Oscar winners: The 10 worst best pictures

Newsflash: The Oscars don't matter. Oh, the golden guy glitters nicely on the mantel, and it's fun when pretty people we like give wacky acceptance speeches or wear swan dresses. But in terms of serving as actual tastemakers who know a great movie from a hole in the ground, well, members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have some work to do.

The academy gets more wrong than they do right. Case in point, here are some people who've never won an Oscar (that wasn't honorary): Stanley Kubrick, Peter O'Toole, Bill Murray, Peter Sellers, Alfred Hitchcock. You know who did win an Oscar? Cuba Gooding Jr.

Life isn't fair and neither are the Oscars, as evidenced by these 10 terrible best-picture winners.

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10. 'Hamlet' (1948, not rated)

Laurence Olivier is among acting's greats, especially when it comes to Shakespeare, so seeing him play the tortured Dane is not without its pleasures. But "Hamlet" brought nothing interesting to the table aside from Olivier's talents: The direction is stiff and overly stagey, and the text of the play altered and seriously abridged. And just as insulting as editing the Bard is that it beat out the gorgeous and provocative "The Red Shoes," an experimental master class of dance and Technicolor, and "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" ("Badges? We ain't got no badges!"). It was a foolish year for the academy to retreat to the comforts of tradition.

9. 'Shakespeare in Love' (1998, rated R)

This historically revisionist romance is a charming enough trifle, imagining a secret torrid love affair between a pretty-boy Shakespeare (in eyeliner!) and the betrothed Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow) while he pens "Romeo and Juliet." A silly Shakespeare for Dummies romance, it has enough charm to make for a fine matinee, but to award it with best picture in a year that saw the release of two of our finest films on World War II — "Saving Private Ryan" and "The Thin Red Line" — is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. Something the academy must have suspected, as Steven Spielberg was the one who walked away with the best-director Oscar.

8. 'Forrest Gump' (1994, rated PG-13)

These are fighting words, but it has to be said: "Forrest Gump" is a deeply wrongheaded film that never should have won best picture and doesn't deserve its continued acclaim and popularity, if only for introducing Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. to the world. An emotionally manipulative slice of American cornball, "Gump" presents happy ignorance as the key to living a good life as it guides its dimwit protagonist through major historical events, turning complex American history into a greatest-hits pop compilation. It also punishes a sexually abused woman with AIDS for having the temerity not to have chosen Forrest as a love interest sooner. One can argue with that interpretation, but you can't argue that it was better than "Pulp Fiction," a narratively innovative film that left an even bigger pop-culture footprint.

7. 'Out of Africa' (1985, rated PG)

No movie starring Meryl Streep is completely bereft of joy, and director Sydney Pollack is no slouch. But something went grievously wrong in the execution of this long, ponderous adaptation of Danish writer Isak Dinesen's account of her years in Africa. The landscape is as stunning as the pacing is glacial, and Robert Redford couldn't have been more miscast as the love interest. The film bested "The Color Purple" and "Witness," both of which have aged far better.

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6. 'Gigi' (1958, not rated)

The most sexist of the best-picture winners? Possibly. This sumptuous-looking Vincente Minnelli film is one of the last of the celebrated MGM musicals, so it's a shame that it opens with a lecherous old Frenchman leering at frolicking children while singing "Thank Heavens for Little Girls" for "they grow up in the most delightful way." That's gross enough, but then "Gigi" doubles down with a story about a teenage girl being groomed to be the perfect courtesan so she can land a big catch. Not even nominated? Hitchcock's "Vertigo," a brilliant film that actually acknowledges the predatory creepiness of molding a woman into a certain image for a man's pleasure ("Vertigo" also tops the "Sight & Sound" poll for greatest film of all time).

5. 'The Greatest Show on Earth' (1952, not rated)

What fun is a trip to the circus if you can't taste the cotton candy? Gasp in unison at the precarious trapeze artist? Complain about the elephant smell? No fun whatsoever, suggests this lavish bore of a 2½-hour-long Cecil B. DeMille production, all bloated showmanship and no actual thrills. And that it beat out the lean and mean "High Noon" and John Ford's romantic "The Quiet Man" makes it the least fun trip to the circus ever.

4. 'Around the World in Eighty Days' (1956, rated G)

If you're going to go for sweeping spectacles and overlong epics, "Giant," "The King and I" and "The Ten Commandments" are all agreeable choices — and they all were nominated in 1956. Instead, the academy inexplicably bypassed those worthier films and awarded gold to this ambling Jules Verne adaptation about a 19th-century English gentleman (David Niven) who accepts a wager to circumnavigate the world in 80 days. It's a three-hour-long tedious slog of a prim travelogue. Not even nominated? John Ford's "The Searchers," a film on the short list for all-time greatest Western.

3. 'Dances With Wolves' (1990, rated PG-13)

Kevin Costner's feathered mullet alone is a testament to how poorly his White Savior epic is aging. "Dances With Wolves" has become a sort of punch line for the sort of overblown vanity project the academy swoons for. Costner won best-directing and best-picture Oscars for this three-hour-long paean to the frontier, where his character, Lt. John J. Dunbar, befriends wolves and Native Americans at a remote Army outpost. It's a well-intentioned slog that would be easier to forgive if it hadn't pulled the rug out from under Martin Scorsese and "Goodfellas," arguably his greatest masterpiece.

2. 'Crash' (2005, rated R)

Perhaps the most damning criticism of Paul Haggis' woefully misguided treatise on modern American race relations comes from Haggis himself. In "Going Clear," Lawrence Wright's celebrated Scientology expose, the Toronto Film Festival premiere of the film is presented thusly: "As he watched the movie, Haggis was appalled. Everything that was wrong was glaringly apparent on the huge screen. He sat glumly waiting for it to end, calculating what could be salvaged." Of course, the courage of your artistic convictions has the tendency to fly out the window when your film is greeted with a standing ovation, even one it doesn't deserve. "Crash" instantly went from dark-horse upset, trumping the vastly superior and nuanced "Brokeback Mountain," to reviled footnote in Oscar history.

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1. 'Driving Miss Daisy' (1989, rated PG)

This is far from the worst film on the list. It has, at least, the wisdom not to carry on for three hours, and Jessica Tandy was not undeserving of her best-actress Oscar for playing a demanding Jewish woman who learns a lesson about race after forming a bond with her Black chauffeur (Morgan Freeman). It's not even the most patronizing and facile of the race films made by White directors on the list (see: "Crash"). What makes "Driving Miss Daisy's" win so intolerable is that it was released the same year as "Do the Right Thing," as good a movie on American race relations as has ever been made, and neither it nor director Spike Lee were nominated. The academy awarded what was comfortable, not what was challenging, and it's as good an argument exists for the Oscars' authoritative irrelevancy.