The Academy Awards are supposed to honor the very best movies of the year. So why do they get things so wrong so often?

Despite the cottage industry built around Oscar prognostication and analysis in recent years, no one has offered a truly satisfying answer to that question beyond the fact that, as we all know, democracy is messy and ugly. Did you see that tweet going around about the anonymous Oscar voter who still gets yelled at by their spouse every year because they voted for Jamie Lee Curtis in 2022?

The Academy Awards sounds very prestigious, and everyone treats it as this objective measurement of cinematic greatness, but when you get right down to it, that’s the whole problem in a nutshell. Beneath the glamour and the golden statues, It’s just a couple thousand people voting for random things, sometimes on a spur of the moment whim. How many Academy members do you think would like to take back some of their Oscar votes of the past? I wonder...

Are there any Oscar voters who’d like a mulligan on some of the 15 movies below, ScreenCrush’s picks for the absolute worst Academy Award Best Picture winners in history? We’re not talking about winners in some technical category like Best Visual Effects or Best Editing; these movies won the biggest Oscar of them all. Best Picture!

Out of the hundreds of movies released in a year, these were the best the Academy could find? I find that very hard to believe...

READ MORE: The Full List of this Year’s Academy Award Nominees