10 Oscar Bait Movies That Are Awful From Start to Finish

Not soon after they were first given out in 1929, the Academy Awards became the most important and coveted award in Hollywood. Nowadays, it’s safe to say that an Oscar is the biggest honor in the film industry. As such, studios and filmmakers think they’ve cracked the formula: These movies are called Oscar bait. It’s a vague term that different people may define differently, but in broad terms, it’s a film that feels like it was devised specifically to win Academy gold.

Biopics of historical figures played by beloved actors; big ensemble dramas with sociopolitical themes; comeback narratives for actors deemed long-overdue for an Oscar; there are all sorts of things that can make a movie Oscar bait, but it doesn’t always work out. Indeed, there are some pretty awful films that nevertheless had ambitions to stand on the Dolby Theater stage. They may have some redeeming qualities here and there, but it’s not enough to truly make them not-terrible.

10

‘Amelia’ (2009)

Directed by Mira Nair

In 2000, Hilary Swank got an Oscar for Boys Don’t Cry. Five years later, she won again for the Best Picture-winning Million Dollar Baby. Four years after that, she swung for the fences in an effort to get a third — and failed spectacularly. The result? Amelia, where she plays legendary American pilot Amelia Earhart in a story about her life and her eventual disappearance over the Pacific Ocean.

Rarely throughout the history of the 21st century have there been Oscar-bait performances more obvious than this one, but although Swank does indeed deliver a solid performance, the movie isn’t nearly up to her height. It’s such a plainly formulaic movie that it genuinely feels like it came out of a bottle. It never quite finds the right way to balance reality with drama, and as a result, it’s one of the most remarkably unexciting movies about flying ever made.

9

‘Collateral Beauty’ (2016)

Directed by David Frankel

Before he finally won his long-awaited Academy Award in 2022 for King Richard (and then quickly stained that moment with the infamous slap incident), Will Smith spent years desperately trying to get an Oscar. Some of those attempts were truly great movies, others were less remarkable… and then there’s Collateral Beauty. It’s about a man retreating from life after a tragedy, questioning the universe by writing to Love, Time, and Death. He receives unexpected answers and realize how loss can reveal moments of beauty.

It all sounds fine and dandy on paper, but viewers and critics alike were able to see right through the film’s emotional manipulation. It has good intentions, but it’s so bonkers in how far it’s willing to go in begging the audience to cry and begging the Academy to give Will Smith an Oscar that it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. It’s one of the worst-written drama movies of recent years, and those who saw and disliked it are thankful that the Academy didn’t fall for the trap.

Collateral Beauty

Release Date

December 6, 2016

Runtime

97minutes

8

‘Dear Evan Hansen’ (2021)

Directed by Stephen Chbosky

Dear Evan Hansen originated on Broadway with Ben Platt playing the titular role. It’s a Tony and Grammy-award winning musical about a socially-anxious high-school senior and his journey of self-discovery after a classmate’s suicide. When a movie adaptation was made, instead of casting an actual teenager in the lead, they cast a nearly-30 Platt in the role, put him in a wig and makeup that made him look nearly-40, and called it a day.

There are all sorts of reasons why this is one of the worst movie musicals of the 21st century, aside from just Platt being hard to buy as Evan. The musical numbers are lifeless, the visuals are drab and dull, and the story about a manipulative young man lying his way into becoming popular and being with his grieving crush comes across as creepy, to say the least. “Terrifying” would be a more appropriate term. It’s exactly the kind of thing that one would have expected to get at least a couple of Oscar nods initially, but even the Academy preferred to wave through a window instead of touching this absolute mess.

Dear Evan Hansen

Release Date

September 24, 2021

Runtime

137minutes

Director

Stephen Chbosky

7

‘Amsterdam’ (2022)

Directed by David O. Russell

Though he’s now infamous for how abusive he allegedly is on set, David O. Russell and his movies were Academy darlings up until Jennifer Lawrence‘s Best Actress nomination for 2015’s Joy. Then came Amsterdam, and things quickly fell apart. It’s a conspiracy thriller set in the 1930s, about three friends who witness a murder, are framed for it, and have to uncover one of the most outrageous plots in American history.

Despite its incredibly stacked cast featuring the likes of Margot Robbie, John David Washington, and Christian Bale, Amsterdam became one of the biggest box office flops of the 2020s so far, and its luck at award shows wasn’t much better. People thought that all the dazzling elements never added up to a greater whole, Amsterdam instead losing itself in its own poorly-plotted narrative and noisy directing.

6

‘Grace of Monaco’ (2014)

Directed by Olivier Dahan

Grace Kelly was one of the greatest and most interesting actresses of Hollywood’s Golden Age. From being a Hitchcock Girl to winning an Academy Award and three Golden Globes, she was a true icon. She was also Princess of Monaco as the wife of Prince Rainier III until her death, and it’s a crisis in their marriage that the biopic Grace of Monaco explores, focusing on a period during a political dispute between Rainier III and France’s Charles de Gaulle.

