5 Worst Best Picture Oscars Winners of All-Time
By Lacy Baugher
How Green Was My Valley
By almost anyone’s account, How Green Was My Valley is the worst Best Picture winner of all time.
To be fair, this view has almost nothing to do with the movie itself. The 1941 film is actually a solid adaptation of the Robert Llewellyn novel of the same name. Starring Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O’Hara, Roddy McDowall and more, it tells the story of a hard-working mining family living in 19th-century Wales. How Green Was My Valley is one of those movies that wrestles with the decline of the working class way of life, or “the majesty of plain people”, as the New York Times review put it in 1941. It’s not a bad film, by any stretch of the imagination.
It’s just not Citizen Kane.
Yes, How Green Was My Valley took home the Best Picture Oscar instead of what is generally accepted to be the greatest movie ever made. That’s one way to live forever as a Jeopardy answer, I guess.
The major reason that Citizen Kane lost was supposedly the ongoing feud between Orson Welles and William Randolph Hearst. Wells, along with screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, based Charles Foster Kane, the newspaper tycoon at the center of the story, on Hearst. This infuriated the media mogul. Hearst, in retaliation, waged an extensive campaign to discredit and ruin the movie. This included a massive push against the film’s Oscar chances. It involved everything from forbidding his papers from mentioning the film to trying to discredit Welles at every possible opportunity. Seriously, the story of just how much Hearst hated this movie is pretty wild.
And this campaign clearly worked, even if poor How Green Was My Valley gets blamed most often for Citizen Kane’s loss.