Alright, you’ve already seen our picks for the five best BEST Picture years, the Oscar years that you can actually look back on and not wince if you’re a fan of movies and just-deserved prizes. So let’s keep it simple: here are the five worst years below, the ones that make fans of cinema rather crazy and that have had people bitching about it ever since.
The 5 Worst Best Picture Line-Ups
1949
The Best Picture Nominees:
“All The King’s Men” (winner), “Battleground,” “The Heiress,” “A Letter To Three Wives,” “Twelve O’Clock High”
What Else Could They Have Nominated?
“Adam’s Rib,” “The Third Man,” “Kind Hearts & Coronets,” “Manon,” “On The Town,” “Passport To Pimlico,” “She Wore A Yellow Ribbon,” “White Heat”
Why Is It One Of The Worst? Anyone who thinks that the Oscars picking sub-standard fare is a recent development needs to cast their mind further back; because when the not-all-that-great “All The King’s Men” (remade less successfully with Sean Penn in 2006) is the best of your five nominees, you’re in trouble. Made up of two post-WW2 patriotic crowd-pleasers in “Battleground” and “Twelve O’Clock High,” and two forgettable melodramas in “The Heiress” and “A Letter To Three Women,” it’s a positively dull five, especially given that British cinema was having something of a renaissance, Jimmy Cagney was giving his signature role in “White Heat” and there was even an ace musical in “On The Town.”
1956
The Best Picture Nominees:
“Around The World In Eighty Days” (winner), “Friendly Persuasion,” “Giant,” “The King & I,” “The Ten Commandments”
What Else Could They Have Nominated?
“War and Peace,” “The Searchers,” “High Society,” “La Strada,” “Baby Doll,” “Beyond A Reasonable Doubt,” “Bob Le Flambeur,” “Forbidden Planet,” “The Killing,” “A Kiss Before Dying,” “The Red Balloon,” “Seven Samurai,” “Somebody Up There Likes Me,”
Why Is It One Of The Worst? At the very peak of Hollywood’s television-battling streak of megabudgeted blockbuster epics and museums, few years were quite as grim as this one. It’s not as if they were lacking in quality studio product: “The Searchers” was released in the same year. The fucking “Searchers.” And yet only one of the five, “Giant,” is really worth its place, the other being impressive spectacles (or in the case of “Friendly Persuasion,” a lesser knock-off of “High Noon,” right down to the presence of Gary Cooper), but fairly insubstantial. And “Around The World In Eighty Days,” is generally a film that tops polls of the worst Best Picture winner ever.