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Robert Cattani: Three Films That Shouldn’t Have Won the Best Picture Oscar

Hello folks, film critic Robert Cattani here. The whole world is hot and bothered with Oscar fever these days, and as Hollywood’s most famous golden statuette rears its handsome head to an adoring movie-going public, the ten Best Picture nominees – Toy Story 3, Winter’s Bone, True Grit, Black Swan, The Kids Are All Right, The Fighter, 127 Hours, Inception, The Social Network, and The King’s Speech – are all pitted against one another for the Academy award. It’s common knowledge, however, that the Oscar win doesn’t make the winning film “better” than all other nominees. Oscar nods are a product of critics’ choices, Academy votes, and the best interests of the industry’s bigwigs.

On that note, I bring you three films that I, Robert Cattani, believe should not have won the Oscar, and the films that much more deserved the recognition in their stead.

Titanic (1997) – Director James Cameron’s obnoxiousness takes a backseat to this forgettable mess that invested more in set design than in story. Still, it won over Curtis Hanson’s LA Confidential, a masterful whodunit set in Hollywood’s golden age that put Russell Crowe and Guy Pierce on the map.

Forrest Gump (1994) – This crowd pleasing love letter to Baby Boomers robbed the Oscar from no less than three great films – the wonderfully moving Shawshank Redemption, Robert Redford’s brilliant loss-of-innocence drama Quiz Show, and Quentin Tarantino’s explosive, witty, and overall badass indie cult classic Pulp Fiction.

Dances With Wolves (1990) – At the height of his career, Kevin Costner starred and directed this hammy quasi-epic, and it beat out Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, a brutal, energetic mob film whose mood, style, and storytelling became so influential that film students of today are still using it for critical analyses studies.

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