See Critic's List of Oscar Mistakes on Best Film

Ahead of Sunday's Oscars, movie critic Brian Truitt has reason to hope the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will choose a deserving Best Picture. "Amazingly, they got it pretty right in recent years," he writes at USA Today, though he can't help but think back to what he views as the Academy's numerous Best Picture mistakes, offered as a list of 15. Some examples:

• 2019, Green Book: It's good, but Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman, a "thought-provoking cop drama that digs into America's racist past to mirror our own tumultuous times ... would have been the ideal choice" that year, writes Truitt.
• 2011, The King's Speech: Many thought Colin Firth's portrayal of George VI working through a stutter pulled an upset over The Social Network, but the "weird and wonderful" Black Swan was "flying above both."
• 2006, Crash: The winner was "plagued by mixed reviews and complaints of stereotyping," while the more-deserving Brokeback Mountain was "timeless and resonant."
• 2005, Million Dollar Baby: For Truitt, the Howard Hughes biopic, The Aviator, "piloted by Leonardo DiCaprio's fantastic descent into eccentric madness, is a no-brainer."

• 1999, Shakespeare in Love: It "had an intriguing concept as a referential, experimental biopic," writes Levitt. "But it has no business upending another Spielberg classic," Saving Private Ryan.
• 1995: Forrest Gump: Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, an "ultraviolent, narratively complex cultural phenomenon ... wasn't just the best picture that year but arguably of the entire decade."

See the full list here. (More Oscars stories.)