15 Actors Who Didn't Deserve Their Oscars

Academy Awards for acting have been presented a total of 372 times across the Oscars' 97-year history, and suffice to say that not all of those times have been necessarily well-deserved.

A lot more goes into an acting Oscar win beyond mere performance quality: There's the matter of campaign narratives and strategies, overall popularity of the movies themselves, actors' reputations within the industry, and the sheer showiness of roles. Some of the least-deserving winners can be explained away through one or more of these factors. Some, on the other hand, are difficult to explain at all.

Here, we've compiled a list of the 15 least-deserving Oscar wins in the Best Actress, Actor, Supporting Actress, and Supporting Actor fields. Every one of these people is a great actor at minimum, mind you — they just shouldn't have won that year.

Best-known to today's audiences as the man who played Uncle Ben in Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man" trilogy, Cliff Robertson was a prolific Hollywood supporting actor who, in 1968, played a leading role so showy and unusual that it netted him an Oscar: Charly Gordon in "Charly," a Ralph Nelson-directed adaptation of the celebrated Daniel Keyes sci-fi novel "Flowers for Algernon." In the plot, Charly is a man with a vaguely-defined intellectual disability who, through a revolutionary surgical procedure, develops superhuman intelligence.

Essentially, the role gave Robertson the chance to play two characters, with the first being a "Simple Jack"-esque caricature of neurodivergence and the second being a more conventional showcase of his trademark wit and sharpness as an actor. The first performance was distinctive and impressively committed, but grossly broad and offensive; the second was solid and charming, but hardly Oscar-worthy. Taken together, they make up one of the worst Best Actor wins ever, and had no right to beat either Alan Arkin's deeply soulful work in "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" or the never-awarded Peter O'Toole's volcanic Henry II in "The Lion in Winter."

The Oscars' box-office-fueled love affair with the hamfisted Queen biopic "Bohemian Rhapsody" ranks among the most embarrassing moments in the history of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And, while the statuettes for Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing, and even the much-derided Best Film Editing win could be excused on certain technical grounds, there's just no justifying Rami Malek's win for Best Actor.

Malek is an excellent actor, as he has demonstrated in projects like "Mr. Robot" and "No Time to Die," but his performance as Freddie Mercury is both a) utterly not evocative of the real Mercury in either his boisterous or introverted moments, and b) completely flat and rudderless even if you take the character as wholly fictional. The movie does wrong by Mercury in too many ways to count, and, aside from the Live Aid recreation climax, even Malek's lip-syncing is not especially convincing — unless voters mistakenly believed he was doing his own singing. You know who was doing his own singing? Bradley Cooper in "A Star Is Born." You know who did bring gravitas and humanity to a larger-than-life historical figure? Willem Dafoe as Vincent van Gogh in "At Eternity's Gate." Both men inexplicably lost to Malek.

Even one of the best to ever do it shouldn't get a namecheck Oscar for a performance as substandard as Meryl Streep's Margaret Thatcher in "The Iron Lady." Phyllida Lloyd's 2011 telling of the life story of the conservative British prime minister is a bloodless and lifeless Thatcher biopic from top to bottom, so concerned with hitting encyclopedic bullet points without ruffling any feathers that it comes across as less cinema than rushed prep for a history exam. Still, it could have been at least partly salvaged by a performance that rendered Thatcher into a credible human — but that is not at all what Streep provides.

Even in the fleeting moments where her performance scans as decent on the levels of impersonation and accent work, Streep never disappears or relaxes into the role; her constant clinical mimicry of Thatcher makes the whole movie feel like an elaborate excuse for a clanging, distracting feat of stunt casting. Streep deserves to have three Oscars on her shelf, but not with one of them being for this — especially not when Rooney Mara in "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" was right there.

1965's little-known "A Thousand Clowns" is a solid dramatic comedy about Murray Burns (Jason Robards), an unemployed, down-on-his-luck TV writer who must get his act together in order to retain custody of his 12-year-old nephew Nick (Barry Gordon) — only for both uncle and nephew to start questioning the true merit of living an "acceptable" life. It was one of the big Oscar sensations of 1966, nabbing nominations for Best Picture (maybe a bit much) and Best Screenplay (fair enough).

What was really inexplicable was the Best Supporting Actor trophy for Martin Balsam, who plays Murray's Type A brother and moral opponent, Arnold. Appearing only for a few minutes, Balsam gives a pretty good performance, but barely makes a blip within the movie's overall impact. He's not even the best supporting actor in this film (that would be Gordon), which makes it hard to understand why he beat Michael Dunn, who absolutely steals the show in "Ship of Fools" and made history as the first (and thus far only) actor with dwarfism to ever get an Oscar nomination.

The 2000 Best Supporting Actor lineup was one of the strongest of any acting category in history, boasting four positively iconic performances that would have made equally deserving winners. You had Jude Law roaring into Hollywood stardom in "The Talented Mr. Ripley," Haley Joel Osment giving maybe the best child performance ever in "The Sixth Sense," Michael Clarke Duncan making the entire world weep in "The Green Mile," and Tom Cruise pushing himself to never-before-seen extremes of intensity in "Magnolia." And then there was also Michael Caine in the weepy Oscar-bait Miramax release "The Cider House Rules." Guess which one won?

