- Gandhi (1982)
This movie by Richard Attenborough is horrendously boring. It’s a perfectly fine movie, but definitely not deserving of an academy award. After watching the movie, many people forgot that they watched it, as it was incredibly uneventful. It’s just a visual retelling of Gandhi’s struggles, and nothing more. When you look at the competition it had in 1983 with ET and the Verdict it’s just not a generationally significant movie like the other two, and has pretty much been entirely lost to history.
- The King’s Speech (2010)
This is actually a great movie. The King’s Speech is all about speech defects and historical events, but it falls short compared to its competition. However, per usual, the Academy disagrees. With movies such as Inception, Toy Story 3 and the Social Network being in the same year, there is no way that this movie should’ve won. Once again, a perfectly fine movie, maybe the best on this list, but it absolutely snubbed much better movies.
- How Green Was My Valley (1941)
This is an incredibly mediocre movie about the danger of working in mines. That’s about all it has going for it. This also somehow beat Citizen Kane which was asinine and proves how the Academy is terrible. Most of the movies on this list are fine, but terrible picks for Best Picture. Not much to say about this one, very straightforward movie that doesn’t have a lot going on.
- Anora (2024)
Anora centers around a stripper of the same name almost finding love, and then finding out that it wasn’t actually love. There are some other more mafia-esque elements of the movie, but otherwise that’s it. It’s a pretty good watch, but when you look into the 2025 Oscars and how the Academy didn’t even watch some of the competing movies like Dune 2. This could’ve been a good pick, but if the Academy isn’t even bothering to watch the movies it feels like they’re just giving the win away to whichever movie they happened to watch.
- Shakespeare in Love (1998)
Shakespeare in Love is a fan-fiction about Shakespeare writing his plays based on the love of his life who never actually existed. This is basically revisionist history but a movie. Some people in the world believe that this is a nonfiction movie and is actually a retelling of how the plays were written which speaks volumes about the impact of this movie on society. Somehow this beat Saving Private Ryan which is a cinematic masterpiece while this is not a good movie.
- Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
In 2008 this might’ve been a better movie but it has not aged well. This movie is filled to the brim with racist stereotypes of India, as well as terrible writing. It is also filled with toilet humor making it even worse to win best picture. This is especially taking into account that The Dark Knight which Heath Ledger literally died for wasn’t even nominated for best picture. That is absolutely outrageous and this movie probably shouldn’t have been nominated, much less released to the public.
- The Shape of Water (2017)
I really like thinking about how this movie was made. “What if we took The Creature from the Black Lagoon, but made it about the fish guy constantly making out with a female human?” Half of this movie is just the mutant fish abomination having intercourse with some random lady. I suppose that there were not really any good movies during this year, but anybody that watches this movie and says “Oh yeah, that was inspiring and deserving of best movie all year” is either making fun of this atrocity or has incredibly strange tastes.
