Since 1929, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been giving out the Oscars. Today, these awards have become the most prestigious honor in the film industry, and winning one can potentially alter the actor's career for good. However, every now and then — in fact, one might even say often — general audiences universally agree that the Academy got something wrong.
Whether it's a bad movie winning Best Picture, an actor winning an acting award over a much more deserving peer, or the trashiest film winning a random Best Makeup Oscar, there have been plenty of occasions over the years when people have agreed that the Academy messed up. These are the most unpopular Oscar wins, ranked from "some people might defend this" to what is nothing short of a stain on the Academy's reputation.
10 'King Richard' (2021)
Award: Best Leading Actor for Will Smith
Every year, more than a few movies come out that are very obvious Oscar bait; sometimes, they are actually pretty good. Such is the case of King Richard, a biopic about Richard Williams, who coached his daughters Venus and Serena into tennis superstardom. From the get-go, it was clear that this was an Oscar vehicle for Will Smith, who had been trying to get on that Dolby Theatre stage for years.
Unfortunately, the first time that Smith did step on that stage was when he infamously slapped Chris Rock for having told a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith. Later in the night, he won that coveted Oscar and even got a standing ovation, but a moment that should have felt triumphant and cathartic instead felt all too sour. King Richard is one of the best sports movies of the 2020s, and Smith's performance in it is admittedly phenomenal, but because his win will forever be tied with his baffling public display of violence, it's a victory that immediately became one of the most unpopular in the Academy's history.
King Richard
- Release Date
- November 19, 2021
WHERE TO WATCH
- Cast
- Jon Bernthal, Saniyya Sidney, Aunjanue Ellis, Demi Singleton, Will Smith, Tony Goldwyn
- Runtime
- 138 minutes
- Director
- Reinaldo Marcus Green
- Writers
- Zach Baylin
9 'The Broadway Melody' (1929)
Award: Best Picture
The Broadway Melody is the lowest-rated Best Picture Oscar winner on both IMDb (where it has a 5.6 out of 10) and Letterboxd (where it has 2.4 out of 5 stars), so it's no shocker that it's aged as one of the worst-ever recipients of the prestigious award. It follows a pair of sisters from the vaudeville circuit trying to make it big on Broadway, but matters of the heart complicate their ambitions.
This movie is a valuable historical artifact, being one of the first musicals ever made (The Jazz Singer, the first-ever talkie, had only come out less than a couple of years prior). Alas, historical value does not a good movie make. The Broadway Melody is one of the worst movie musicals in history, with a nonsensical story and lousy dialogue joining together musical numbers that are only semi-entertaining.
The Broadway Melody
WHERE TO WATCH
8 'The Nutty Professor' (1996)
Award: Best Makeup
It feels wild to apply the term "Oscar-winning" to a movie like The Nutty Professor, but here we are. It's not the worst of Eddie Murphy bombs, but this slapstick comedy about an overweight and good-hearted professor taking a chemical that turns him slim but obnoxious is definitely no masterpiece. Murphy plays multiple characters in it, and that's pretty much all it has going for it.
It sometimes feels that a Best Makeup Oscar nod (or even win, as in this case) is where bad Oscar-nominated films go to die. Indeed, this is pretty much universally agreed to be one of the worst movies that have ever won an Oscar, and as such, its Makeup victory isn't exactly a cause for joy for pretty much anyone. It's not like it didn't have any competition, either, with Star Trek: First Contact also being in contention that year.
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The Nutty Professor
- Release Date
- June 28, 1996
WHERE TO WATCH
- Cast
- Eddie Murphy, Jada Pinkett Smith, James Coburn, Larry Miller, Dave Chapelle, John Ales, Patricia Wilson, Jamal Mixon
- Runtime
- 95 minutes
- Director
- Tom Shadyac
- Writers
- Jerry Lewis, Bill Richmond, David Sheffield
7 'Cimarron' (1931)
Award: Best Picture
Since the Oscars were just beginning to find their footing in the 1930s, the Academy rewarded plenty of duds during that decade. But while many of those wins have been forgotten, there's one that sticks out like a sore thumb as the absolute worst Best Picture winner of the '30s. Cimarron is a Western about a newspaper editor settling in an Oklahoma boom town with his reluctant wife at the end of the nineteenth century.
