Year: 2010 Fellow Nominees: 127 Hours, Black Swan, The Fighter, Inception, The Kids Are Alright, The Social Network, Toy Story 3, True Grit, Winter's Bone The most recent entry on this list, 2010's The King's Speech at least boasts a group of decent performances in its midst, albeit ones nowhere near good enough to save them from director Tom Hooper's - a filmmaker who time and again proves himself an amateur behind the camera - shoddy hand. Naturally, he won the Best Director award to go along with The King's Speech's three other wins (Original Screenplay, for David Seidler, and Lead Actor, for Colin Firth, who's good here but was far better a year earlier in Tom Ford's A Single Man). A quintessential Academy-friendly prestige picture, The King's Speech beat out a whole host of great films (this was the second year that the Best Picture race had been extended to include up to ten films), not least another David Fincher masterwork in The Social Network, which to my mind is one of the three-or-four most important American pictures of the decade. Nominated for a whopping twelve Oscars overall, Hooper's film is actually the least deserving of all ten nominees (though admittedly I haven't seen The Kids Are Alright), and it still remains baffling that it actually won here, especially when you consider just how much better films like The Fighter and Black Swan are. It's not really a surprise that The King's Speech (or most of the films on this list, for that matter) did win, however, and in a list that has given us multiple things to be sad about in regard to the Oscars, this is what we should despair most.
