10 Smart Movies Which Are Secretly Dumb

10. American Hustle

There's perhaps no single movie in the last decade that's been put on a pedestal as undeservedly as American Hustle.

David O. Russell's slick, superficially smart crime comedy centers around the FBI Abscam sting operation of the late 1970s and early 1980s, but the real scam worth investigating is how Russell performed a psy-op that convinced the Academy to give this thing 10 (!) Oscar nominations - of which it won zero.

The film has a bit of a smug, self-satisfied air to it which clearly relishes toying with audiences as they attempt to figure out exactly what's true and what isn't.

But when you get down to it, American Hustle is really just dude-bro Scorsese: a well-crafted and brilliantly acted imitation of Goodfellas that doesn't really have any original ideas of its own.

And that's totally fine - American Hustle is a perfectly enjoyable movie within that context, yet how aggressively it was championed by the Academy as a serious work of Cinema that's just plain smarter than its audience did its long-term reputation no favours at all.