5 Worst Best Picture Oscars Winners of All-Time

Crash

When you think about movies that absolutely did not deserve to win an Oscar, there’s pretty much no way that Crash isn’t at the top of your list. You could make the argument that this isn’t just the worst movie to ever take home Best Picture, but probably the worst movie of its own decade. It’s that bad.

Crash is relentlessly preachy, but in the lamest way possible. As a film, it substitutes a lot of vague moralizing and handwringing for actually having something to say. It’s melodramatic to no real end. And every character is basically a political caricature. The story centers on a disparate group of Los Angeles residents over a 24-hour period. But by the end of the movie, almost every person in Crash ends up connected to one another in an exhausting narrative design that really wants a pat on the head for its cleverness. But it’s not the deep moral masterpiece it pretends to be. Most of it doesn’t even make sense. (For example: If a bigoted white cop pulls over a black couple on a power trip and sexually assaults the woman, but then he saves her life later, does that mean he’s still racist? Ugh, miss me with this mess.)

Crash insists for all our flaws, we’re all humans together. But there are more impactful cultural lessons to be found in a Sex and the City voiceover. Plus, this movie beat out gay cowboy love story Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture of 2005, and that was by any method of classification a much, much better film.