Prestigious Awards Given To Undeserving Winners

If you win a major award, typically it means you're the best of the best at what you do. Other times, you win because whoever voted for you wasn't right in the head that day. That's the only way to explain how these incredibly prestigious awards got doled out to incredibly undeserving winners.

Even without looking at a list of Best Picture winners throughout the Academy Awards' history, you'd probably guess Citizen Kane was one of them. But you'd be wrong, because in 1941, Kane lost to a movie called How Green Was My Valley. 

It's not that Valley is a terrible movie — it's got a 90 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, so the trials and tribulations of a Welsh mining family clearly resonated with people. But when pit against Kane for Best Picture, it absolutely should've been burned like Rosebud. Yet it won the top award — and you can probably blame newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst for that.

As told in the PBS documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane (and recapped by the LA Times), Charles Foster Kane was a thinly veiled stand-in for Hearst, who did not have a sense of humor about the cinematic critique. Enraged by the film's audacity to portray Kane (and thus, Hearst) as a ruthless, power-hungry egomaniac, Hearst set out to squash the film. He banned it from being mentioned in his newspapers, and even had his reporters bury Orson Welles with articles about his personal life, his politics, and anything else they could demonize the man with. He even got the FBI to open a file on poor Welles. Hearst was the worst.

What's more, Hearst used his influence to stop many theaters from showing Citizen Kane under threat of lawsuits. Most likely, the Academy felt the same pressure, and gave what should've been Citizen Kane's Oscar to a feel-good film like How Green Was My Valley, one that couldn't possibly offend anybody. Except, of course, for those offended that one of the best films ever didn't get its due Oscar props.

Steve Nash was a damn good NBA player, but his winning two MVP awards in a row makes virtually no sense. 

In the 2004-2005 season, Nash won the MVP over Shaquille O'Neal, who had just gotten to the Miami Heat and helped the team earn the best record in their conference. He also brought them to the conference finals, where they lost in seven games. Meanwhile, Nash did roughly the same thing with his Phoenix Suns, bringing them from 29 wins the year prior to 62 wins, and bringing his team to their conference finals, where they lost in five games. The voting was super-close — according to Basketball-Reference.com, Nash just edged Shaq 1066-1032. Clearly, a case could be made for either man.

But it's Nash winning his second MVP a year later that officially made people wonder why the voters loved this guy so much. That year, he guided his Suns to another first-place record and another deep playoff run, so he didn't exactly do the worst-to-first thing that's a great MVP argument. Plus, the voting was less close this time around, with Nash getting 924 points and the second-place guy, LeBron James, getting 688. LeBron was, at the time, about the only good player on the Cleveland Cavaliers, and he had just guided them to their first playoff run since 1998. It's unclear how that doesn't scream "MVP" to basically everyone.

Meanwhile, you've got Shaq saying, in an interview with Sports Illustrated, that he deserved to win not just one of Nash's MVP awards, but both of them. On Nash's end, he was quoted by CNN in 2017 as saying "the MVP is such a subjective thing that it almost says more about the voter than it does about the players." That might just be his way of saying that, in the mid-2000s, voter subjectivity was off the mark.

More than 25 years after Driving Miss Daisy became a Best Picture Oscar winner, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who actually likes it. More likely, you'll hear the title used in a derogatory way, like if you're driving Miss Daisy around, you're probably someone's servant. And yet, this film won the top Oscar in 1990, a decision that's aged about as well as hair metal. 

Up against nominated films like Dead Poets Society and Field of Dreams, Daisy probably shouldn't have had much of a chance of winning. But it's the 1989 film that wasn't even nominated — Spike Lee's provocative Do the Right Thing — that got the biggest shaft. Even Kim Basinger proclaimed, while on stage, "The best film of the year is not even nominated, and it's Do the Right Thing" (as recapped in a New York Magazine interview with Lee.)

Driving Miss Daisy, meanwhile, seemed like a step backwards — as the New York Times theorized, "it bears a subtext that summons up a longing for the good old days before the civil rights movement changed the Old South forever."

In the years since, Morgan Freeman himself has expressed regret about the movie, saying in an interview with Richard Jobson of the Guardian that his role worked to popularize, as he put it, "this wise, old, dignified, black man" that's more special guardian than human. If you're a fan of TVTropes.com, you might be familiar with what he's describing — namely this. It's not a compliment, and if popularizing such a trope is Daisy's legacy, you can see why the Academy should've realized that and given the nod to Kevin Costner's spooky baseball team instead.

The "all-star charity single" genre hasn't aged well — about the only time you see it now is when people like Weird Al make fun of the idea. So it's utterly baffling to look at 1986 and see that the Grammys gave USA For Africa's "We Are The World" their Record of the Year award. 

By all accounts, "We Are The World" is pure schlock. Even the artists who performed on it think so — Billy Joel was interviewed by Rolling Stone in 2005 and recalled, "I remember most of us who were there didn't like the song, but nobody would say so. I think Cyndi Lauper leaned over to me and said, 'It sounds like a Pepsi commercial.' And I didn't disagree." Somehow, the Pepsi commercial got honored with a Grammy, which is even more baffling when you consider the four unabashed classics it beat out: Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing," Don Henley's "The Boys Of Summer," Huey Lewis & The News' "The Power Of Love," and Bruce Springsteen's "Born In The USA."

"We Are The World" beat all those, which simply boggles the mind. You can turn on the radio just about any time of day and listen to one of those iconic bits of rock. "Power of Love" in particular is one of the most beloved soundtrack songs of all time, thanks to Back To the Future. When's the last time you heard "We Are The World" on the radio, or anywhere outside of VH1's I Love The '80s, for that matter? Simply put, the Grammy committee voted for sentimentality over substance, and now look incredibly silly — though they're used to that.

Peyton Manning is, without question, one of the best players in NFL history. That said, when he won his first Super Bowl in 2006, awarding him the MVP was just about the worst possible decision, one made almost certainly because "he's Peyton Manning." 

In early 2017, ESPN's Mike Sando ranked all the NFL MVPs — Manning's Super Bowl XLI nod ranked 41st out of 50. But since everyone below him isn't a transcendent icon of the game, his run especially looks bad. While his Indianapolis Colts won, 29-17, it was almost in spite of Manning. His numbers were decidedly mediocre (247 yards, one TD, one INT), and his defense basically won the game for him. Manning's one touchdown happened six minutes in, and the rest of the game was the defense stuffing Chicago's attempts to score. The Indy defense had just as many touchdowns on interceptions as Manning did, period. Three field goals from Adam Vinatieri, one of the best kickers in league history, didn't hurt either.

This ultimately seems like one of those awards they gave a legendary, beloved figure because he is legendary and beloved. He'd just won his first ring, so why not heap honors on him? That doesn't change how one of his defensemen deserved the honor several times more than he did.