Even setting aside its blatant misogyny and racism, Cimarron would still be an awfully boring movie with stilted dialogue and unappealing characters. It's hard to ignore its offensive stereotypes, though, so all of its bad qualities come together to form a pretty terrible flop whose Best Picture win is baffling, even considering what kinds of so-so movies won the award throughout the 1930s.
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Cimarron
- Release Date
- February 9, 1931
- Runtime
- 123 minutes
- Director
- Wesley Ruggles
- Cast
- Richard Dix, Irene Dunne, Estelle Taylor, Nance O'Neil
- Writers
- Edna Ferber, Howard Estabrook, Louis Sarecky
6 'Suicide Squad' (2016)
Award: Best Achievement in Makeup and Hairstyling
As is the case with The Nutty Professor—arguably even more so—it's beyond stupefying that the term "Oscar winner" applies to Suicide Squad, one of the DCEU's most embarrassing flops and one of the worst superhero movies of the 2010s. It's about a secret government agency that recruits some of the world's most dangerous incarcerated supervillains to form a defensive task force, whose first mission becomes to save the world from the apocalypse.
Suicide Squad is pretty terrible in every sense imaginable. If there's one thing about it that's sort of redeemable, however, it's the makeup work. It was precisely this element that earned the movie a Best Makeup Oscar, even if Star Trek Beyond was arguably a far more deserving winner. Moreover, the mere fact of awarding a movie like this with one of the most prestigious awards in the industry should feel icky to any movie fan.
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Suicide Squad
- Release Date
- August 5, 2016
- Cast
- Joel Kinnaman, Will Smith, Cara Delevingne, Jai Courtney, Jared Leto, Viola Davis, Margot Robbie, Jay Hernandez, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Scott Eastwood
- Runtime
- 123 minutes
- Director
- David Ayer
- Writers
- David Ayer
5 'Shakespeare in Love' (1998)
Award: Best Leading Actress for Gwyneth Paltrow
For anyone familiar with the history of the Academy Awards, Shakespeare in Love doesn't really need much of an introduction. This romantic period drama is about a young William Shakespeare, short on ideas and cash, meeting the woman who becomes his muse and inspires one of his most iconic plays. Over the years, it's been shown that Harvey Weinstein's aggressive campaigning style was the main reason the movie did as well as it did at the 1999 Oscars, and that has just made its wins age worse.
One of the movie's most unpopular victories, and perhaps the worst Best Actress winner of the '90s, was Gwyneth Paltrow's triumph for playing Viola De Lesseps, the Bard's fictional muse. Paltrow clearly struggles with this particularly demanding role, delivering a performance that's okay at best and wonky at worst. To add salt to the wound, her winning the award that year over Fernanda Montenegro's performance in Central Station was highway robbery.
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- Cast
- Ben Affleck, Gwyneth Paltrow, Joseph Fiennes, Geoffrey Rush, Judi Dench, Colin Firth
- Runtime
- 123 minutes
- Director
- John Madden
- Writers
- Tom Stoppard, Marc Norman
4 'Shakespeare in Love' (1998)
Award: Best Picture
Gwyneth Paltrow's Best Leading Actress victory may be unpopular, but there's not Shakespeare in Love Oscar win more heavily disliked than its Best Picture win. The film isn't bad by any means, but beating Saving Private Ryan for the big Oscar of the night has led some people over the years to overcompensate and throw more hate at it than it deserves. Beyond that, Shakespeare in Love does nothing extraordinary enough to warrant Best Picture status.
Shakespeare in Love beating Saving Private Ryan for the big Oscar of the night has led some people over the years to overcompensate and throw more hate at it than it deserves.
