The Academy Awards, also known as the Oscars, are recognized for technical and artistic merit in the film industry. They are considered by many to be the entertainment industry’s most prestigious and important awards across the globe. The Oscar awards are internationally recognized for their excellence in motion picture making evaluated by the voting members of the Academy.
On the evaluation of the Academy, some people are still mad about the Oscar-winning of some worst movies and actors and actresses. It is their opinion that some Oscar winners are not worthy of such awards in the film industry. For example, people are mad about Oscar-winning worst movies such as Crash, Around the World in 80 Days, Ordinary People, etc. Apart from these, there are a lot of other movies that are considered the worst Oscar winners of all the time.
Worst Oscar Winners of All the Time
1. Crash (2004)
In the 21st century, without a doubt, Crash is the worst winner for the Best Picture Oscar Award. The cast of the movie is incredible such as Thandie Newton, Don Cheadle, Sandra Bullock, and Terrence Howard but the film is not so much. The movie was about the interweaving of stories around the social and xenophobic tensions in Los Angeles while missing a ton of opportunities to deal with multiculturalism and racism in the real way.
Instead of Crash, the Oscar award could be for Good Night and Good Luck, Capote, Brokeback Mountain, Munich, etc. According to the public and director of the movie, Crash, it was the worst Oscar winner of all time.
2. Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
This movie is about the story of a young orphan boy named Dev Patel, who comes out of the slums to win Who Wants To Be A Millionaire (Indian Version). The victory of this boy is not in question because of his past but the movie is more than 90 percent a fine film.
In the end, Slumdog Millionaire featured a giant routine of song and dance. The song and dance pass too smoothly outside the final scene and give you a satisfying ending but the Jai Ho song gets stuck in your head.
3. Shakespeare in Love (1998)
As a concept, it is one of the inspirational movies for writers. You can imagine a romance between Shakespeare played by Joseph Fiennes and a Viola De Lesseps played by Gwyneth Paltrow auditioning, disguised as a man that helps the bard write Romeo and Juliet. It is a romantic comedy and Shakespeare’s experimental biopic with a lot of references.
This movie was a storm of random things that never settled into cohesion. Also, it reminds you that old William was a modern cat. This movie was not considered a worthy Oscar winner because it has aged poorly. Also, it is more important to win an Oscar rather than produce a good movie.
4. Out of Africa (1985)
Since World War II, no winner for Best Picture has received poor reviews as Out of Africa. It was a sleepy movie about two whites having an affair in Kenya. It is an embarrassment in the wealth of the acting with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford as a married Danish writer and big game hunter falling in love with one another in Nairobi.
It might be a good movie if you can stay awake for 160 minutes of slow-paced story-telling. If the Academy had to honor Sydney Pollack, then the worthy Oscar-Winning movie was Tootsie in 1983. For the 1986 Oscar Award, After Hours and Back to the Future were the better nominees than Out of Africa.
5. Dances With Wolves (1990)
1990 is another one of those years where you scratch your head in hindsight. After two decades, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather returned but no one wanted to give a nomination to Godfather III. Instead, it went to notoriously boring Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves.
It is guaranteed that no one has watched it in one go because of the 3h 56m runtime. On the other hand, this movie won the award for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director along with four other academy awards. Instead, this worst Oscar-winning movie, movies like Goodfellas, was worthy enough to win an Oscar.
6. Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990 is another time in which the Academy chose a boring film for an Oscar award that only appealed to old whites over something interesting. This movie was Driving Miss Daisy in which a relationship between an elderly Jewish woman (Jessica Tandy) and her black driver (Morgan Freeman) in the Southern United States was shown.
Driving Miss Daisy was one of the worst Oscar winners of all time. Instead, the Oscar could be awarded to Do the Right Thing, Henry V, and My Left Foot.
7. The King’s Speech (2010)
The sweep of The King’s Speech in 2011, proved that the Academy was unable to put aside the trend towards inspiring and predictable biopics rather than something more original. Colin Firth deserved the Best Actor award that year, which he received but the Best Director and Best Picture awards were not for this movie.
The movie had a great plot but the fondness of hideous set designs from one of the top 6 movie studios and weird camera angles made it the worst Oscar winner of all time. Instead, The Social Network was Oscar-winning.
Worst and Worthy Oscar-Winning Movies
| Worst Oscar-Winning Movie | Worthy Oscar-Winning Movie |
| Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Ten Commandments (1956) |
| Ordinary People (1980) | Raging Bull (1980) |
| Argo (2012) | Zero Dark Thirty (2012) |
| Chicago (2002) | The Pianist (2002) |
| Green Book (2018) | A Star Is Born (2018) |
| Dances with Wolves (1990) | Goodfellas (1990) |
| Crash (2004) | Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Capote (2005) Good Night and Good Luck (2005) |
| How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Citizen Kane (1941) |
| Shakespeare in Love (1998) | Saving Private Ryan (1998) |
| Avatar (2009) | Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)
Inglourious Basterds (2009) The White Ribbon (2009) |
| Birdman (2014) | Boyhood (2014) |
| Going My Way (1944) | Double Indemnity (1944)
Laura (1944) Gaslight (1944) |
| Rocky (1976) | Taxi Driver (1976)
All The President’s Men (1976) Network (1976) |
Other Worst Oscar-Winning Movies of All Time
| Forrest Gump (1994) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) |
| Gladiator (2000) | American Beauty (1999) |
| Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) |
| Amadeus (1984) | Gandhi (1982) |
| Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Terms of Endearment (1983) |
| The Sound of Music (1965) | Ben-Hur (1959) |
| Rain Man (1988) | Million Dollar Baby (2004) |
| Cimarron (1930-31) | No Country for Old Men (2007) |
| Tom Jones (1963) | The Deer Hunter (1978) |
| Oliver! (1968) | West Side Story |
| Gone with the Wind (1939) | Midnight Cowboy (1969) |
| All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) |
| In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Gigi (1958) |
| My Fair Lady (1964) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) |
| A Man for All Seasons (1966) | Platoon (1986) |
Worst Oscar Winners – Movies That Were Not Worthy of Oscar
Every year people debate about the Oscar best pictures but every year there are some disappointments regarding the best and worst movies. Some worse movies win more Oscar awards than best movies because of mediocre projects or occasional head-scratchers. This is the reason why people are still mad about Crash (2004) winning an Oscar award, while there were plenty of other best movies nominated for the best picture award.
Various critics were not in favor of Titanic winning the most Oscar awards while there were other best picture nominees for the year. It is clear from the Academy that sometimes the actual best picture movie does not win all the time. This is why there are a lot of the worst Oscar-winning movies of all time.