2010s Movies by Plot

Zoomania in Germany

The one with Brie Larson was pretty bad, too.

I thought Room was great

Many bad films have won or been nominated for awards before for various reasons including, among other things, politics among the judging committee or in a broader sense, current social atmosphere, sympathy, celebrity, bigotry, media influence, assorted kinds of stupidity, and poor taste. But mostly politics.

roadrage, the Academy has thousands of members, most of which belong to the American film industry. They don't have time to see many of the nominees, and the movies they do see have already attracted some hype in town. Some members even vote for movies which they haven't seen, just because they know the makers or follow their colleagues' opinions. The Oscars are a popularity contest.

I can think of plenty of movies that should have been nominated for Best Picture that weren't. On the inverse, some of the nominees I've seen didn't deserve to be nominated, and in some cases, didn't deserve to win.

I agree somewhat with what's been said about the Oscars, however my husband and I try to see all the Best Picture nominees each year. We've had to sit through a lot of turkeys, but occasionally we find a gem we would never have watched otherwise - Midnight in Paris was one of those. It is the only Woody Allen film I've ever seen that made sense to me. We gauge a film's worth by how much conversation it generates on the drive home. The Reader and Brokeback Mountain caused our longest conversations - we were still discussing those for days afterwards. Ang Lee is a genius. He became my favorite director after seeing Sense and Sensibility.

ander, have you seen The Purple Rose of Cairo? It is my favorite Woody Allen film and more relatable than most of what he has done. I also like your way of measuring the worth of a movie. As for the Oscars, many of the nominees are good movies, but an Oscar doesn't guarantee quality. However, they surprised me this year; not only because their choice was a foreign-language, non-"Caucasian" movie, but even more because it was so unsentimental and sharply analytical. My inner cynic concludes that they tried to be politically correct and, like the blind chicken, also picked the right corn.

By the way, here are some links to back the claims mentioned above: Proof That Oscar Voters Are Clueless About Animation; Some Oscar Voters Haven’t Even Seen ‘Get Out’ Because They Don’t Think It’s Oscar-Worthy; 'I want an American director to win';

What Oscar Voters Are Voting For And Why

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I was going to add my thoughts on Allen, decided to look up a list of his films to refresh my memory, and realized I'd seen almost none of them.

ander: Black Panther is a good example of a film that got nominated for Best Picture and absolutely did not deserve it. It's easily in the bottom 5 of all films in the "Marvel Cinematic Universe." If you were going to watch any of those I'd start with Iron Man, instead. If the Academy were nominating super hero films for best picture that actually deserved the nominations then Infinity War or Endgame would have gotten a nod. Together they represent an unprecedented feat in cinema, though appreciating them fully is impossible without having seen the decade of films that preceded them. I know you're going to say that you're a grandmother and so can't enjoy these movies, but my mom is a grandmother many times over and she loves them. Her favorite I think is Guardians of the Galaxy.

Sounds like they just made a Hercule Poirot movie and changed his name and accent. Not that I'm complaining. I love his stories.

It's so much more than that. It's an underrated masterpiece.

I often am.... but... sometimes the majority is correct, you know. Johnson has made 3 big mainstream films. One was sort of okay but very very stupid and very lazily written (he also wrote it), one was decent, and one was so god-awful it simultaneously made the George Lucas prequels look like Citizen Kane and single-handedly destroyed the most lucrative franchise in Hollywood history. All three were overrated. The guy sucks.