Every Best Picture Oscar Movie Winner Of 21st Century Ranked Worst To Best

24. Green Book (2018)

What should have won: Roma.

Peter Farrelly's Green Book is a competently made, good-looking road movie that's also thematically flimsy; a big issues drama with minimal tact and artificial emotions guiding it forward. 

A film in which legendary pianist Don Shirley (a redemptive, Oscar-winning Mahershalla Ali) plays second fiddle to his casually racist bodyguard (Viggo Mortensen) so the white guy can Listen and Learn Things about his ignorant prejudices, Green Book tracks the mismatched pair as they glide through the Deep South. 

With all the nuance of an anti-racist ad from the '90s, it creates a friendship that never becomes any more than surface (perhaps because the real pair were never as close as the film wants us to believe), and it staggers through its superficial profundity without ever finding anything new or perceptive to say about cultural differences or racism in the Jim Crow era; its conclusions thin and sentimentality naive. 

In a year where two insightful films about race - BlacKKKlansman and Black Panther - were nominated but lost the top prize, Green Book's unimaginative Best Picture win only feels that much more egregious.