Top 10: Oscar travesties

It’s Oscar® season again and it is customary to consider the greatest mistakes of the previous ceremonies. This is likely to be another controversial list but here is The Yorker’s attempt to countdown the 10 worst years for Best Picture winners.

10) 1952 – The Greatest Show On Earth
This could very well be one of the worst films that has been produced in mainstream cinema. It may involve circus theatrics and yet it is dull and listless and has not aged at all well. Since this won over the nominated classics The Quiet Man and High Noon (as well as the not nominated Singin’ In The Rain) this year has been derided for years.

9) 1941 - How Green Was My Valley
It is fair to say that one of John Ford’s films deserved a Best Picture award during his career, but why the Academy chose to bestow the award on this drama of family hardship is a mystery. Admittedly the decision might have been acceptable had this not been the year Orson Welles released his masterpiece the legendary Citizen Kane, and changed filmmaking overnight. An oversight the Academy has regretted ever since.

8) 1979 - Kramer Vs Kramer
It is admittedly not a bad film, far from it, featuring fantastic performances from both Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep, who deservedly won her first Oscar. Yet it simply cannot compete with perhaps the greatest war movie ever made; Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Filled with stunning performances, visuals and now iconic scenes it is a film that more than deserves its esteemed place in popular culture.

7) 1987 – The Last Emperor
The Academy always loves an epic, especially one with Peter O’Toole in it. However, this caused the psychological classic Fatal Attraction, with the infamous bunny-boiling scene, and the brilliant satire Broadcast News to miss out on their chance for glory, which is lamentable.

6) 1994 – Forrest Gump
This will prove controversial. However, in this year we saw the battle lines drawn between Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption, so whichever of these classics came out on top will have left some ripples no matter what. As such 1994 was doomed to be part of these sorts of lists.

5) 2005 – Crash
Where do I begin? The Academy can sometimes be the most infuriating body in the film industry. How this could have beaten out Ang Lee’s majestic work Brokeback Mountain is known as one of the great travesties and a sign of how far the fight against homophobia needs to go.

4) 1964 – My Fair Lady
The Sixties saw a large number of musicals take the major gong, but when you see Mary Poppins on the list it is obvious which the better representation of the genre is. Then when you see Dr Strangelove as another nominee from 1964, well, the whole idea just become ludicrous.

3) 2002 - Chicago
A film whose victory at the Oscars I will never understand. Sure it’s vaguely entertaining and has a couple of nice songs but other than that there is nothing to say for it. Yet this film successfully defeated Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Roman Polanski’s brilliant film The Pianist either of which would have made a deserving winner; whereas in all honesty Chicago didn’t even deserve to be nominated.

2) 1976 - Rocky
Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky is one of the worst Best Picture winners, giving us nothing except five increasingly dire sequels and an incredibly irritating soundtrack. Something completely unacceptable when competing with both Sidney Lumet’s biting satire Network, and what by far was the deserving winner Taxi Driver, arguably Martin Scorsese’s greatest film, which is vastly superior in every department.

1) 1998 - Shakespeare in Love
It is an enjoyable romantic comedy featuring Shakespeare and... nothing more. However, incredibly it managed to defeat both Saving Private Ryan and Terrence Malick’s astounding Thin Red Line to claim victory. Both of which are truly astounding, quite different depictions of the Second World War and vastly superior to what is essentially an above average romantic comedy.

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