worst film to ever win best picture

I watched CHICAGO again recently after a long time, and was still jazzed by it. It's simultaneously jazzy and fun, while being dark and cynical and satirical. Maintaining that tone for a whole film was pretty significant.

I loved CHICAGO and I remember when it came out there were a number of accusations of it "ripping off" MOULIN ROUGE (as if; those two movies are like matter and antimatter), and I think there were some others who were turned off by how sleazy and manipulative the "heroes" are (that's the point, it's satire). Whatever, I still love this movie.

And Cecil B. DeMille's THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH is also ranked by many as THE worst film to ever win an Oscar; it really was more of a body-of-work award to DeMille rather than on that film's merits alone. (Actually, I checked; it's now largely seen as winning because the REAL best film of the year was HIGH NOON but because of its anti-McCarthy allegory nobody wanted to vote for it, so DeMille's tripe won out in the end. Jeez, who says Oscar voting isn't political?)


Facts need to come before certainty.

Quite obviously the people who LOVE Chicago had never seen SWEET CHARITY and CABARET. Bob Fosse was the innovator of stage musical transported onto the big screen. Chicago is flat and boring in my book. It looked like it was made for TV.

Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge is in a completely different class from this mediocre effort.

I agree. At least The Hours was much better.

I can't see how people could imagine Chiacgo is up there with the greatest musicals such as The Sound of Music.

I find for the most part that people who like musicals love this movie and people who don't care for musicals can take it or leave it or simply hate it.
And 'best' is subjective. Some people (and the Academy, for sure) think Best Picture has to be important, serious. It is good every now & then to see something fun get rewarded. The Hours is a very good movie....fun, it ain't.

I don't think that Chicago is even close to be the worst film ever to win. I think the only thing that generates all the hate is that it won to such great films as the other nominees (I still can't believe Gangs didn't win anything).

P.S.: The worst is obviously Crash.

I still can't believe this piece of garbage won over "The Pianist".

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Disagree. It was the superior film of the five.

And about bad Oscar winners... IMO "Argo" is worse, "Shakespeare in Love" is worse, "The King's Speech" is worse, "The Hurt Locker" is worse, "Slumdog Millionaire" is worse, "A Beautiful Mind" is worse... and a lot more.