WORST of the Best Picture Oscar Noms (Only the '90s Edition)

Pauline Kael's post-retirement dismissal in an interview: "We're supposed to believe Holly Hunter found her independence playing New Age trills?"

I'm more surprised by how many of these I love (none of them winners, natch) than by how many shitty ones there are.

oh I don't mind The Silence of the Lambs (queer mullet guy sewing skin costume listening to Colin Newman) and Howards End (eighties respectability returns!).

i believe you also enjoy jfk

oh see I didn't even notice it.

Fine: JFK best of the nominees.

so what's the appeal of Shawshank -- the last time Tim Robbins could wear Griffin Mill fringe hair?

SotL is great!

Scent Of A Woman is a bloody awful movie Hoo Aah.

Speaking of which, the '90s were the heyday of Seinfeld--I count at least six of these where there were either throwaway references or sometimes whole subplots (e.g., making out at Schindler's List).

i don't think i could be with someone who doesn't like the english patient. enjoy sack lunch.

4 weddings

Gump.

Titanic

The fugitive vs ghost

what's wrong with The Fugitive besides Ford dyeing his hair

the fugitive is fucking awesome

My experience of the fugitive is passing out after the first 30 minutes and then waking up for the last 30 minutes and thinking it was a super disjointed confusing short movie, but I believe in reader response criticism, so my vote will stand

Also the girl I was dating at the time yelled at me for getting drunk and super high beforehand and snoring during the movie, so basically f u the fugitive, no Oscar for u

The Fugitive is textbook Tommy Lee Jones awesomeness

This list doesn't look as bad as I thought it would, though that is probably because of how much worse the 00s norms were in comparison.

still kinda amazed i saw all of these. i guess i saw a lot more movies before the internet came along to fill my life with its required daily dose of inanity.

fugitive is def one of those yeah i'll watch this on cable because i'm too lazy to change the channel

and it's always on cable

I don't really HATE The English Patient--there's about 90 mins worth that would've made for a good 1940s studio genre pic in there somewhere--but it's bloated as hell and contains some truly groan-worthy writing.

Haven't seen The Fugitive since it was in theatres, when I remember not liking it as much as In The Line of Fire.

hmm this isn't too bad a list, all things considered. if forced to, i could endure most of these again, but the one that would cause me the most dread is Life is Beautiful.

I can't actually be the only one voting for American Beauty....? Though objectively Dances With Wolves might be worse, I danced between those two.

There are lots of these which I think must be bad but which I can't be sure whether I've seen them or not (e.g. Scent of a Woman,Awakenings,Beauty and the Beast) but my feeling is that if it were REALLY bad enough to compete with AB and DwW, I'd remember the unpleasantness of watching it.

Full disclosure: there are only 11 of these I'm sure I've seen, and maybe 5 more that I may well have seen.

american beauty would definitely make any shortlist i made

but gump is just out-and-out evil

i could stomach gump until the maudlin last 30 minutes or so. unforgivable.

let's make this painful:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_1bUWWgsbLZM/TFMed7b_3BI/AAAAAAAAACk/_cXRnSc9B4s/s1600/american+beauty.jpeg

Gump is another one I haven't seen since it was in theatres, but I have a feeling that if I watched it again now it would be too weird for me to out and out hate. Really, if this weren't the hit it was, we'd remember it as a camp curio today.

I love Life is Beautiful. Mainly the first half, but the last half ain't half bad either.

i only have vague memories of it, to be honest. it's more the idea of seeing it again that i fear.

Awakenings. I just want to again remind you that this was nominated for Best Picture.

lots of terrible movies have won best pic tho

Kind of want to vote Apollo 13 because I remember sitting in a theatre full of adults who were laughing their asses off at the piss being ejected into space and feeling mortified.

Pretty great list.

I really need to see Gump again. I loved it at the time, but I was like ten so what the hell did I know. Has there ever been a movie that was praised so highly at the time and then suffered such a huge backlash since? It's the Be Here Now of movies.

