15 Worst Best Picture Winners

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s black comedy about an ex-superhero actor trying to revive his career on Broadway was a fascinating, surreal watch, but we’d have instead given the 2014 Best Picture trophy to the decade-in-the-making family drama Boyhood or the powerfully-acted historical pic Selma.

The gangsters of Goodfellas would probably have choice words about their film losing the 1990 Best Picture race to Dances With Wolves, a Western film starring Kevin Costner as a Civil War soldier who ingratiates himself with a Sioux group — and a film that, unfortunately, rides on the tropes of the “white savior” and the “noble savage.”

All these decades later, film buffs are still talking about 1956’s The King and I and The Ten Commandments. Not so much this flashy Jules Verne adaptation, which beat those films for Best Picture and stands as “proof that you can buy an Academy Award,” per Chicago Reader.

In a 2015 The Hollywood Reporter poll, Academy voters said they should have given the 1989 award to My Left Foot, a biopic with a powerhouse Daniel Day-Lewis performance, over Driving Miss Daisy, a feel-good comedy starring Morgan Freeman as a driver and Jessica Tandy as his crotchety passenger. (And Do the Right Thing wasn’t even nominated in that 1989 race.)

This semi-biographical musical starring William Powell as famed Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. was three hours of Hollywood overindulgence. Film critic Emanuel Levy said the 1936 film “overlong … and overblown but ultimately mediocre as a musical movie and as a biopic of the legendary showman.”

Acclaimed films like Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, The Favourite, and Roma all lost the 2018 Best Picture award to this film starring Mahershala Ali as the real-life pianist Don Shirley and Viggo Mortensen as his white driver. The A.V. Club notes that Oscar voters “had the chance to avoid another Driving Miss Daisy-like win with this very Driving Miss Daisy-reminiscent film.”

1985’s The Color Purple earned 11 Oscar nominations, Best Picture included, but received zero awards. Instead, that year’s top prize went to Out of Africa, a so-so love story between a wealthy Danish woman and a big-game hunter in Africa — played, respectively, by Meryl Streep and Robert Redford.

Posters for this 1931 film deem it “terrific as all creation,” but many critics would beg to differ. Starring Richard Dix as a newspaper editor making a grab in the Oklahoma land rush of 1889, the film has become “rightfully impugned for racist overtones and scattershot storytelling,” ReelViews notes.

This middling melodrama starring Betty Hutton and Cornel Wilde — a Technicolor ode to the three-ring circus — won perhaps as a sort of lifetime achievement award for director Cecil B. DeMille, a founding father of American cinema. Whatever the reason, the 1952 film beat the classic Western High Noon for Best Picture, and Singin’ in the Rain wasn’t even nominated.

After the Color Purple snub, another Steven Spielberg film was overlooked more than a decade later, when the landmark 1998 war film Saving Private Ryan lost Best Picture to the period rom-com Shakespeare in Love, which won almost certainly because of a vicious Oscar campaign by the now-disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein.

The 2012 Best Picture race was stacked, and this historical drama about the Iran hostage crisis was certainly thrilling but didn’t expand the horizons of cinema like its competitors, especially Beasts of the Southern Wild and Life of Pi.

We were down to watch Colin Firth play a stammering King George VI on his way to oratory glory — for one viewing, at least. But the cinematic achievements Toy Story 3, The Social Network, and Inception — all of which lost the 2010 Best Picture race to The King’s Speech — are films we’d watch again and again.

The second Best Picture winner (and the first with sound) is a 1929 film that follows a sister-sister vaudeville act trying to make it on Broadway, with clichés aplenty. TIME deemed it “a tedious musical comedy embedded in a routine story like a fly in celluloid.”

It’s wild to think that this film — about a turn-of-the-century family in a Welsh mining town — beat the iconic film that is Citizen Kane. Even the film noir The Maltese Falcon, another Best Picture contender from 1941, is more legendary than How Green Was My Valley.

This depiction of race relations in Los Angeles is as simplistic as it is star-studded, and Ta-Nehisi Coates declared it “the apotheosis of a kind of unthinking, incurious, nihilistic, multiculturalism.” The internet’s go-to example of an underserving Best Picture winner, 2004’s Crash scored an upset over Brokeback Mountain, and even director Paul Haggis doesn’t think his film was the best film of the year.