10 Best Picture Oscar Winners That Aged Terribly

What was going through the Academy's mind when they picked this one as the best picture of 2002? Admittedly, 2002 was not a stellar year for the motion picture industry, but this vacant, indulgent, and empty musical adaptation directed by Rob Marshall might even outdo Braveheart and Crash for inexplicable Academy Award decisions.

Plenty of viewers and film fans were eagerly watching the awards in anticipation that Martin Scorcese might finally win the best director nod, for Gangs of New York. Now that film certainly didn’t deserve to win (it’s easily one of his worst), but in comparison to the vacant eye candy that Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renee Zellweger fronted that year, Gangs felt like it was the Magnificent Ambersons of the early 21st century.

All that aside, though, why has it aged poorly? Well, it now feels very dated because of its own legacy. Since Chicago was so successful, the film helped kickstart a new wave of big screen musical adaptations as filmmakers became desperate to recapture the kudos and awards that the film reaped.

This has, unfortunately, lead to such filmic horrors as Gerard Butler as the Phantom of the Opera, Johnny Depp attempting to sing in Sweenye Todd, a Rock of Ages movie with Tom Cruise, a Mamma Mia movie, and possibly the worst adaptation of Rent imaginable.

Musicals are now so common, and most of the time so bad, that any freshness or originality that might have been present when Chicago debuted, has long vanished under the crippling weight of further awful broadway adaptations.

Today, Chicago feels like just another crappy musical in an overcrowded market of even crappier musicals (La La Land aside, OBVIOUSLY).