Crocker Jarmen

Movies that won Best Picture without winning for both Best Director and Best Screenplay (Original or Adapted):
Around the World in Eighty Days
The Greatest Show On Earth
Ben-Hur
West Side Story
Lawrence of Arabia
My Fair Lady
The Sound of Music
In the Heat of the Night
Oliver!
The Godfather
Rocky
The Deer Hunter
Chariots of Fire
Platoon
Driving Miss Daisy
Braveheart
The English Patient
Titanic
Shakespeare in Love
Gladiator

Mr. Flix

I enjoy these games... even though I suck at them.

Crocker Jarmen

I'm uncomfortable with people saying the reason Brokeback Mountain didn't win was because of homophobia.

If the academy is so homophobic, why did they give it so many nominations in the first place?

If it had won, would you be saying, "I can see why Brokeback Mountain won (one word: racism)"

Brokeback Mountain didn't win for the same reason stuff like Raging Bull and 2001 and Fargodidn't win--because people were so focused on choosing the best film of the year, they were blind to movies that were amongst the best films of the decade... maybe of all time.

Shannon Nutt

I think they may have meant "or" instead of "and"

davidh777

I have a type of question!

Shannon Nutt

I've always thought it was a movie that, other than the fact that the two main characters were gay, was a rather unoriginal story. Put a female in one of the lead roles, and it's just a LIFETIME movie. It's well-directed, but I've never thought the story was all that remarkable.

Felt the same way about THE BUTLER this year. It didn't get ignored at the Oscars because of racism - it got ignored because it's just not that great of a movie.

Count Dooku

I guess the sentence should be:
It was the last movie to win Best Picture without also winning either an Academy Award for both Best Director or "Best Screenplay" (Original or Adapted) until Gladiator in 2001.

If anyone has a wikipedia account, you should edit it.

Count Dooku

I guess this is one of those instances where I am aware of a piece of trivia that I totally expected that the knowledgeable movie fans would be aware of as well.

davidh777

Chalk me up as ignorant!

Count Dooku

I've always thought that Crash won because the movie in its plot and themes especially appealed to all the Academy members who live in LA.

Think about how you would feel about a movie that you thought was saying something important and insightful about the city you live in.

Shannon Nutt

I think it's more of a case of those knowing also knowing that most of the forum members playing this game weren't going to pick that film as their answer. It was the first film to pop into my head, because I've heard so many critics mention it as an undeserving winner...but I've also been a member of DVD Talk long enough to know how loathed CRASH is around here.

Count Dooku

I did say it was a piece of trivia.

Before the movie Ed Wood was made, the notion that Plan 9 From Outer Space was the worst movie ever made was a similar (although admittedly more widely known) piece of trivia.

It's just one of those things that I expected would have been conventional wisdom for a lot more players in this game.

Added: I was also really surprised that no one named Schindler's List as the best B/W movie. If not for the "back in the old days" line, that would have been my answer.

Drexl

If only they had felt that way about L.A. Confidential.

wishbone

You've played enough Sheep games to know how this works by now.

Congrats sauce07 for the win and congrats to Crocker for hosting his fifth game.

Count Dooku

It's sort of how I viewed the movie Spanglish. I imagined a certain demographic of people in LA seeing that as saying something thoughtful about their everyday lives.

Count Dooku

I thought post-game whining was part of how this works.

dino88

If that's the case...

No one?

Damfino

Well, OK, I tried going with my perceived forum bias for Return of the King and yet Godfather I managed to take it!

Congrats to sauce07 for the win and Crocker for running the game!

dhmac

I know that The Greatest Show On Earth is generally considered by critics to be the worst Best Picture winner ever, but I was trying to go with "The Worst Movie To Win That Will Be The Most Sheepy" so that means it would have be something that won in roughly the past 20 years or less.

Crocker Jarmen

All the movies voted for where good choices, as I remember each as a controversial winner.

For me, I would have picked Gladiator, which I thought was a flat-out terrible movie. While I agree that there were much better movies than winners like A Beautiful Mind or Shakespear in Love, the movie to win best picture has always been Good, a movie I enjoyed seeing. Gladiator is the lone best picture winner from the last 20 or so years that I genuinely thought stunk as a movie.

Damfino

That's what I was thinking too, which is why I passed on Greatest Show on Earth and voted for The English Patient, primarily because it was a struggle for me to stay awake during that one.

Crocker Jarmen

I remember the backlash when The English Patient got nominated and Sack Lunch was snubbed.