Something like a quarter of this list is great movies that it's been too long since I watched. Totally missed The Fugitive! Which I did see recently and which kicked major ass.

American Beauty is definitely the winner on the list in terms of the u-turn of my first 'oh, wow' impression to a later 'ugh, no' impression.

you seriously cannot fuck with any of these:

The Silence of the Lambs
The Crying Game
The Fugitive
Quiz Show
The Shawshank Redemption
Babe
Fargo
L.A. Confidential

"Quiz Show" is my vote for "movie on this list which is basically perfect and which the world seems to have forgotten."

rob morrow with worst boston accent evah

"WOY didn't ya TESTIFOY?"

life is beautiful, no contest. every other movie on the list does something better than life is beautiful, and none are even close to being as offensive

gump is way better than most of these. especially braveheart. you guys are really sleeping on braveheart. for example, you can't vote for titanic when braveheart's right there. you just can't.

Trying to remember whether Gump was better or worse than that Benjamin Button remake they did.

Actually, that's unfair. Gump and BB are more like those two Nickelback songs you can play simultaneously and hear the extent to which the exact same formula was employed twice with different words.

i voted from the heart: jerry maguire

If you watch Braveheart as pure fantasy instead of historical drama it's pretty good

I won't defend anything on your shit list, but A Few Good Men and Scent of a Woman are two I don't mind, almost certainly owing to the fact that I was 14 when they came out and they looked and talked like real grown-up films that made me feel smart for enjoying them. Had they been released even five years later, I don't know that I would have even seen them, let alone liked them. As it stands, I still prefer either to Apollo 13 and Titanic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjJzOpe9xEg

I had to get pretty deep into the list (L.A. Confidential, of which I only have very vague memories) before I found a movie I'd want to watch again.

Four Weddings and a Funeral is listed twice (a guilty pleasure of mine to be honest) and Scent of a Woman isn’t that bad. Shakespeare in Love, however, is war crime worthy.

wtf Apollo 13 is great

smdh @ you Ron Howard haters

Shakespeare In Love is a fine, frothy romcom with Stoppard jokes in

Sitting in a theatre as a bunch of adults crack up over the piss-in-space scene in Apollo 13 is one of the most mortified I've ever felt during a movie.

*cracked

Four Weddings and a Funeral is listed twice (a guilty pleasure of mine to be honest) and Scent of a Woman isn’t that bad. Shakespeare in Love, however, is war crime worthy.

― Your dad's Carlos Boozer and you keep him alive (fionnland), Sunday, February 3, 2010

lol -- like I wrote on Facebook, that typo might be Freudian: I don't know what to think about that film.

It's definitely one of the two non-heinous theatrical films by Richard Curtis.

https://ih0.redbubble.net/image.417306250.0964/flat,550x550,075,f.jpg

Do you force yourself to watch all of them? I haven't done that to myself with The Green Mile yet (but I plan to watch the imdb top 250 this year), and a few minutes of Awakenings on TV were enough for me.

If we're judging on the basis of # of times watched and how frequently I feel the urge to revisit, The Fugitive is pretty much the hands-down winner of this lot for me. It's joined the Robocop/Dazed & Confused pantheon of 'movies I am never not in the mood to watch'.

Oh wait, this is a thread for the worst, how do I salvage my mistake...

The Fugitive ya right more like The F-U-gitive

Robocop: Dazed & Confused.

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--ATsl-UD6--/18dxh3czpp6tpjpg.jpg

I have only had 4 beers, I am not deterred from climbing MoonTower

xpost I don't know why I did a backslash instead of a comma. But I'm pretty sure that hypothetical movie mashup is in fact The Entertainment as featured in the novel Infinite Jest (i.e. I would watch it until I was dead from entertainment).

The Piano is pretentious twaddle. The Insider is fake grittiness.