The Worst Movie To Win Best Picture At The Oscars, According To Rotten Tomatoes

Over the years, that shiny gold statuette known as the Oscar has been handed out to a wide variety of films, including certain winners that plenty of film fans might think didn’t even deserve the little shiny plaque the actual awards are nailed to. For example, not even filmmaker Paul Haggis thinks his movie “Crash” should’ve taken home the Best Picture Oscar. It’s not up to him, though! This is the internet, after all. But how are we to determine the worst film to have won that coveted coveted man-shaped medal (don’t make it weird)? According to Rotten Tomatoes’ metrics, the worst Best Picture Oscar winner of all time also happens to be the first of its kind in a different but related respect.

Long before James Cameron was crowned king of the world thanks to “Titanic” and the wildest Oscars moment of our lifetime (i.e. the “La La Land” and “Moonlight” mixup), 1929’s “The Broadway Melody” won what is now known as the Best Picture Oscar, a whole 10 years before the Academy Awards themselves were nicknamed the “Oscars.” Even with that success though, “The Broadway Melody” is the lowest-rated Best Picture winner on RT with a score of only 42%. To quote the website’s critics consensus, the film is “interesting as an example of an early Hollywood musical, but otherwise, it’s essentially bereft of appeal for modern audiences.” Okay, so it might not be all that well loved nearly 100 years later, but that does nothing to change the fact that “The Broadway Melody” was the first film with sound to be declared Best Picture.

Directed by Harry Beaumont, “The Broadway Melody” tells the story of two sisters — Queenie (Anita Page) and Hank (Bessie Love) Mahoney — that are trying to make it big on Broadway, only to get caught in a good old-fashioned love triangle that jeopardizes everything. Besides being the first Best Picture-winning film to use sound, “The Broadway Melody” also dared to feature a Technicolor sequence, which probably explains why it earned the now revered accolade. This really was like the “Avatar” of its time, blowing minds and embedding ear worms while doing so.

Featuring songs like “Give My Regards to Broadway” by George M. Cohan and Nacio Herb Brown’s “You Were Meant For Me,” the film’s technological breakthrough established a tradition for musicals to follow from then on, adding a daring splash of color that would eventually become the go-to approach decades later. Incredibly, it’s nearly 100 years later and Beaumont’s musical remains only one of 10 musicals to have won the Oscar for Best Picture, proving that while it might not be so popular nowadays, the movie still hit all the right notes back in its time (enough so to earn the Academy’s highest recognition). From “The Sound of Music” to one of the greatest musicals of the 21st century, “Chicago,” every Best Picture winner that’s carried a tune owes a little bit of thanks to “The Broadway Melody” for starting that trend to begin with.