As a man in a somewhat overrated movie once said, we live in a cynical world. So now that we've praised the best movies and stuck up for the snubbed, it's time to get to the part that we all love the most in this debased, cynical world of ours: talking trash. Complaining about how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences fucked up is a tradition as old as the Academy itself. One has to assume that in 1929, there was an ardent fan of 7th Heaven dismayed that Wings won the inaugural Best Picture award.

What follows is a list of the most overrated films to win the Oscar for Best Picture. But first, some criteria: Overrated does not necessarily mean horrible. Some of these films are pretty bad. Others are fine, or even pretty good for what they are. But when a pretty good film beats a truly great film, or if a very popular film that's decent enough wins because of a lack of competition and the Academy's tendency to kowtow to commerce, it invalidates the entire enterprise. Those that mock the Academy do a valuable service: They reinforce the idea that standards and excellence matter above all else. With that said, here are ten films that don't deserve their statutes.


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The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

This is a fine little film. Myrna Loy is in it, and she was always a delight. The core message—that society needs to support their veterans as they figure out how to adjust to life after war—continues to be sadly relevant even today. But divorced from its context (it came out shortly after World War II when America was still high of its victory rush), it's also an undeniably heavy-handed and sentimental affair. The Academy loves nostalgia, even for events that just happened, so the film swept the Oscars in 1946.

But let's be honest. If you're in the mood for 1940s era film that will thaw your cold heart and remind you of humanity's inherent goodness, you are obviously going to watch It's a Wonderful Life, which was up for Best Picture in the same year. It's also sentimental to be certain, but Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart work at such a high level that they manage to charm you into thinking that such complaints are churlish.


A Man for All Seasons (1966)

Fred Zinnemann's adaptation of Robert Bolt's play about the clash between Sir Thomas More and King Henry VIII's Church of England is a thoroughly elegant affair, if at times unavoidably stiff and stagey. But looked at from a historical angle, it's one of the most high-profile examples of the Academy's inability to notice when they're in the middle of a sea change. A Man for All Seasons is the sort of epic that the Academy was basically made to celebrate: sourced from highbrow material, historically minded, sweeping and self-consciously grandiose. That's why it ended up beating a superior and more forward-thinking film, Mike Nichols's adaptation of Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

Completely avoiding the pitfalls of most play-to-film translations, Nichols' adaptation captured the way real people lived, talked (this was the first time many Americans heard movie characters say "goddamn" and "son of a bitch"), drank, and, most importantly, fought. Real life partners Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton play an unhappy married couple, and they fucking tear each other a new one throughout. It's hilarious, hard to watch, and impossible to turn away from. Cringe humor starts here, but so does a new more modern language of filmmaking that made even the best epics of yore look hopelessly stuffy and out of date.


Rocky (1976)

First, some caveats: Rocky is a fun film. Sylvester Stallone is a limited actor and writer, but he can hit (no pun intended) his marks with aplomb and he has a meathead charisma that's hard to deny, though the script's gender politics are hopelessly dated. The fight scenes are rousing, and it's to Stallone's credit (and ability to read the downbeat cultural mood of America in the '70s) that he didn't let the titular character win. But one has to hope for Stallone's sake that, deep down, he knows this film didn't deserve to beat Taxi Driver or Network. The former is a meditation on damaged, delusional masculinity that hasn't lost its power to shock. The latter is a satire of compromised corporate news so forward thinking that it if had been released last week it would seem completely of its moment.

Now, if you personally would rather kick back with Rocky instead of the above-mentioned classics, more power to you. We all need our feel good entertainment. But the Academy's job is so to celebrate films that represent the peak of what cinematic storytelling is capable of. By that standard, giving the nod to Rocky is as ridiculous as the sequels Stallone would go on to make.


Dances With Wolves (1990)

Just think about how this movie would be received in today's era of Twitter and hyperwoke identity politics. It'd be a damn bloodbath of hot takes. Kevin Costner's film about an injured Civil War soldier who is taken in by a Sioux tribe and becomes their protector was an unexpected smash at the time of its release, but over the years historians and critics have called it out for technical inaccuracies and for being the textbook definition of the white savior trope.

One likes to think that the movie couldn't win today (and it sure as hell didn't deserve to beat Goodfellas), but as seen by recent nominations for The Help and The Blind Side, the Academy loves movies that help white people feel good about themselves.


Titanic (1997)

James Cameron's Titanic is a triumph of scale. To paraphrase an old show business saying, you can see all the money on the screen. At $200 million dollars, it was at the time the most expensive movie ever made. Predicted to be a disaster, it went on to become the highest-grossing picture of all time (until Cameron beat his own record with Avatar). The sheer overwhelming popularity of the thing likely cowed the Academy into submission, and those softies probably couldn't say no to a film so clearly made in the sweeping historical epic mode of Gone With The Wind.

