By Sam. Posted in Movies | No Comments »
We’ve seen some pretty awful movies this year. There was the truly horrible The Smurfs. The painfully unfunny, and like with any bit of binge drinking, truly regrettable Hangover 2.
But the film to surpass all shitty films since the beginning of time was Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star – a film so bad that it didn’t even get 1% on Rotten Tomatoes, and you know any film is truly woeful when the best review is this: “one feels nothing more strongly than an acute sympathy for all involved” Variety.
But let’s not go on about truly shitty films that made a few dollars at the box office that’s up to the Oscars 2012 judges. We know they are bad. Lets look at the ones that were the best Films of the year and conned the Oscar judges to giving them a gong. So which are the worst Oscar Best Picture winners of the last 30 years?
The Worst ever Oscar Winning Movie
5) American Beauty – Oscar Best Picture 1999
Boasting a cast of masterful actors Kevin Spacey and Anette Benning, this low budget “non-Hollywood” film went from the critically acclaimed “look at me i’m an Indy film” to the mainstream. We all love it when an underdog does well and beats the likes of Titanic in its own backyard by being intelligent and beautiful. I admit i liked it when I left the cinema back in the 1990s and agreed with most that it was a truly magnificent film. However, i started thinking about it a bit more.
The characters are such exaggerations of themselves and live in a world of hyperbole. The hyper mum who slaps herself when she doesn’t sell a house. The vacuous teenage boyfriend. A next door neighbour who is a nazi and a homosexual. And the hero dad who is actually a perverted old man who gets his chance with jail bait and then he suddenly sees the light and doesn’t do jail bait. In the original script Wesley and Angela actually had sex, maybe this is my problem with the film: This supposed “Indy” film actually knew it was going to be a mainstream film all along and needed to be all pleasing to all men. It cost $20million which is no small sum. Maybe if it was more independent in thought and actually moved away from the puritanical Hollywood image more it would have been more memorable and more racey rather than just flirting with taboo subjects. American Beauty is in this list because it could have been so much better in a year that offered little competition.
4) Braveheart – Oscar Best Picture 1995
We all like a bit of guts and gore. Braveheart had it all, face paint, an Australian racist pretending to be a Scotsman, a cute French princess who liked a bit of rough and those nasty nasty Englishmen with snotty, arrogant accents . Oh yes it also had a script which loved to re-write history too. No doubt this may have had something to do with Mel Gibson, who Directed, Produced, Narrated and starred in this story that should never be referenced in a GCSE history paper. Braveheart was a fun film in places, but surely the best bit was when William Wallace said to a red-uniformed Englishman “You can take our lives but you’ll never take our freedom” and was then hung-drawn and quartered, very painfully – the cinema i was in started cheering.
3) Titanic – Oscar Best Picture 1997
Some may be surprised this isn’t higher in the list. Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet have performed in some brilliant films since this overlong, over marketed sap-fest. Both are amazingly accomplished actors who generally strive to find the perfect script rather than a mainstream schmaltzy blockbuster, but for this film they took their pay-cheques and have spent the next 10 years restoring their careers.
The film for me was ruined before i even saw it. Everywhere on TV was documentaries about the The making of Titanic, how Kate Winslet’s dress was designed, The sea’s most deadly icebergs, or debates whether Director James Cameron was the most intelligent, special human being in the world. Everyone was brainwashed. With a budget of $200m (that’s 5 times Braveheart) they spent $1million on the film and the rest on marketing the bugger to us in every possible media space in the world. The bastards subliminally forced us to go and watch it with a jedi-like advertising campaign. But they needed one more thing to get into our minds, something so powerful and crippling that we would just have to go and watch it and relinquish our freedom and join the un-dead movie goers. That thing was Celine Dion. Played at every possible moment for months and months on Radio 1, The Chart Show, Top of The Pops – that song paralysed our children, took-over our women-folk and turned made us go to the movies and hand over our cash. The film that beat LA Confidential and As Good As IT Gets for the Oscar made $1.8 billion – do you feel stupid now?
2) Dances With Wolves – Oscar Best Picture 1990
It’s funny how things change. Your kids won’t believe this but there was a time when people thought Adam Sandler was funny. There was also a time when people queued through the night to see Star Wars and even thought George Lucas was a genius. There was also a time, back in the 1980s when Kevin Costner was a heart-throb and we all thought every film he did was an epic, self-discovery of human goodness beating the demons amongst us. God it’s embarrassing isn’t it?
Grossing a huge $424m at the box office this 3 hour self-congratulating, bore-fest of a lecture conned a lot of gullible people across the world in handing over their money. Almost every single minute of those 3 hours were long shots of silhouettes in the distance or lingering shots of a smug, pouting Costner riding through the plains masterly on horseback. Directed by and starring Costner it took 5 years from start to finish to complete, apparently it was only finished at all because someone took the mirror out of Costner’s dressing room.
1) Out of Africa – Oscar Best Picture 1985
Back in the mid-1980s the Oscar judges went a little bit up their own arses. Don’t get me wrong, give me A Passage To India over Con Air any day of the week, but too much of it really does get suicidally tedious. Over this period there was The Colour Purple, The Mission, Children of A Lesser God, The Killing Fields – Lighten Up you bastards. And by far the one closest to water torture was Out of Africa.
Christ this was boring. What the hell was it about? It wasn’t a drama nor a particularly compelling romance. Yeah it looked good, but so did National Geographic. I would have walked out the cinema if it wasn’t for the fact i took my mum to watch it on her birthday. The fact that this film is rarely spoken about as a classic, despite the cast of Meryl Streep aka Margaret Thatcher and Robert Redford, and the pretty measly score of 63% in Rotten Tomatoes, Out of Africa is the worst ever Oscar winning film.
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