The visuals are lavish, the cinematography is beautiful, and Nicole Kidman is dazzling as Kelly, but the film is so offensively vapid that it’s perhaps one of the weakest biopics of the last quarter-century. It’s the kind of film that’s all style, zero substance; the writing is atrociously lacking in the complexity of the real-life subject’s story, the directing is entirely inert, and the casting outside of Kidman is pretty terrible.

Grace of Monaco

Release Date

May 25, 2015

Runtime

102 Minutes

Director

Olivier Dahan

5

‘Diana’ (2013)

Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel

Nicole Kidman wasn’t the only one who tried to nab an Oscar nomination by playing a European royal in the 2010s. Naomi Watts did it too (and arguably to even worse results) in 2013’s Diana. It’s a romance drama exploring the last two years of Princess Diana’s life, as she embarks on a final rite of passage: a secret love affair with a Pakistani heart surgeon.

The film, one of the most contrived Oscar-bait movies ever, is a terrible disservice to both the Princess Diana mythos and Diana Spencer as a person. It feels more like a cheap TV movie than a production with even a fraction of the elegance of its subject, with performances that are less than ideal — sadly, including Watts’s. It’s sappy, surface-level, completely pointless, and a pathetic attempt at paying respect to Diana’s memory.

Diana

Release Date

September 19, 2013

Runtime

113 minutes

Director

Oliver Hirschbiegel

4

‘Blonde’ (2022)

Directed by Andrew Dominik

Lady Di and the legendary Hollywood star Marilyn Monroe were remarkably similar women. It’s then even more tragic — and ironic, considering how a perversion of their public images was a common problem for both — that Marilyn, too, is the star of an atrocious Oscar-bait film. Blonde is less a biopic and more of a fictionalized retelling of the actress’s romantic and professional lives. More particularly, it’s about the mythologization of her image and how it is consumed to this day.

Blonde did get an Oscar nod, a Best Actress nomination for Ana de Armas (a not-entirely-undeserved honor), but that doesn’t make it any less bad. It’s probably one of the worst Oscar-bait movies ever, contributing to the exploitation of Marilyn’s image and personal life a hundred times more than it comments on it. It’s all tragedy and trauma porn made by people who should have known better.

3

‘Emilia Pérez’ (2024)

Directed by Jacques Audiard

Made by a French director who doesn’t speak a lick of Spanish and who says he didn’t do any research on Mexico for the film (you can tell), Emilia Pérez pretends to be an incisive satirical look at the country’s sensitive sociopolitical situation, from narco culture to forced disappearances. Instead, it’s the most offensively tone-deaf and idiotically-written film of 2024, without even an ounce of compassion or truth in how it treats its subject matter. The story follows a lawyer who’s hired by a trans narco leader in order to help her transition, and later to get her closer to her wife and kids, who don’t know about her true gender identity and think she was killed.

Emilia Pérez proposes all sorts of wild ideas that have proved offensive to both Latin Americans and the trans community. That being transgender suddenly absolves you of all your sins, that Mexico is a hellscape of delinquents living in miserable conditions, and that the people who have terrorized Mexico for decades are deserving of redemption are but a few of the film’s baffling theses. As if that weren’t enough, the comedy is painfully unfunny, the musical numbers are astonishingly cringe-worthy, and save for a pair of solid performances by Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofía Gascón, there are no rescuable qualities in this absolute disaster. It has already won four Golden Globes, and its Oscar prospects look just as bright… for some reason.

2

‘Music’ (2021)

Directed by Sia

If the history of film has proven anything, it’s that no matter how talented they are, some musicians should just stay away from movies. This includes Sia, who got ambitious and directed in the atrocious Music one of the most boring Oscar-bait films of all time. But being boring isn’t even the movie’s worst crime — It’s being terrible all around. It’s about a newly-sober woman who receives news that she’s to become the sole guardian of her half-sister named Music, who’s on the autism spectrum.

At some point, the movie’s baffling misunderstanding of what autism is or how it works stops being funny and starts being wildly offensive. The characters are completely empty vessels for Sia to manipulate the audience in this awfully self-indulgent vanity project, with terrible music scenes and the clumsiest screenplay imaginable. Please stick to singing, Sia.

Music

Release Date

January 14, 2021

Runtime

107 minutes

Director

Sia

1

‘Cats’ (2019)

Directed by Tom Hooper

Even being just a little over half a decade old, Cats already requires no introduction. Based on the Broadway cult classic of the same name, it’s a fantasy musical about a tribe of cats who must decide yearly which one of them will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life. The movie feels like a waking nightmare of traumatizing CGI, musical numbers, and bizarre story beats and creative decisions.

There have been very few movies throughout the 21st century more awful than Cats, and the fact that Oscar gold was a genuine expectation that the team behind it had while making it makes it even funnier. It’s one of the worst films of the past couple of decades, a truly appalling insult to cinema that’s not even funny enough to be a so-bad-it’s-good cult classic: It’s just bad.

KEEP READING:The Worst Oscar Bait Movies of the Last 5 Years, Ranked