Oscar Bait Performances That Turned Out Terrible

There's a peculiar sort of formula to many of the world's Oscar-winning movies. The projects that win Best Picture are rarely the best films of the year — most often, they're just the ones that appeal to the most voters in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. As a result, a certain template has emerged over the years for movies that do well during awards season, particularly milquetoast dramas that fall in a category called "Oscar bait."

These movies tend to share some common traits. They can take place in historical settings, as biopics of famous figures. Or they can be ponderous modern-day dramas that require the lead actor to transform themselves dramatically, portraying characters so unlike themselves in look and manner that a reward for the work feels undeniable. Since these kinds of movies have been known to be rewarded in the past, filmmakers and actors sometimes seem to try and engineer an Oscar victory by incorporating these elements on purpose.

Often enough, those efforts fail, with actors putting their heart on their sleeve and their health on the line for a movie that ultimately ends up falling short of expectations. But sometimes, the disparity between what the filmmakers try to do and what they end up doing can come off as completely hilarious. Want some examples? Read on for a history of Oscar bait performances that turned out to be just terrible.

The senseless murder of John Lennon is a story in the sense that it was a news event. No one expected it, it happened for no reason, and the world moved on. But Jared Leto apparently thought he could earn some accolades for going back to the days before the songwriter's death, bringing Lennon's killer to life on screen in the execrable Chapter 27. 

The title refers to the 26 chapters in JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, which was among the killer's possessions when he was taken into custody. As a piece of trivia, it's meaningless, and it speaks to the general pointlessness of this movie. In the best of circumstances, this movie would still feel unnecessary — probably too pointless of a story for much Oscar consideration. But unfortunately for Leto, the filmmaking here borderlines on the incompetent, wasting the hard work and physical transformation he put into the role.

Despite gaining 67 pounds and developing a host of medical difficulties over it, Leto's performance as the unbalanced assassin ended up in a movie that was a total waste of time. Chapter 27 is mostly remembered as a project in which an actor went so far and received so little. In their pursuit of verisimilitude, the filmmakers forgot to figure out whether this was a story worth telling.

Tedious and dull, Hyde Park on Hudson takes what could be a rather interesting story and lets it wither on the vine. Set during a 1930s Hudson Valley summit between Franklin D. Roosevelt and the king and queen of England, the movie follows Roosevelt's love affair with a distant cousin, chronicling a carefree episode with a tense political backdrop. The resulting movie is a flighty thing, a comedy of manners and scandal that hits with weightless impact, never really justifying its own existence.

Bill Murray stars as FDR, turning on the charm in a script that serves him, and the character he's playing, rather poorly. While Murray would seem perfectly suited to a comic take on the four-term president's life, the script itself forgets to give him much of anything that funny or dramatically intriguing to do.

Despite the lush period setting, Oscar voters didn't bite on what Hyde Park on Hudson was offering. Ultimately, Murray was nominated for a Golden Globe in the category of Comedy or Musical, losing to Hugh Jackman for his performance in Les Miserables.

What has Eddie Murphy been doing? As much as he's stayed out of the spotlight over the last decade, he's never really stopped acting. Instead, he's just been choosing increasingly ill-advised roles as a performer, arguably none of them worse than 2016's Mr. Church. 

Mr. Church is directed by Bruce Beresford, who was previously responsible for the hotly disputed Best Picture winner Driving Miss Daisy. Like that movie, Mr. Church is a movie about race, inasmuch as the complexities of race relations in America can be explored through the sentimental depiction of one interracial friendship.

Toothless and uninteresting, Mr. Church is a completely surface-level movie, never interrogating the inner lives of its characters as it pours on the sentimentality. It's hard to gauge what Murphy brings to the role, playing against type in this underwritten drama. With a better script and a different approach, he might have been able to access some inner depths, and do something interesting. As it stands, the movie is a feature-length experience that feels like watching Murphy as he stands with dignity in the shallow end of the pool. He doesn't do anything interesting, and what he's doing doesn't look difficult. He's just there.

Seven Pounds is another swing and a miss from Will Smith that, like Collateral Beauty, vaguely feels like it was made by aliens who visited our galaxy as part of an effort to win Oscars. You wouldn't think to categorize this movie as "torture porn" based on the look of it, but it certainly is — it's emotional torture porn.

Seven Pounds follows Smith as a man seeking redemption for the pain he caused through a fatal texting-while-driving incident. As penance, he seeks out seven worthy people in need of organ donations to receive his healthy body parts after he kills himself, thereby putting more good into the world than pain by the time his life's accomplishments are tallied. As a result, the movie barely has a story — everything is in service to a character study of Smith's protagonist as he works his way up to a sad, sentimental sacrifice. 

But whatever affecting qualities the journey may have are completely deflated by the method of his character's suicide — stung to death by a box jellyfish while sitting in an ice bath. It all makes sense, as far as the practicalities of how you'd really do this are concerned. But actually seeing movie star Will Smith flop around in a motel bathtub as a jellyfish exacts poetic vengeance on his body isn't the kind of thing you want to honor with awards. You mostly want to make sure no one in the theater hears you snickering.

Naomi Watts is a great actress who, by our metric, has never really turned in a bad performance. She's talented, charismatic, and fearless in her choice of roles — but that willingness to try stuff and be bold has landed her in some pretty crappy movies. Sometimes she secures her legacy with an all-time great like Mulholland Drive, and sometimes she ends up floating through movies like The Book of Henry, Shut In, The Ring Two, or Diana. 

Scoring only an 8 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, Diana is a failure on just about every level, failing to present an accurate picture of Diana, Princess of Wales or effectively convey what made her story worth telling in the first place. As a result, the movie went home empty-handed during awards season, only receiving a nomination from the Razzies. Watts is typically always the best part of her more lousy movies — but she can't even come close to saving this one. The only thing that deserves an award is that glorious, feathery hair.