The Social Network: Up There with Citizen Kane? The Top 10 Best Picture Snubs

The odd thing about James Cameron's Titanic is that it's nowhere near as bad as we all feared it would be. That said, it should never have won 11 Oscars, let alone Best Picture over the exquisite L.A. Confidential. This smart, snazzy slice of film noir extracted smart performances from its ensemble cast (and to be fair, a Best ... Supporting Actress win for Kim Basinger).

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It's not so much that Born on the Fourth of July is a great movie (both director Oliver Stone and star Tom Cruise have done better work) but that Driving Miss Daisy is such a bad one. When your friends explain why the Oscars don't matter, 2 to 1 says they'll cite this Best Picture winner.

Here's an Oscar secret: the Academy will reward actors and directors with little gold men for movies that don't deserve them. Martin Scorsese is a case in point: famously snubbed by the Academy on a bunch of occasions (see other entries in this top 10), he ended up winning for The Departed, which felt more like an apology than ... justice. Goodfellas, however, is pretty much perfect, while Dances with Wolves felt overwrought and overly long 20 years ago, and nothing's changed since. Naturally, Dances won seven Oscars.

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Back to your friends: if Driving Miss Daisy isn't mentioned as a disastrous choice for Best Picture, then Ordinary People will be. The usually reliable Robert Redford came unstuck with his tale of American psychodrama that hankered to be Chekhov. How his film managed to defeat Scorsese's beautiful Raging Bull — quite possibly ... the greatest sports movie ever — is a knockout blow the Academy will forever have on its tale of the tape.

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Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove was not only quite possibly the director's best film (look away now, fans of 2001) but also a film that was ahead of its time, in turns thrilling and vital. My Fair Lady? Not so much, though Audrey Hepburn does her best to salvage the situation. In the eyes of the Academy, she clearly did.

The Weinstein Co. was firmly behind the success of The King's Speech. It wasn't the first time the company backed an underdog all the way to Oscar glory. Belligerent brothers Bob and Harvey marketed Shakespeare in Love as if their lives depended on it, while Saving Private Ryan was the superior movie. Today it's the only one of ... the pair that continues to air on television.

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Double Indemnity remains flawless decades later, a reminder of Billy Wilder's genius (by the by, here's hoping that Cameron Crowe, for whom Wilder is a hero, recaptures his once great talent). After seeing the film, no one looks at life insurance the same way. For Barbara Stanwyck's performance alone, Double Indemnity should ... have been awarded the top honor. Instead, it received seven nominations but didn't win a single Oscar (True Grit is nursing a similar hangover). Adding insult to injury, the sappy Going My Way (Bing Crosby as a dancing priest!) won the main prize.

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TIME movie critic Richard Corliss made the astute point that the 2011 Oscar race mirrored what went down in 1942. As he wrote, "A widely praised film about a wayward media mogul — with genius galore but no central sympathetic character — was up against a sentimental, well-wrought family drama set in the United Kingdom. The ... first movie earned all the respect; the second made people cry. And in the end, the family drama, How Green Was My Valley, won Best Picture over Citizen Kane." 'Twas ever thus.

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Reds is arguably Warren Beatty's finest achievement. He spent a decade working on it and ended up financing, writing, producing, directing and starring in the film to great acclaim. It was beaten to the finish line by the British film Chariots of Fire, which, at times, is about as much fun to watch as it is to run.

Despite Raging Bull's loss, boxing has had its moment in the limelight, including when Clint Eastwood and Hilary Swank teamed up for Million Dollar Baby. And as enjoyable as Rocky is (if not the sequels), the Academy could have picked a more worthy winner from all the other choices in 1977. If you're reading, makers of All the ... President's Men, Bound for Glory, Network and Taxi Driver, you have NewsFeed's eternal sympathy.

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