7 of the Most Divisive Oscar Wins of All Time

The Oscars are practically designed to court controversy. Art is subjective, after all, and officially declaring that one movie is better than all others released in a certain year is always going to create division.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences handed out little gold statuettes to select winners for the very first time in 1929, and since then, the Oscars have become an increasingly elaborate affair. Today, studios embark on massive campaigns to secure nominations and wins, and pundits pour tons of energy into predicting who will take home the awards. Each year, some people are ecstatic while others are disappointed by the results.

Still, some Oscar winners have been far more controversial than others. Here are seven of the most divisive Oscar winners of all time.

1. Crash Wins Over Brokeback Mountain
2. Green Book Wins Over Roma
3. Shakespeare in Love Wins Over Saving Private Ryan
4. Roman Polanski Wins Best Director for The Pianist
5. Forrest Gump Wins Over Pulp Fiction
6. Bohemian Rhapsody Wins Best Film Editing
7. Driving Miss Daisy Wins Best Picture

Crash Wins Over Brokeback Mountain

Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain was favored to win Best Picture in 2006, but as the Oscars approached, rumors about homophobia in the Academy began to emerge. Based on a short story by Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain tells the story of two cowboys and their tortured, passionate romance, but in the lead-up to the ceremony, the film received public backlash from Academy members and actors, including Ernest Borgnine and Tony Curtis, due to the queer relationship at its center. 

Ultimately, the movie Crash took home the award for Best Picture. Crash was already controversial; written by Paul Haggis, it explored race in Los Angeles and received some pushback for its depiction of sexual violence and race. Its win at the Oscars that year was so surprising that presenter Jack Nicholson mouthed the word “woah” after reading the film’s name during the show.

Green Book Wins Over Roma

In 2019, the movie Green Book won Best Picture in a surprise victory over Alfonso Cuarón’s widely favored Roma. Green Book, which told the story of a Black jazz pianist (Mahershala Ali) and his white driver (Viggo Mortensen), received pushback for what some called an oversimplified and sanitized portrayal of racism. At the time, some theorized that Roma may have lost out because it was a Netflix feature.

Shakespeare in Love Wins Over Saving Private Ryan

The 1999 Oscars was a stacked affair. Shakespeare in Love, Saving Private Ryan, and Life Is Beautiful were all nominated for Best Picture, and The Truman Show wasn’t even nominated at all. Still, Saving Private Ryan, an emotional drama that follows a group of soldiers looking for a missing comrade during World War II, was strongly favored to win.

Instead, the award went to Shakespeare in Love, a romantic comedy about William Shakespeare falling for a woman who helps inspire him to write Romeo and Juliet. The win was shocking, and some attributed its triumph to an aggressive marketing campaign spearheaded by disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein.

Roman Polanski Wins Best Director for The Pianist

In 2003, Roman Polanski took home the award for Best Director while a fugitive from the U.S. justice system. The director pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a minor in 1977 but fled before his sentencing, and has resided primarily in France in the years since. Polanski won Best Director at the Oscars for The Pianist, a film starring Adrien Brody as a Jewish concert pianist who survives the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland. Decades later, the director—who has been the subject of numerous other accusations of sexual assault—was formally expelled from the Academy in 2018 and went on to unsuccessfully sue the organization.

Forrest Gump Wins Over Pulp Fiction

Forrest Gump is a beloved and heartfelt comedy classic that follows a man named Forrest Gump as he manages to play a role in all the major events of the 1960s and 1970s. Pulp Fiction is a gritty and sordid cinephile’s delight that tracks two hit men, a gangster’s wife, and two bandits as they wreak havoc across Los Angeles. Naturally, some cinephiles were enraged when Forrest Gump won Best Picture over Pulp Fiction in 1995. Still others continue to argue that The Shawshank Redemption, which was also in the running that year, was the best of all three films. 

Bohemian Rhapsody Wins Best Film Editing

Bohemian Rhapsody, a biopic that told the story of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, netted star Rami Malek the award for Best Actor at the 2019 Oscars, and it also received awards for Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Film Editing. Some people contested Malek’s win, saying that it should have gone to Bradley Cooper for his performance in A Star Is Born, but the award that received the most pushback was Best Film Editing.

After the film received the award, a viral YouTube video called “Bohemian Rhapsody’s Terrible Editing - A Breakdown” sparked widespread discussion amongst film critics and editors about just how poorly edited the film actually is. “Counterintuitively, the Oscar sometimes ends up going to films with the most noticeable editing, which generally is not the film with the best editing,” says YouTuber Thomas Flight in the video. “It’s pretty clear which one Bohemian Rhapsody is.” 

Even the film’s editor John Ottman, who took home the Oscar, has admitted that there are things he would change about his work on the film. “Whenever I see it, I want to put a bag over my head,” he told The Washington Post of a particular scene that Flight critiques in his YouTube video, which shows the band meeting their future manager John Ried and features over 60 cuts in less than two minutes. “Because that’s not my aesthetic. If there’s ever an extended version of the film where I can put a couple scenes back, I will recut that scene!”

Driving Miss Daisy Wins Best Picture

Driving Miss Daisy took home the award for Best Picture in 1990. Though many critics admit the movie was decent, its win sparked controversy due to claims that it offered a sanitized and simplistic take on racism—much like Green Book, which is, ironically, another Best Picture about race and driving criticized for being too simplistic. The movie’s win was also criticized because that same year, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing had garnered extensive Oscar buzz for its rawer portrayal of police brutality and racially-driven violence, but it was not even nominated for Best Picture.

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