Oscars: Every Best Picture Winner Ever Ranked From Worst To Best
90. Around The World In 80 Days (1956)
It's hard to know what the Academy was smoking when they awarded Michael Anderson's devastatingly mediocre, three-hour slog of an adventure film Best Picture, in a year where the award should've gone to Giant, The King and I or The Ten Commandments. Or, you know, The Searchers, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and a bunch of others classics which weren't even nominated.
Though David Niven makes for a fun-ish Phileas Fogg, there are moments of inspired production design and the battery of cameos provide some cheap chuckles (Buster Keaton shows up as a train conductor!), it is an oppressively bland film with an oddly lacking sense of adventure and some horrendous racial caricatures that are risible, offensive or both.
Advertisement