Caine himself was flummoxed by his win, and devoted the better part of his acceptance speech to singing the praises of his fellow nominees and confessing he didn't think he had a chance. In fairness, his performance as kind-hearted orphanage director Dr. Wilbur Larch was dependably pretty good — but it was not a standout of that year's field, especially considering Caine already had an Oscar.

Up until the 1937 ceremony, there were no separate Academy Awards for supporting performances. Maybe the category's freshness and lack of past parameters helps explain why the very first Best Supporting Actress winner ended up being one of the least deserving ever: Gale Sondergaard in "Anthony Adverse."

Sondergaard was a poised, regal, hypnotic stage actress whose work in film was divided between iconic Universal horror flicks and respectable award-friendly dramas. An Oscar would have been well-warranted for several of her roles, but her film debut as Faith Paleologus, the scheming housekeeper of the stuffy Mervyn LeRoy epic "Anthony Adverse," was not one of them. The whole movie is so bland that Sondergaard does make a comparatively strong impression by tearing into her unabashedly evil part, but it's still a stock villain performance; the Oscars should sooner have gone with the miraculously caustic turn of 13-year-old Bonita Granville in "These Three," or Maria Ouspenskaya's indelible single-scene appearance in "Dodsworth."

Film history is littered with examples of cisgender actors receiving plaudits and awards for the "bravery" of tackling trans roles in exoticizing drag — and the all-time worst offender is arguably Jared Leto in "Dallas Buyers Club." In Jean-Marc Vallée's snappy biopic of legendary AIDS medication smuggler Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey), Leto plays fictional trans woman Rayon. A composite of the queer community who helped Woodroof in his enterprise (a community to which Woodroof belonged, though the movie conceals it), Rayon is in the movie to suffer, cry, sass, and riffle through every trans woman stereotype in the book.

Leto, much trumpeted at the time for his "commitment" to the role (which included losing weight, of course), plays her as a wilting delicate flower, all pain and mannerisms and no interiority, leaning so hard into proving what a transformative actor he is that the whole thing loops back around to an insulting stunt. When he succeeded in winning the Oscar, he thanked "the Rayons of the world" in his speech — no mention of trans people. Then, to make matters worse, that win cursed us with a decade of pointlessly "method" Jared Leto performances. And to think the Academy could have given it to Barkhad Abdi for "Captain Phillips."

The all-timer case study in an actor nabbing an overdue career-acknowledgement Oscar for a subpar role is Al Pacino's win for "Scent of a Woman." It's not a bad performance, to be clear; Pacino has had a small handful of those, but, thankfully, none were favored by the Oscars. The problem with Pacino's work as Lt. Col. Frank Slade, an eccentric and charismatic blind man who strikes up an unlikely friendship with his caretaker Charlie Simms (Chris O'Donnell), is that it's just so aggressively fine — a normal, inoffensive performance in a normal, inoffensive movie of the sort you might wade into while channel surfing aimlessly at 9 PM on a Saturday.

Pacino being Pacino, he does make Frank a better, more interesting character than he's written — but even his dashes of exquisite rowdiness don't compensate for the sheer absurdity of this being the Oscar-winning Al Pacino role. That he beat Denzel Washington in "Malcolm X," a contender for the best leading performance in American film history, only compounds the absurdity further, even if Washington himself didn't want that particular Oscar.

Sometimes, movies make it all the way to the Academy Awards not because they're acclaimed or artistically bracing, but because they make a lot of money. Such was the case of "The Blind Side," a 2009 (allegedly) fact-based white savior sports movie that, in a just world, would have been too cloying and mawkish for the MTV Movie Awards. It was a grown-up drama that made $300 million worldwide, though, so into the Best Picture Oscar field it went.

As for Sandra Bullock's win in the role of tough-loving Tennessee mother Leigh Anne Tuohy, who adopts troubled 17-year-old Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) and changes his life as he changes hers, it's easier to take in stride as an industry thank-you to Bullock for decades of excellent, audience-drawing, under-appreciated work in popular movies. Surely that's closer to a plausible justification for Bullock's win than the performance itself, a serviceable work of filling in the blanks of a positively dreadful, sub-Hallmark script. In retrospect, that should have been the year to award a breakout star — either Gabourey Sidibe in "Precious" or Carey Mulligan in "An Education." Heck, give Meryl her third Oscar for "Julie & Julia" and prevent the timeline where she wins for "The Iron Lady." Anyone would have been less preposterous than Bullock for that movie.

One of Hollywood's greatest historical cases of injustice happened in the 1930s, when Anna May Wong, a phenomenal actress and certifiable screen legend who had the misfortune of living in a time when Hollywood roles for Asian actresses were nearly non-existent, was turned down for the female lead role of "The Good Earth." An adaptation of Pearl S. Buck's novel about poor Chinese farmers in the early 20th century, "The Good Earth" cast Paul Muni in yellowface in the main role of Wang Lung; Wong campaigned hard to get the role of Wang's wife O-Lan, but the film ultimately cast white actress Luise Rainer.