Shakespeare in Love is one of the worst Best Picture Oscar winners ever, a shallow yet overinflated mess with a pair of lead characters whose romance isn't particularly compelling. Had it only received Oscar nods and not so many wins, its reputation would undoubtedly not have aged as badly. But since it beat much stronger competitors in almost every category, its Best Picture win is usually mocked and disregarded in all sorts of sad ways.
3 'Bohemian Rhapsody' (2018)
Award: Best Film Editing
While Shakespeare in Love's Best Picture win is widely criticized, it's not without its defenders—but one would be hard-pressed to find someone blind enough to say that Bohemian Rhapsody isn't one of the worst-edited movies that has ever won the Best Film Editing Oscar. This biopic about Freddie Mercury and the rise of Queen to rock superstardom isn't the worst movie ever, but it sure isn't great, and its editing is nothing more than deplorable.
The movie feels like it's just composed of a bunch of random shots spliced together in the most haphazard ways, sometimes to the point of being hilariously bad. There are certain moments where the editing is okay, particularly in the momentous Live Aid sequence at the end of the movie, but by that point, it's too little, too late. Bohemian Rhapsody won several Oscars, but none of its victories have ever been as widely and strongly criticized as its confusing Best Film Editing win.
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- Cast
- Ben Hardy, Aidan Gillen, Gwilym Lee, Mike Myers, Rami Malek, Lucy Boynton, Tom Hollander, Michelle Duncan, Joseph Mazzello, Allen Leech
- Runtime
- 2h 14m
- Director
- Bryan Singer, Dexter Fletcher
- Writers
- Anthony McCarten, Peter Morgan
2 'Crash' (2004)
Award: Best Picture
Forget The Broadway Melody, forget Cimarron, forget Shakespeare in Love. There has never been, and is unlikely to ever be, a Best Picture Oscar win as intensely derided as Crash. This tone-deaf, one-note, incredibly dumb drama follows the vastly separate lives of several Los Angeles citizens whose paths collide in a series of interweaving stories of race, loss, and redemption.
The now-infamous Crash is the most obvious piece of Oscar bait that has ever actually managed to win Best Picture, to the befuddlement of everyone in Hollywood and every viewer who ever had to sit through it; even presenter Jack Nicholson couldn't believe it. It doesn't have much artistic merit or particularly strong performances, and its self-important script is an embarrassment. The fact that this managed to beat a film as exceptional as Brokeback Mountain is one of the Academy's biggest failures.
1 'The Pianist' (2002)
Award: Best Director for Roman Polanski
While The Pianist, a harrowing biopic about W?adys?aw Szpilman hiding from Nazi persecution during WWII in the Warsaw ghetto, is one of the greatest war films that have ever won Oscars, it's also the protagonist of one of the darkest wins in the history of the Academy Awards. In 1977, director Roman Polanski was arrested and charged in Los Angeles with having drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl. He was placed on probation, but upon learning that he was likely to be imprisoned and then deported, he fled to Europe as a fugitive of justice, which he has been ever since.
In 2002, however, Polanski earned the coveted Academy Award for Best Director for his work on The Pianist. Not only did he win, he won to a standing ovation. This is easily the Oscar win that has aged the worst, and exceptional though Polanski's direction in this devastating movie may be, the fact that he earned the love and respect of his peers in the film industry despite the knowledge of his actions is horrifying. Even still, the movie has endured the test of time in spite of Polanski rather than thanks to him. Visually striking, beautifully written, and with Adrien Brody delivering one of the best acting performances in any war film, which also earned him an Oscar, The Pianist may have facilitated the most unpopular Oscar win ever, but that doesn't mean it's any less great of a film.
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The Pianist
- Release Date
- March 28, 2003
- Cast
- Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Frank Finlay, Emilia Fox, Michal Zebrowski, Ed Stoppard, Maureen Lipman, Jessica Kate Meyer
- Runtime
- 150 Minutes
- Director
- Roman Polanski
- Writers
- Ronald Harwood, Wladyslaw Szpilman
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