9 Films Designed To Win Oscars That Failed Miserably

Coming off the success of A Beautiful Mind, a largely fictionalized biography of a woman-beating paranoid schizophrenic, director Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman returned to the world of period-piece biopics that treated them like tinsel town royalty just four years earlier. Cinderella Man once again pairs Howard with Russell Crowe as boxing legend James J. Braddock.

An American underdog if there ever was one, Braddock was a depression-era boxer forced into manual labour after injuring his hand in the ring, only to fight his way back to be the heavyweight champion of the world.

Though reviews were kind enough and Paul Giamatti received a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, it failed to live up to the hype of A Beautiful Mind, let alone a title bout. It's not that there's anything particularly awful about Cinderella Man, it's just so by-the-numbers and commonplace that a Best Picture win would have been a blemish on an otherwise decent directorial record.

Today it's largely forgotten, its only legacy the auctioned-off jockstrap used by Crower that talk show host John Oliver bought and donated to the last Blockbuster in Alaska.