8 Terrible Films That Somehow Won The Best Picture Oscar

2. Slumdog Millionaire

Year: 2008 Fellow Nominees: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, The Reader Moving on to some bona fide poverty porn now, and Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, which we all somehow seemed to lose our collective sh*t about when it was released. Nominated for ten Oscars in 2008, Boyle's film won eight, including this time a directorial win for Boyle, nominated here for the first time as Best Director (other wins inc. Best Adapted Screenplay, Music, Editing, Cinematography, Score, and Song). Beating out one genuine masterpiece in David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (an assertion I stand by and will defend always), Boyle's crowdpleaser too beat out Frost/Nixon, a whip-smart entertainer that would've also made a far better Best Picture winner (Gus Van Sant's Milk was always going to be a little too esoteric). Filled with average performances and an annoying, jaunty style of directing, Slumdog panders to the worst kind of populist filmmaking, imbuing itself with just enough surface-level awareness for it to be taken seriously, but nowhere near enough depth into such issues that it becomes possible to truly care about them. A slight sprinkling of good-natured heart saves Slumdog from being an outright awful movie, but as Best Picture winners go, it's pretty bad.