Over the years, the shiny gold statuette known as the Oscar has been awarded to a variety of films, including some winners that many movie fans may feel didn’t even deserve the little shiny plaque on which the actual awards are nailed. For example, even filmmaker Paul Haggis doesn’t think his film “Crash” should have won the Oscar for Best Picture. It’s not up to him though! This is the internet, after all. But how are we to decide 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 (ie “La La Land” and “Moonlight” mixup), 1929’s “The Broadway Melody” won what is now known as the Best Picture Oscar, a full 10 years before the Academy Awards themselves were nicknamed “the Oscars.” Even with that success, “The Broadway Melody” is the lowest-rated Best Picture winner at RT with a score of only 42%. To quote the site’s critics’ consensus, the film is “interesting as an example of an early Hollywood musical, but otherwise essentially bereft of appeal to modern audiences.” Okay, so maybe it wasn’t as popular nearly 100 years later, but that doesn’t change the fact that “The Broadway Melody” was the first movie with sound to be named Best Picture.
The Broadway Melody is the first talkie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture
Directed by Harry Beaumont, “The Broadway Melody” tells the story of two sisters – Queenie (Anita Page) and Hank (Bessie Love) Mahoney – who try to make it big on Broadway, only to get caught up in an old-fashioned love triangle that jeopardizes everything. In addition to being the first Best Picture-winning film to use sound, “The Broadway Melody” also dared to include a Technicolor sequence, which probably explains why it won the now-revered award. This really was like the “Avatar” of its time, blowing minds and embedding earworms while you did it.
With songs like “Give My Regards to Broadway” by George M. Cohan and Nacio Herb Brown’s “You Were Meant For Me,” the film’s technical breakthrough established a tradition for musicals to follow from then on and added a bold splash of color that would eventually become the best way decades later. Amazingly, it’s almost 100 years later and Beaumont’s musical is still only one of 10 musicals to have won an Academy Award for Best Picture, proving that while it may not be as popular these days, the film still hit all the right notes back in its day (enough). so as to win 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 who has carried a song owes “The Broadway Melody” some credit for starting that trend to begin with.
