I'm not baiting. It's been discussed several times over the years.
An article about the topic: 40 nominees that should have won. I don't necessarily agree with all the choices but Shakespeare in Love winning over Saving Private Ryan didn't make sense, as do several other wins.
'Doctor Strangelove,' 'Fargo,' 'Get Out,' 'Broadcast News,' 'Pulp Fiction': These famous nominees should've won Best Picture at the Oscars.
www.indiewire.com
No Oscars crime will ever be as great as the time
Crash (2005) won (i.e. the 2006 Oscars), and that article helps show that.
The majority of those, both the movies are genuinely good, and from 1990 onward, the one which is more relevant to milquetoast white Boomers is reliably the winner (I honestly can't judge the reasoning on a lot of the older movies, though I have seen about 80% of them). Often it's pretty narrow - like
Gladiator and
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - they're not only kind of similar movies in a lot of ways, but they're of relatively similar quality. So the academy just chooses the one which is more relevant to them personally as aging white people.
You see this over and over. Clearly, from 1990 onwards, it's not possible to argue that Best Picture really represents the greatest feat of movie-making, or even the greatest feat of mainstream, Hollywood-oriented movie-making. But it is possible to argue that,
in most cases, it is given to a movie which is at least genuinely a good movie and something of an achievement.
It also helps show the most "worthy" movies don't actually reliably win - only movies which are "worthy" in very specific ways, particularly ones that are exculpatory rather than accusatory re: America's history of racism, and which keep racism very firmly in the past (the other main "worthy" way to get Oscar is "handsome white guy with mental disability does amazing things despite that" - and
Tropic Thunder's advice there is also relevant if unprintable).
The entirely exculpatory "both sides" attitude to racism why
Crash (2005) won, for example. It's genuinely bad movie, by pretty much any reasonable standard. The plot is beyond contrived and awful, the dialogue is almost physically painfully bad, the performances are not great (and weird casting of a lot of B-tier or lower talent, none of whom gave performances which made you say "Oh, actually X
can act!" in this - people acted like Matt Dillon could, but I'm sorry, I've seen that movie - he's better than
90210 but...). Particularly amazingly, it straight-up has a very racist white cop sexually assault a black woman, and then later has him implausibly save her life, and tries to act like "Oh wow gee the world sure is complicated and my film sure is nuanced", and it's like no, you're just trying to make excuses for horrific, prison-worthy behaviour by a white cop. You can't "both sides" a racist police officer committing sex crimes in the name of racial animus! It continues to try and "both sides" everything - for example, the racist cop racially abuses a black woman on the phone, when she can't help him, and later on in the movie, she is shown being racist to an asian guy (who is also racist), which is just grotesque. It may come as no surprise given the plotline that the writer/director (Paul Haggis) was
later accused of multiple rapes, and successfully sued for one of them (and lost his own counter-suit).
What's even more bizarre is that the academy has a lot of other easy choices. The nominees that year were:
Crash (2005)
Brokeback Mountain
Capote
Good Night, And Good Luck
Munich
All of those movies are, on every level, better movies than
Crash. They all have better cinematography, better acting, better scripts, and have all stood the test of time infinitely better than
Crash. All of this was obvious at the time and much discussed. That Crash won was extremely surprising.
Brokeback Mountain not winning was obviously due to a degree of homophobia, but even if say "Okay, we knew they were homophobes", it doesn't explain why
Crash beat the rest. Maybe we can rule out
Munich because it made the academy uncomfortable - it's a very well-made movie that draws some interesting parallels and looks at the costs of violence, but is just a little too keen to glorify some guys who are really just thugs committing largely pointless post-facto murders (and repeatedly fail to kill the most valid target - which were it fiction I would give them a bit more credit for as a philosophical point!), but also insufficiently glorifies them for some people's tastes. Still we have
Capote and
Good Night, And Good Luck. We can't blame homophobia re:
Capote because it works around Capote being openly gay before it was "okay", and
Good Night, And Good Luck is both a very safe and very good historical drama.
The next-worst Oscars crime is the exact same sort of deal - a weak movie that is exculpatory re: American racism. Green Book is nowhere near as bad as
Crash, but it's a profoundly 7/10 kind of movie. Watchable enough, just about, forgettable, okay, fine. But it was very exculpatory re: American racism in the 20th century! The 2019 slate was a bit wild:
Green Book
Black Panther
BlacKkKlansman
Bohemian Rhapsody
The Favourite
Roma
A Star Is Born
Vice
To be fair, there are multiple 7/10 movies on that list -
Bohemian Rhapsody is pretty much a 4/10 movie and most insanely won "Best Editing" despite having genuinely appalling editing (that Best Editing oscar is worthy of its own whole discussion - it has several times gone to straightforwardly badly-edited movies - the people voting on it are clueless re: editing).
Black Panther is a fun movie but not a great one and has some genuinely embarrassing SFX in it.
Vice is huge fun but also pretty 7/10.
A Star is Born is very 7/10.
Roma was the best movie on the list, but again,
The Favourite, and
BlackKkKlansman are far better movies than
Green Book.
Re: this year's Oscar, at least Best Picture had multiple strong contenders - I don't think any of them are less than "good" movies (admittedly
Maestro might be a tier below but there are years it could have won, and I haven't actually seen it yet so maybe not). I'm delighted
Poor Things got at least one Oscar, that was my favourite movie of the ones I've seen from this year, and by far the most amazing movie.
TLDR: If you want to win the Best Picture Oscar, you need to focus entirely on being relevant to Boomers, and it's only ok to talk about racism so long as you are exculpatory about it (
Crash) and/or show it very firmly in The Past (
12 Years A Slave).
en.wikipedia.org
