The 10+ Most Undeserving Oscar Wins In Movie History
In theory, the Academy Awards are supposed to celebrate the best films, the best performances in them, and a wide variety of other aspects that all contributed to some movie magic. Naturally, art is subjective no matter what medium it’s in, so it’s always going to be impossible to please everyone.
Even with that in mind, there are some Oscar victories that nobody outside of the wards committee can understand. Art may be subjective, but it’s unrealistic to expect people to prefer a five-year-old’s drawing to the Mona Lisa. As far as thousands of movie fans are concerned, that’s precisely the trick the Oscars have tried to pull many times.
Best Film Editing: Bohemian Rhapsody – 2019
Among film editors, it’s generally understood that the way to best do that job is to go completely unnoticed. If an editor is a master, several separately filmed scenes will seem to have naturally progressed together, and even unbelievable fantasy stories will feel immersive enough to be real.
It’s for that reason that Bohemian Rhapsody has largely gone down in history as the least deserving movie to win an Academy Award for editing, as the number of unnecessary cuts made throughout the movie was not only noticeable but distracting. One scene where Queen meets their manager is considered so infamously inept that even John Ottman, the movie’s editor, told The Washington Post, “Whenever I see it, I want to put a bag over my head.”
Best Picture: How Green Was My Valley – 1942
At this point, How Green Was My Valley‘s Best Picture victory at the 14th Academy Awards is so infamous that it’s become popular to unfairly criticize the movie itself. It’s by no means a bad film and arguably deserved its nomination, but judging purely by artistic merit, it had no business beating Orson Welles’s masterpiece, Citizen Kane.
Although Welles all but revolutionized visual storytelling with Citizen Kane, he was also a young upstart who drew the ire of one of the most powerful men in the world, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. There were likely many reasons why the Academy passed Citizen Kane over for Best Picture, but the controversy marked the first clear instance where they had nothing to do with the merits of the film.
Best Picture: Shakespeare In Love – 1999
While Dench’s Best Supporting Actress win was certainly criticized at the time, that questionable result was overshadowed by the overwhelming disappointment that followed when Shakespeare In Love itself won Best Picture at the 71st Academy Awards. It wasn’t just that a piece of what could charitably be called alternate history ephemera won, but the fact that it won over Saving Private Ryan that proved such an outrage.
Of course, it later became abundantly clear that this victory was largely the result of some aggressive, devious campaigning tactics by disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein, rather than serious consideration of the merits of the nominated films.
Best Actor: Art Carney – 1975
Over the years, a common practice among Oscar voters has seen them implicitly reward actors for their overall body of work than for the performance they were actually nominated for. The problem with this practice is that the deserving actors who are then passed over that year are often rewarded for something lesser later, turning these “legacy” Oscars into one big vicious cycle.
One of the most infamous examples of this saw Art Carney receive the Academy Award for Best Actor after playing the titular Harry in the sweet but ultimately unchallenging movie Harry and Tonto. In a year that also saw Al Pacino nominated for The Godfather Part II, Jack Nicholson nominated for Chinatown, and Dustin Hoffman nominated for Lenny, it’s pretty hard to justify.
Best Picture: Crash – 2006
Although the argument can certainly be made that the race relations drama Crash was well-intentioned, it was also roundly criticized for what was considered a ham-fisted, oversimplified approach (particularly in how most of the movie’s interweaving storylines resolve) to its central subject matter.
However, the problem wasn’t just that detractors of this result felt Crash didn’t deserve on win on its own merits, but rather that it stole the Best Picture Oscar from a landmark film that approached a tragic gay romance with timeless sensitivity and sophistication: Brokeback Mountain.
Best Actress: Julia Roberts – 2001
Although it’s fair to say that Julia Roberts performed well in Erin Brockovich and arguable that she stepped outside of her comfort zone to do so, there’s a big difference between deserving nomination for a performance and deserving to win.
If Roberts had weaker competition that year, there wouldn’t be much reason to gripe about her victory. That said, it’s unfathomable that the majority of Oscar voters that year could see Ellen Burstyn’s utterly gut-wrenching performance as Sara Goldfarb in Requiem For A Dream and think anyone else deserved to win that year.
Best Actor: Rex Harrison – 1965
The 37th Academy Awards were already in the midst of controversy concerning the replacement of Julie Andrews by Audrey Hepburn for the lead role of My Fair Lady and the industry politics of the Academy’s response, which is probably why it wasn’t until later that Rex Harrison’s win for Best Actor was treated with much public scrutiny.
However, that scrutiny is hard to argue with, as Harrison’s overall performance was fairly average but he was also allowed to awkwardly talk-sing while Hepburn (who had already famously sang “Moon River” in Breakfast At Tiffany’s) had her singing voice dubbed without her knowledge. Add that to the fact that Harrison beat out Peter Sellers for his revolutionary performance in Dr. Strangelove and it becomes even more of a travesty.
