Ten films that give Oscar a bad name

IS “Crash” the worst movie ever to win the Oscar for best picture? Probably not, though it definitely reeks. Academy members had a chance to make history by honoring “Brokeback Mountain,” a trailblazing gay love story that also happened to be the best movie of 2005. Instead, they voted for arguably the worst of the five films nominated -- a ham-fisted expose of racial tensions in Los Angeles that pulled its punches by ending on an incongruous note of communion and redemption.

Disappointing as this decision was, however, it wasn’t the first time the academy got it all wrong. Indeed, in the 78 years that Oscars have been awarded, there are only a dozen or so times when the statuette was awarded to an undisputed classic such as “It Happened One Night,” “Gone With the Wind,” “Casablanca,” “All About Eve,” “On the Waterfront,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II.”

In other cases, the academy honored a good movie that wasn’t quite the best of the year -- the Oscar did not go to 1941’s “Citizen Kane,” frequently cited as the greatest movie in history, but “How Green Was My Valley” -- or hugely popular films that may have been kitschy but were still enormously entertaining, such as “The Sound of Music,” “Titanic” or “Gladiator.”

But in a surprising number of cases, the Oscar has gone to films that were mediocre or just plain bad.

To provide a little context for readers who are still perplexed or angry over this year’s upset, I’ve come up with an admittedly subjective list of the 10 worst movies to be voted best picture. It wasn’t an easy list to compile -- not because there were so few possibilities but because there were so many.

These first two really take the booby prize:

“The Greatest Show on Earth” (1952) was criticized even at the time for its cornucopia of cliches. Perhaps this circus-themed soap opera can be enjoyed as a guilty pleasure, full of unintended howlers, but is that what the Oscar was meant to signify? The Oscar that year might have gone to “High Noon,” “Moulin Rouge” (the good version, directed by John Huston), or to “Singin’ in the Rain,” which wasn’t even nominated but is now widely regarded as the greatest movie musical ever made.

“Around the World in 80 Days” (1956) also sits at the bottom of the barrel. Producer Mike Todd was the Harvey Weinstein of his day, a cunning showman who knew how to court Oscar voters. He also managed to attract a legion of stars to do cameos, a novelty at the time, but the movie is nothing more than a 167-minute travelogue, with inane and insulting comic relief provided by Mexican actor Cantinflas.

Grandiosity is a regrettable hallmark of several of the other worst movies to be named best picture:

“The Great Ziegfeld” (1936) first epitomized this trend. It’s a three-hour biopic with a few eye-popping production numbers and a couple of hours of padding.

“Ben-Hur” (1959) won a mind-boggling 11 Oscars. The chariot race is worth the price of admission, but the rest of this 212-minute epic is drenched in syrupy religiosity reminiscent of a Hallmark Christmas card. The movie was the weakest of the five nominees that year; “Anatomy of a Murder,” “The Diary of Anne Frank,” “The Nun’s Story” and “Room at the Top” are all more watchable today. And two movies that are more enduring than any of them -- “Some Like It Hot” and “North by Northwest” -- weren’t even nominated.

“The English Patient” (1996) is well photographed and well edited, but it’s also emotionally desiccated and downright ponderous (as “Seinfeld” fans well know). Director Anthony Minghella crafted a far more involving movie three years later, “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” which won exactly zero Oscars.

“Forrest Gump” (1994). Robert Zemeckis made a terrific piece of entertainment in “Back to the Future,” but he won his Oscar for this bloated, soft-headed trip though a few decades of American history. That year, the academy might have honored the electrifying “Pulp Fiction” but chose to play it safe. Quentin Tarantino and co-writer Roger Avary did win for best screenplay, but that was merely a consolation prize, like “Brokeback Mountain’s” directing and screenplay Oscars this year.

“You Can’t Take It With You” (1938). Some argue that the academy is a sucker for swollen, overlong epics. But in several instances, the Oscar went to small, quirky movies that were just as stupefying. This one is a case in point. Seen today, the antics of the world’s wackiest family seem about as engaging as the sound of fingernails raking a blackboard. Consider all the classic comedies of the ‘30s and early ‘40s that didn’t win Oscars -- such as “My Man Godfrey,” “Ninotchka” and “His Girl Friday” -- and then try to justify this one’s victory.

“Rocky” (1976) ladles on the whimsy as well. This is one of the most ridiculous of all Oscar choices, first because of the movies it beat: “Taxi Driver” and “Network.” It’s also hard to forgive the picture for spawning all those dreadful sequels, with yet another installment, “Rocky Balboa,” still to come.

“American Beauty” (1999) is a precious satire of suburbia (now there’s a fresh topic) that mustered the courage to criticize real estate agents and gun nuts. Overlooked that year: “The Insider” and “The Cider House Rules,” the latter of which took on a genuinely controversial subject -- abortion. On the plus side, the Oscar victory gave writer Alan Ball the clout to create HBO’s “Six Feet Under,” a far more incisive look at American mores.

Finally, there is space for one more movie on the list, and that belongs to:

“Crash” (2005). This jeremiad bemoaning our society’s intolerance is filtered through a fanciful plot built on a heap of outlandish coincidences. Can you really imagine audiences in another decade or two giving this movie, which somehow combines grandiosity and whimsical eccentricity, any more respect than they give “Rocky” or “The Greatest Show on Earth” today? Like all of these prize-winning embarrassments, “Crash” is destined to be remembered as just one more footnote in the annals of Oscar blunders.

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Farber has written several books on film and is a critic for Movieline’s Hollywood Life. Contact him at calendar.letters@latimes.com.