While Rainer won a ridiculous second Best Actress Oscar for her goofy, makeup-caked caricature of a suffering "Chinese" woman, Wong rounded out her last few Hollywood years in a series of low-budget B-movies for Paramount and Warner Bros., none of which won awards or attained contemporaneous critical notoriety. Several of them have aged very well, though — which is more than can be said for Rainer's performance in "The Good Earth."

The 2013 Best Supporting Actor lineup presented an unprecedented conundrum. For the first time in Academy Awards history, every single one of an acting category's five nominees — Alan Arkin, Robert De Niro, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tommy Lee Jones, and Christoph Waltz — was a previous Oscar winner. In effect, this nullified the possibility of any "overdue" narratives and forced the voters to contend with the performances as they were.

And they still managed to make the wrong choice. Christoph Waltz did good, entertaining work in "Django Unchained" as its noble quasi-white-savior deuteragonist Dr. King Schultz, but it was hardly worthy of a second Oscar so soon after his incomparably more memorable turn in "Inglourious Basterds." Even the nomination was a bit baffling when both Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson left bigger impressions in the same movie; for Waltz to win over a performance of generational caliber like Philip Seymour Hoffman's in "The Master" was just straight-up bonkers. Was it all just the wow factor of Waltz playing a good guy?

Depending on how versed you are in Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton lore, you may or may not have heard of 1963's "The V.I.P.s," a middling Anthony Asquith ensemble drama about various wealthy strangers stranded together in the London Heathrow Airport during a heavy fog. Taylor and Burton play a married couple in the throes of possible separation, but they're all but swallowed up by the rest of the film's star-studded ensemble.

Perhaps the quaintness of watching a bunch of character actors outshine Liz and Dick at the height of their celebrity is what accounts for Margaret Rutherford, who plays the Duchess of Brighton, having won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Rutherford makes a delightful comedic contribution in her brief appearance, but it's a small, simple part — the kind that makes you go "Gee, I wish she'd been given more to do," as opposed to "Wow, she deserves an Oscar." It certainly didn't hurt Rutherford that the category was crowded by three actresses from "Tom Jones," one of the worst Best Picture Oscar winners ever. But there's still no good explanation for why she beat Lilia Skala, who made a terrific sparring partner for Sidney Poitier in "Lilies of the Field."

On one hand, the Oscars were still tinkering with their criteria and overall mission in 1930, their second edition ever, so a less-than-deserving Best Actor winner by today's standards might be somewhat excusable. On the other hand, there's no excuse other than racism for the practice of putting a white American guy in brownface and a sombrero and calling him Mexican, as "In Old Arizona" did with Warner Baxter.

Notable as the first major Western with synchronized sound, "In Old Arizona" stars Baxter as the Cisco Kid, a kind-hearted Mexican bandit being pursued by a ruthless Arizona sergeant (Edmund Lowe). And, as is also true of Luise Rainer's work in "The Good Earth," the ethnic cosplay appears to be the entire extent of what was perceived as Baxter's merit: He gives a moderately charming but utterly standard rascal-hero performance, which must have seemed distinctive to Academy voters strictly because he "transformed himself" into a Mexican, clunky accent and all. It would have been the perfect opportunity to give an Oscar to George Bancroft, who collected his only nomination for his commanding and quietly nuanced work in that year's "Thunderbolt," but alas.

Mikey Madison absolutely deserved the Best Actress Oscar for her lived-in, transformative, relentlessly physical work in "Anora," but, if her win over the likes of Demi Moore and Fernanda Torres was met with backlash due to the looming specter of "ingénue favoritism," she has one exact person to thank for that: Gwyneth Paltrow.

It's bad enough that a thoroughly serviceable movie like "Shakespeare In Love" swept the 1999 Oscars by sheer force of Miramax campaigning, but Paltrow's victory is something else entirely. In a field that included no fewer than four acting geniuses giving career-best performances, there was really no plausible justification for giving it to Paltrow, charismatic but technically out of her depth in the role of drag-clad romantic heroine Viola de Lesseps, other than "she was America's sweetheart and it was her star moment." If only more voters had seen Fernanda Montenegro in "Central Station."

Speaking of "Shakespeare in Love," Judi Dench's win for her tiny appearance as Queen Elizabeth I is one of the foremost examples of a legendary actor essentially snagging an Oscar for showing up. Still, it's Dame Judi Dench, it's her only Oscar, and she stops the show in her six minutes of screentime, so it's hard to begrudge the Academy's choice. For an example of a Supporting Actress award under similar circumstances that is worth begrudging, look to Ingrid Bergman in "Murder on the Orient Express."

Titan though she may be, Bergman's work as missionary Greta Ohlsson in Sidney Lumet's 1975 Agatha Christie adaptation is essentially a glorified cameo; outside of one interrogation scene, she barely gets to do any substantive acting. If Bergman was to win a late-career third Oscar, it should have been for "Autumn Sonata" four years later — not in 1975, blocking the effervescent glory of Madeline Kahn in "Blazing Saddles" from being properly rewarded.