Best Actress: Sandra Bullock – 2010
Although they certainly shouldn’t, there are times when the Oscars have practically functioned as a popularity contest. And while it can’t be denied that Sandra Bullock is popular with good reason and people weren’t wrong to be excited for her comeback at the time, that doesn’t mean she had any real business winning an Academy Award for The Blind Side.
It may have been justifiable if the previous year had been cinematically slow but when a victory like this leaves Gabourey Sidibe empty-handed after her gripping performance in the deeply challenging lead role of Precious, it’s undeserved.
Best Picture: Green Book – 2019
Not since Crash has the backlash to a Best Picture winner been as instantaneous and venomous as when Green Book won Oscar gold at the 91st Academy Awards. It’s not just that it felt like the Academy made their choice for political reasons rather than artistic ones, but they didn’t even do that right.
Artistically, it was pretty clear that Green Book was outgunned by far more ambitious nominees like Roma or The Favourite. And if the goal were to meet the moment in terms of racial politics, certainly BlacKkKlansman, but even Black Panther would have a preferable choice to the same pablum Hollywood has tried to peddle on that front since Driving Miss Daisy.
Best Actress: Marisa Tomei – 1993
Of all the historically controversial Oscar wins that tend to come up in film discussions, this one might have the most defenders. After all, Marisa Tomei brought unmatchable charm and natural talent to a role that looks far easier to pull off than it is when she played Mona Lisa Vito in the unimpeachable legal comedy My Cousin Vinny.
At the same time, it would be rewriting history to say that her win for Best Supporting Actress didn’t spark incredible outrage after the 65th Academy Awards. And as defensible as it may have been, it’s still pretty hard to argue that she deserved to win over Vanessa Redgrave in Howards End.
Best Adapted Screenplay: The Imitation Game – 2015
It would be unfair to call the script for the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game bad. Indeed, it’s apparently a significant improvement from the book it was based on. However, it would take some creative maneuvering to argue that it also wasn’t fairly standard in its structure and featured decent but not particularly memorable dialogue.
None of these things can be said about the script for Whiplash. The film’s oppressive tightness and sharp, focused dialogue and pacing only make Terence Fletcher’s hilarious but intimidating barbs all the more compellingly stressful, and it’s all baked right into its script. Clearly, this was the more deserving win.
Best Picture: The Greatest Show On Earth – 1953
While one could joke that Oscar voters in 1952 chose the following year’s Best Picture winner based on the title alone, the truth is that more was going on than it seemed to lead to the ultimate case of rewarding style over substance. For the most part, it’s because its biggest competition was High Noon.
According to Vice, a Paramount executive on the committee admitted to working with the CIA to undermine blacklisted writer Carl Foreman’s veiled commentary on Hollywood’s cowardice during the Red Scare. Add that to the fact that Cecil B. DeMille was a veteran director delivering something Hollywood thought could compete with television, and you’ve got a perfect storm of the Academy’s worst historical instincts. That still doesn’t explain why Singin’ In The Rain wasn’t even nominated, though.
Best Director: Tom Hooper – 2011
Although Tom Hooper’s career would see its biggest threat in the wake of the 2019 adaptation of the Cats musical, even his more acclaimed films didn’t give the impression that he was a particularly ambitious or imaginative director. At best (except when he directed musicals, as Anne Hathaway’s Oscar in Les Misérables came solely from the strength of her performance), he’s a serviceable one.
The King’s Speech’s Best Picture victory is hard not to see as a product of Harvey Weinstein’s campaign efforts more than any merits it would have over Inception, The Social Network, or Black Swan, but its main strengths are Colin Firth’s chemistry with Geoffrey Rush and their clever dialogue. All Hooper had to do was make sure the cameras were pointed at it, which means there’s no world where he should have won Best Director over Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, Darren Aronofsky, or David Fincher that year.
Best Original Song: Phil Collins – 2000
While it’s hardly unusual for a Disney movie to win Best Original Song at the Oscars, it was also hard not to regard this an all-but automatic decision when Phil Collins’ by-the-numbers ballad “You’ll Be In My Heart” brought him the prize at the 72nd Academy Awards.
In fairness, that category can be a veritable wasteland during a rough year but when the other nominees were Aimee Mann’s haunting “Save Me,” from Magnolia, Trey Parker and Marc Shaiman’s hilarious “Blame Canada” from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, and even the emotionally resonant Randy Newman song, “When She Loved Me” from Toy Story 2, it was anything but a rough year.
Best Supporting Actress: Judi Dench – 1999
In a vacuum, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the fact that an actress as accomplished and skillful as Judi Dench won an Academy Award in 1999. The problem that even she was willing to acknowledge was that she won not just for the maligned film Shakespeare In Love but for a role that didn’t give her much of an opportunity to show her talents.
In other words, she had a grand total of eight minutes of screen time in the movie, which led her to quip, “I feel, for eight minutes on the screen, I should only get a little bit of him.”
