5 Best Picture Winners That Critics And Fans NOW Admit Should've Lost

"Crash" Won Best Picture And Somehow Got LESS Popular Every Year Since

Crash beat Brokeback Mountain in one of the most notorious upsets in Oscar history, and the film's reputation has only cratered further with time. Even its own writer-director eventually admitted the win didn't sit right, and critics who liked it at the time still couldn't ignore its heavy-handed message.

"Green Book" Won Best Picture And Critics Were NOT Having It

Los Angeles Times critic Justin Chang didn't hold back, calling it the worst Best Picture winner in over a decade and blasting its treatment of racism as something that could just be "solved" with a road trip. The backlash was so immediate that Metacritic data showed it had the worst reviews of any winner since, well, Crash.

"Shakespeare in Love" Beat Saving Private Ryan And The Academy Still Regrets It

When Shakespeare in Love pulled off the shock win over Steven Spielberg's WWII epic, jaws hit the floor — and apparently they never fully recovered. When The Hollywood Reporter polled actual Academy members in 2015 and asked them to re-vote that year's Best Picture race, they picked Saving Private Ryan by a wide margin.

"The King's Speech" Beat The Social Network And The Gap Only Got Bigger

The King's Speech was the cozy, crowd-pleasing pick, but critics pointed out The Social Network had landed on 110 more year-end top-ten lists among the country's leading critics. The backlash arrived almost instantly, and years later many still call it one of the most disappointing Best Picture wins on record as Fincher's film keeps getting reappraised as a modern classic.

"Forrest Gump" Beat Pulp Fiction AND Shawshank And History Has Not Been Kind

Forrest Gump swept the 1995 Oscars, but Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption have gone on to become the more enduring cultural touchstones, with Shawshank currently sitting at #1 on IMDb's own user-ranked list. Even Tom Hanks has publicly wrestled with the discourse, conceding to the New York Times that calling his film a "totem of boomer nostalgia" next to Pulp Fiction's edge wasn't "not inaccurate."