Five Most Overrated Best Picture Winners

The Academy has created plenty of controversy in the past selecting such winners as Ordinary People over Raging Bull, Crash and Forrest Gump among others. This list represents my opinion of the five most overrated Best Picture winners. I have excluded those pictures that have lost luster over time (Cimarron,Greatest Show on Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, but rather films that maintained a healthy following.

5. Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

The universal acclaim for this movie still baffles me as the movie is a rather simple telling of a modern day Dickensian storyline. The movie certainly has some thrilling scenes, but beyond that the storyline is very conventional. A movie without memorable characters and forced antagonism along with a traditional frantic Hollywood ending that doesn't belong or fit with the rest of the movie. An entertaining movie, but worthy of high praise it is not.

4. The Sting (1973)

A rather strange anomaly in the Best Picture canon, a movie of pure entertainment winning the big prize. Considering some of the other challenging movies of the 70's to win, The Sting simply feels out of place. The movie contains a great cast and is a rather enjoyable, but neither is it memorable. Considering some of the other challenging and more memorable films of 1973, The Sting's victory seem all the stranger.

3. Chicago (2002)

More of Hollywood's apology for not rewarding Moulin Rouge the year before, Chicago provides a few entertaining musical numbers, without a story to care about. Musical sequences have nothing to do with the story and rarely flesh out the characters. By the way the characters are selfish and nasty, hardly traits to identify with. Granted I'm no fan of musicals, but the Academy could've done much better than this bland release, considering The Two Towers, About Schmidt, The Pianist, Far From Heaven and Road to Perdition were also released that year.
2.My Fair Lady (1964)

Just another musical I just don't get. Beloved for its star Audrey Hepburn, My Fair Lady is an overlong production of an overdone story.

1. Shakepeare in Love (1998)

I've started watching this three times, I fell asleep three times, enough said.