Top-10 Best Picture Oscar travesties.

[riczhang]

Like Kramer vs. Kramer over Apocalypse Now?

Yeah. I liked Kramer vs. Kramer over Apocalypse Now, but that probably is only because I idolise Streep. And, Apocalypse Now's image has always been ruined in my head because the first time I watched it was at school and we had to write a 10 page paper comparing it with its source material Heart of Darkness. Needless to say, it sucked.

[Cmasterclay]

After watching Warrior and reflecting on my list for 2011, 50/50 and Warrior not getting nominated in 2011 when they were far better films than anything nominated is awful. Both films were fabulous, emotional, brilliantly acted films, not two hours of pondering the intricacies of silence and flowers (Tree of Life) or the most cheese possible in a film (ELIC) or film history, back patting masturbation (Hugo).

[Webslinger]

Braveheart

I don't hate Braveheart. It's a solid movie with some really stirring sequences, even if Mel Gibson's performance isn't exactly deep and it runs too long at nearly three hours. But Best Picture seems like a step too far. The only trouble is I don't know if there was really a movie nominated that year that was really up to Best Picture caliber. I haven't seen Sense & Sensibility or Il Postino, so it's between Apollo 13 and Babe, both of which I think are very, very good movies, but perhaps not the best of a year. It's tough to gauge a year for which I don't have a very strong sense of scope. Bringing in movies that weren't nominated, I'd say the most deserving of the honor was either Dead Man Walking or The Usual Suspects.

The English Patient over Fargo/Jerry Maguire

I tried to love The English Patient. I really wanted to love its slow pace, the simmering romantic tension, and the way it balanced the two separate narratives. But ultimately, I was a bit underwhelmed and just liked it. Fargo, on the other hand, is an engrossing thriller that works just as well as an offbeat (and pitch black) comedy, and Jerry Maguire hits all the right notes. Either of those movies would have been a more welcome Best Picture winner in my book.

Chocolat nominated for Best Picture over Almost Famous, Billy Elliot, Cast Away, Requiem for a Dream, and a long list of others

I would hesitate to call most of these picks "travesties" so much as "choices I don't agree with in a somewhat significant way." But Chocolat's Best Picture nomination in 2000 was a travesty to me. The movie just isn't very good; it's pretty light and doesn't seem to have much passion behind it. And yet, behind Harvey Weinstein's awards season savvy, it made the lineup over a long list of movies that were much more deserving. My first pick to replace it would be Almost Famous, which is my favorite movie from that year. Almost Famous is everything Chocolat is not: inspired, fast, funny, poignant, and so very clearly the passion project of its director. I don't often complain about the Academy getting something "wrong" because I realize that taste is subjective and a group of thousands isn't necessarily going to agree with my take, but they really missed the ball on nominating Chocolat rather than Almost Famous. But even then, there were still other movies in the conversation that would have been much better choices. This is the nomination in this category that sits worst with me across the 2000s.

A Beautiful Mind over In the Bedroom/The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring/Moulin Rouge!

Okay, full qualification here: I really, really like A Beautiful Mind. Yes, it plays it totally safe and conveniently glosses over some really icky details of its subject's life, but the story Akiva Goldsman penned in his screenplay (it's almost impossible to believe that this is the same guy that wrote Batman & Robin) is so consistently fascinating in its own right that the movie still works really well anyway. And of course, the acting is fantastic. But it's disappointing to see the Academy go with a very good yet very safe film when there were some even better and significantly more daring films in the lineup. (One could very easily make the same argument for The King's Speech, but since I loved The King's Speech and wasn't peeved by its win, I won't make said argument.) In the Bedroom is dark, uncompromising, and has stuck with me years after seeing it. Fellowship of the Ring is an excellent beginning to one of the most beloved trilogies in movie history, and one of the precious few films of its genre to ever even come close to major Oscar consideration. And then there's the ever divisive Moulin Rouge!, whose daring I love and whose deeply emotional shot hits the bullseye; it's also a successful unconventional spin on a genre the Academy awarded several times earlier in its history. They had a chance to do something really interesting with their Best Picture vote this year, and instead threw it away on a safe drama about overcoming adversity (albeit a very well made one). (You know what, screw it. The parallels are close enough that this could just as easily be read as one against The King's Speech, especially when it was up against movies like Black Swan, Inception, The Social Network, and Toy Story 3 that either busted or put fascinating spins on their respective genres.)

Crash over Brokeback Mountain/Munich

Again, I feel like a qualification is necessary here. I do like Crash. It's heavy-handed, but it's well-meaning and the actors pitch the drama so well that it's at least very potent in the moment, even if it remains to be seen just how well it holds up in reflection. I think it takes way too much flak, especially when its writer/director himself acknowledges that the Oscars were just about the furthest thing from his mind when he made the movie. But yeah, Best Picture over Brokeback Mountain is a joke. Just looking at the movies themselves, I think Brokeback packs a whole lot more punch than Crash. Even without getting in its audience's face the way Crash does, Ang Lee, the screenwriters, and the actors are all so in touch with the raw human emotions that drive the film that it burns its way into viewers' memories. Even before Heath Ledger died - a cruelly ironic twist considering that the movie itself doesn't end happily for the protagonists - it was a haunting experience. But on beyond that, it was a landmark moment for widespread acceptance of a serious film romance between two characters of the same sex. It didn't just do tidy business in arthouses in metropolitan areas; it made it into multiplexes in the heartland and grossed $83 million before leaving theaters. A Best Picture win would have indicated that the industry at large was ready to accept a movie about gay characters as a great movie rather than just a gay movie that made headway within its niche. Chickening out at the last minute, after the film had won nearly every major precursor on the planet, was shameful. That said, my true favorite of the bunch was Munich, which I think is the most underrated movie of Steven Spielberg's career. It's a superb white-knuckle thriller that hits all the harder because it refuses to take a definitive side on the Israel/Palestine conflict. Instead, it shows how both sides of any conflict can lose their humanity while trying to gain/maintain power.

Babel as a nominee over Children of Men, Pan's Labyrinth, United 93

I'm really glad Babel didn't beat The Departed despite scoring more nominations. However, I still wonder what it was even doing in the hunt for Best Picture in the first place. I can see where it might connect very strongly for some viewers, but I thought it was a messy movie that just made one point over and over again, across multiple storylines (not entirely unlike Cloud Atlas, which like Babel I admired a lot, but didn't fully embrace; and yes, I know that comparing Cloud Atlas to Babel is basically the same as painting a shiny red target on the back of my head). In the meantime, it beat out Children of Men, which was a bleak but ultimately somewhat uplifting sci-fi that connected on just about every point; Pan's Labyrinth, which took an odd concept and spun it into an unforgettably haunting experience; and United 93, which was a blisteringly powerful "you-are-there" style account of the darkest and most significant day of American history in the '00s.

The Reader as a nominee over The Dark Knight

Every possible argument for this one has already been exhausted somewhere on the Internet at some point since January 2009, so I'll just let this one stand on its own.