reds is so clearly superior to the other 1981 nominees that its victory should have been a n-brainer.

I've only seen Chariots of Fire once, back in '81, and found it dreary and dull but not objectionable like On Golden Pond and Atlantic City.

Not having seen the stage play, but having had diner twicw with Mark Rydell who seemed to be a smart, sophisticated and savvy guy, I expected On Golden Pond to be a warm, gentle and moving film. Boy, was a shocked to being sitting through a piece of smarmy schlock, featuring probably the worst-ever performance of each cast member (except maybe for Kate "Iron Petticoat"/"Olly Olly Oxen Free" Hepburn). A ghastley movie, with "suck face," an absolutely repulsive misuse of the English language.

But it wasn't as bad as Atlantic City, which, in the consistent Louis Malle tradition, is a completely condescending, smug and shallow piece of tripe. A hateful film.

As for the 5th nominee, I've never seen Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

For me THE masterpiece of 1981 is Blake Edwards's S.O.B. which just gets better and better with each subsequent viewing. I also am head over heels for Brian De Palma's Blow Out, Herbert Ross's Pennies From Heaven, Michael Laughlin's Strange Invaders,Burt Reynolds's Sharkey Machine and George Cukor's swan song, Rich and Famous.

[Big Magilla]

To chime in on 1981, the only one among the year's best picture nominees that I didn;t think belonged there ws Raiders of the Lost Ark - I thought Gallipoli should have been ther instead.

I haven't watched Chariots of Fire in full since then, though I have seen snippets of it through the years. I don't know what's so horrible about it, though Reds, with its dramatic scenes interspersed with the reminiscences of the "witnesses" is the more interesting film.

Atalanitc City remains a one of a kind little masterpiece.

On Golden Pond is one of the ickiest stage plays ever written, but Henry Fonda, Katharine Hepburn, Jane Fonda and young Doug McKeon make such art of it that they are a constant pleasure to behold. Try watching the TV remake with Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer for more than five minutes without gagging. They would have been better served appearing something like The Von Trapp Family Singers in America.

[Mister Tee]

Reds was seen as the favorite in '81 because of its generally decent precursor run (DGA, WGA -- though not Globe best picture), but, as Dennis says, it was a serious box office letdown, and I thought it vulnerable all the way (though I'd thought On Golden Pond was the threat).

I haven't seen Chariots since 1981. I didn't hate it at the time, but neither did I consider it in any way wonderful. (Many did, though. I remember being at Barrymore's a few hours before the show, and everyone thinking Reds would win, but several saying Chariots was the movie they liked best) It was a fairly weak year for movies: I actually -- ducking for a brickbat from Damien -- liked Prince of the City most among the year's efforts, with Reds, Atlantic City, and My Dinner with Andre next.