Last week, I responded to a post at the In Contention blog celebrating the best picks the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made at their annual awards ceremony with my own version of the exercise. Certainly, we all knew that a follow up was inevitable, especially since, as much fun as it is to recall moment when the Oscar ceremony made you beam with satisfaction, it’s even more fun to rail against the misbegotten moments.

So here’s the opposite of what we did last week: the worst selections made by the Academy during the 00s.

Worst Best Picture: I maintain that A Beautiful Mind is the worst Best Picture winner of my lifetime. Indeed, I go so far as to say that it’s the only outright bad film that Academy has rewarded in that category since at least 1970. There have been other instances of films of questionable worthiness winning, and certainly many times that triumphant titles were clearly inferior to other options in among the nominees, but A Beautiful Mind is a flat-out rotten movie, dominated by an overly mannered performance by Russell Crowe and an insipid script by Akiva Goldsman that posits that the best means to overcome mental illness is to simply ignore the imaginary people you see. It’s an abominable literalization of a serious problem, lifelong struggle condensed to a story of cutesy willpower. And I thought victory of Gladiator the prior year was embarrassing. At least that movie was entertaining, in a shameless sort of way.

Worst Best Director: I’d like to add a little variety here, but like the Academy in most years, my director and picture choices march in lockstep. Ron Howard strikes me as someone who sticks with the script he’s given, which is great for the methodical precision needed for Apollo 13, but less so when a stronger hand and a more dominant personality coming through in the direction could clean up the weak spots in a movie. If nothing else, I blame him for seemingly never going up to Russell Crowe and saying “Let’s do another take, and this time give me a little less.”

Worst Best Actor in a Leading Role: I’m tempted to cite Russell Crowe’s win for Gladiator here, but I can concede that while I don’t consider that a great performance, it’s a deeply impressive display of star power, a demonstration of how force of personality can carry a role, and even an entire movie. Truthfully, the win in this category that I found most aggravating over the past ten years belongs to Forest Whitaker. It pains me a bit to type it out since I generally like Whitaker’s acting, but his work as Idi Amin is purely surface level, something for the doctor protagonist played by James McAvoy to bounce off of. It’s also a significant stretch to call this a leading role instead of a supporting one, both in terms of screen time and the way the character fits into the structure of the narrative.

Worst Best Actress in a Leading Role: I wouldn’t spend a whole lot of time arguing with anyone who selected either Nicole Kidman in The Hours or Reese Witherspoon for Walk the Line here, but both those actresses at least had some respectable moments in their respective films. On the other hand, Marion Cottilard is a yammering, squawking, over-emoting mess in La Vie en Rose. It’s one of those instances when voters seemed to confuse an award for best acting with an award for most acting.

Worst Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River is a sturdy enough, wholly overrated film, and Tim Robbins’ single note performance, complete with comically thick working class BAHstan, is one of the weaker elements. As with Whitaker, I like Robbins and I think he deserves the descriptor “Academy Award winner” before his name, but the work he actually won for is mediocre at best.

Worst Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Sure, she belts out the song with appropriate gusto and emotion, but is there really any question that Jennifer Hudson’s performance in Dreamgirls stands as one of the weakest to ever earn Oscar gold?

Worst of the Rest: Sure, I could pile onto Akiva Goldsman and A Beautiful Mind one more time, even making the argument that the screenwriter should have been eternally struck from Oscar eligibility for the crime of penning the screenplays for both of Joel Schumacher’s Batman films. But to mix it up, I’ll look to the equally miserable script for the goddamn little yellow bus that could, the execrable Little Miss Sunshine. Stitch together a lot of spare parts and strained quirkiness into a cinematic crazy quilt designed to capture attention in the thin, cold air of the Sundance Film Festival, and wind up with an Oscar for your efforts? No wonder so many people don’t take these awards seriously.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)