But what Cameron gained in technical prowess, he lost in his ability to tell stories about human beings. Despite their talents, both Winslet and DiCaprio's flat characters feel more like the ideas of what people in love should represent rather than believable human beings. The dialogue is often tin-eared, the story an artless mechanism to get characters into the proper position before disaster strikes, and the music would have to be several shades more subtle to qualify as "manipulative." With Aliens and The Abyss, Cameron proved he could use special effects to tell stories about believable people. He seems to have lost that touch, and instead settled for making a very big movie. That's not the same thing as making a great one.


Shakespeare in Love (1998)

Harvey Weinstein has a lot to answer for. The Miramax founder helped bring a lot of groundbreaking, important films to the American people. But Weinstein also brought a lot of middle-of-the-road films that pretended to be groundbreaking to the people, and often used his legendary propensity for blitzkrieg award season campaigning to get Oscar nominations for some faux classy trifles. (That Chocolat was even nominated for Best Picture is just straight-up, goddamn embarrassing.) At the height of his powers, Weinstein engineered a win for this deeply silly piece of fluff. Which is honestly impressive in a perverse way, because Saving Private Ryan was all but created in a lab to print Oscars.

Strip away the gorgeous costumes and far-too-pleased with itself in-joke laden script, and Shakespeare in Love is basically a Nancy Meyers movie. Which is fine! Throw one of those motherfuckers on, give me a glass of pinot, and I am a pig in shit. But at least (one hopes) Meyers knows she's making undemanding culture porn and not art. Just because you ladle on the highbrow pretensions doesn't mean you've made a great film, Harvey. You recruited the wrong Fiennes brother for your lead and you let talked Ben Affleck into making a cameo. Worse yet, this movie turned Gwyneth Paltrow into a huge star. If you had just left well enough alone, Harvey, we wouldn't have GOOP in our lives. How can you even live with yourself?


Gladiator (2000)

The year 2000 was a weak year, and the three best films (Dancer in the Dark, American Psycho, and Requiem for a Dream) never had a wisp of a chance to be nominated. But it's still wild that Gladiator went as far as it did. This isn't a bad film by any means. The action scenes are great. The part where Russell Crowe fights a tiger is neat. Joaquin Phoenix's mad emperor character is a total hoot. But Crowe and Phoenix try to give their characters a shading that just isn't in the script, and Ridley Scott's strained attempts to make an Important Film in the operatic mode of Spartacus feels forced, and often get in the way of what people came to see.

It's just fine to make a film about people fighting each other with swords. Don't overload us with sturm und drang just because you feel self-conscious about entertaining the people. But the Academy, always a sucker for new movies that try to feel like classic movies, took the bait, even though this film is ultimately a glorified version of 300.


Crash (2005)

Did you know racism is bad? Well, it is!


Argo (2012)

The Best Picture victory for the perfectly fine Argo is a classic case of overcompensation. By 2012, the box office was dominated by superhero movies, young adult franchises, and reboots. There was much hand wringing about the death of down-the-middle films made for adults. Ten to 20 years ago, well-made and ultimately forgettable films like Argo came out every few weeks. Usually starring Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis or Nicolas Cage, these films were all destined to fade from theaters after a month, only to live on in basic cable rotation until the end of man. So when a film clearly set in that mold came along, the Academy lept into action to anoint it. The idea was to send a message to studios: more of this and fewer superheroes films, please.

Nevermind that Argo had nothing insightful to say Middle East politics, didn't interrogate its subtext about how the world relates to Western commercial art, had several historical inaccuracies, and that Ben Affleck's character is basically a cipher. When the Academy nominated the film for Best Picture but not Affleck for Best Director, many voters, offended on Affleck's behalf (this was during the brief period when he was being patted on the back for turning away from easy paychecks and instead pursuing "real" films) rallied around the film and awarded it Best Picture. To be fair, we all have our insecurities, and every generation worries that its values will be replaced by the generation coming up from behind. But voters, next time just talk to your therapists. Don't work through your issues by inflating Affleck's ego.


Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)

So that part up there about how Hollywood is freaking out because the only movies Hollywood thinks people want anymore are superheroes films? Well, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) made that the main text of its film. And there is absolutely nothing the Academy loves more than movies about movies, especially ones that tell the noble struggle to (sigh) make authentic, meaningful art. Alejandro G. Iñárritu's film-length extended take is impressive enough on a gimmicky level, but enough movies and television shows have done the sustain take thing recently that it's not as novel as it used to be. The film's main argument is muddled, and the script often mistakes lecturing the audience for insight. Birdman was an unwieldy but ultimately useful vehicle for an excellent performance from Michael Keaton, and it is hard to begrudge a film that put the underused great actor back on the A list.

As is their wont, the Academy managed to get everything wrong, as the sublime Boyhood should have won Best Picture, Keaton should have won Best Actor (as this is more of an actor's film than a director's film, flashy techniques be damned). And obviously, actual Best Actor Eddie Redmayne should have been launched into the sun, with the journey being filmed in one uninterrupted take.