8. Out Of Africa
Year: 1985 Fellow Nominees: Witness, The Color Purple, Prizzi's Honor, Kiss Of The Spider Woman In a weak year for Best Picture nominees, the weakest film of the lot took home the statuette back in 1985, when Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa beat out a pretty unremarkable board of fellow candidates (Witness is far and away the best film here, and the only one of the five that's anything even close to a great movie) to take top prize. The film, a lifeless romance between Meryl Streep's Danish plantation owner and Rober Redford's big-game hunter in postcolonial Kenya, was nominated for a staggering eleven Oscars, making Out of Africa the joint-fourth most nominated film of all time. What's more, it actually won seven of the categories it was nominated in, including triumphs for director Pollack and his screenwriter, Kurt Luedtke (the other were for Music, Cinematography, Art Direction, Sound and Set Design). Starring one of Meryl Streep's "just because she's Meryl Streep" nominations, and featuring a Robert Redford who frankly looks bored, Out of Africa is an instantly forgettable film; handsome enough, but ultimately unworthy as an Oscar nominee, let alone a winner. It's also a near-three-hour movie set in Africa, with Africa in its title, that makes little-to-no mention of actual African people.