The Academy Awards are the ultimate symbol of quality in the film world. Or at least, they’re the most popular symbol of quality. Your parents know what an Oscar is, but they’re probably less familiar with fancy international film festivals that give out prestigious awards such as Cannes or Telluride. If a movie wins an Oscar, it’s a big deal, especially if it’s Best Picture, which often denotes what is, definitively, the best movie of that specific year. People tend to have opinions about what should win Best Picture, to say the least.
There are entire websites devoted to betting on which movies will win which awards, and numerous culture sites publish their own predictions to get in on the Oscar race. It's not that hard to guess which movies will win Oscars, though sometimes there are surprises. Sometimes, even the Oscars don't get it right. More often than not, movies that are usually pretty good go home with gold, sometimes, movies that are pretty bad go home with gold! Yes, subjectivity is everything, folks, which is why Suicide Squad somehow has an Oscar. You don’t know what it won it for, but you do know that it probably doesn’t deserve it.
While more often than not, movies that are usually pretty good go home with gold, sometimes, movies that are pretty bad go home with gold! Yes, subjectivity is everything, folks, which is why Suicide Squad somehow has an Oscar. You don’t know what it won it for, but you do know that it probably doesn’t deserve it.
Of course, there are a lot of bad movies that have won Oscars. The Academy is often biased towards certain types of movies, known as “Oscar bait.” There are several types of Oscar bait, the types of movies you always see winning awards: devastating family dramas, war movies, any movie with Meryl Streep in a lead role that doesn’t have her singing ABBA songs. These movies are usually good, not great, but the Academy will often be moved to nominate these movies despite their actual quality, sadly, and often ignore more innovative films by doing so.
Recently we’ve seen the Academy begin to actually nominate more innovative and interesting films, such as Get Out, Arrival, and Mad Max: Fury Road. But as always, there’s Oscar bait (and worse) nominated, sometimes even winning awards while more worthy films are snubbed. Here are the worst movies to win Oscars.