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Last year at this time, the British (or, as the president would say, "Great British") magazine Empire published a list of what its editors considered to be the ten worst movies ever to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Top o' the tally was Mel Gibson's "Braveheart." This year, the folks at Premiere magazine, always up on the latest Tinseltown trends (especially when it comes to making lists), have published their own list of worst picture Oscar winners. And there is some overlap.
According to a press release, Premiere's choices include: "Chicago," "My Fair Lady," "American Beauty," "Oliver!," "Around The World In 80 Days," "The Greatest Show On Earth" and "The Great Ziegfield."
Empire's most unworthy picks were: "Braveheart," "A Beautiful Mind," "The Greatest Show on Earth," "Ordinary People," "Forrest Gump," "Terms of Endearment," "Around the World in 80 Days," "Cavalcade," "Rocky" and "How Green Was My Valley."
I'd say the musicals on Premiere's list are, as motion pictures, about as embarrassing as, well, "Cavalcade" -- with the surprising exception of Carol Reed's "Oliver!," which remains engaging and watchable, even though it's not anywhere close to being the Best Picture of 1968. But the only reason "Oliver!" won that year was because "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Graduate" and "In the Heat of the Night" (winner) were nominated the year before and the uptight, squaresville Academy was getting a wee bit nervous in a "traditional family values" kind of way (as if Dickens supported traditional family values).
So, in 1968, the year of "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Rosemary's Baby," "Once Upon a Time in the West," "Petulia," "The Producers," "Faces," "if...," "Night of the Living Dead," "Head," "Bullitt" (and those are only some of the eligible English language pictures), the nominees for Best Picture were, ahem: "Funny Girl," "The Lion in Winter," "Rachel, Rachel," "Romeo and Juliet" and "Oliver!" You couldn't imagine a safer, more conservative slate -- especially in the radical pop culture year of 1968. The next year, "Easy Rider" and the MPAA Ratings would shake everything up and "Midnight Cowboy" -- an X-rated film that hasn't aged well -- would win the Oscar for Best Picture.
The Empire list doesn't seem to be so much about the pictures that won as the pictures that didn't. By any standard, John Ford's "How Green Was My Valley" is a gorgeous, superlatively made movie -- it's just not "Citizen Kane," which history confirms should have been named Best Picture of 1941. Likewise, Robert Redford's "Ordinary People" is an extraordinarily well-directed, and well-acted, picture about white, suburban, emotionally repressed characters (hence the title). But, no, it's not as sensuously thrilling a slice of cinema as "Raging Bull" -- or "Tess" or "The Shining" or "Altered States."
No question in my mind that the funny-turned-maudlin "Terms of Endearment" doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same category with "The Right Stuff" or "Tender Mercies" -- two polar-opposite pictures that both deserved the Oscar more than that unwieldy but perfectly cast tragi-weepedy. (That's my own word but you can use it if you want.)
But as Empire's Patrick Peters wrote: "Critical worth is almost irrelevant where bestowing the Best Picture award is concerned. The Oscars aren't about quality. They're peer group nods of approval and, as a result, there has been a surfeit of unworthy Best Pictures and, rest assured, there will be many more to come."
Here's hoping this is not one of those years.
