Best Picture- 2000: American Beauty

Think the world is hard for starving children and soldiers dying in Iraq? Then obviously you’ve never seen American Beauty, a movie that posits the notion that there is nothing harder than being an angsty middle-class suburbanite going through a midlife crisis. Or maybe an angsty middle-class teenage suburbanite whom nobody understands because she’s just too complicated. Or a slutty, angsty middle-class teenage suburbanite who… okay, I could go on for hours listing off the mountain of irritating characters in American Beauty whom you might sympathize with after a successful lobotomy. Loaded with sappy and obnoxious music and shots of the suburbs that seek to simulate profundity, American Beauty is the biggest cinematic joke in history.

When Mena Suvari is on her period, everyone knows about it.

Of course, when getting into the subject of cinematic jokes, nothing beats the seizure-inducing scene wherein two teenagers watch a video of a plastic bag blowing in the wind. That such an insipid, moronic scene could pass as deep makes me want to take a plastic bag and choke everyone involved in American Beauty to death. Now that would be art. But even the trash that is, well, watching trash, is only a small piece of all that is terrible about American Beauty. This movie thinks that being edgy consists of its characters constantly whining about how miserable they are, while taking breaks to get stoned and whine about how miserable they are. Less a movie than it is propaganda for a nuclear holocaust, American Beauty is filled with performances that consist of little more than staring into space. At the same time, I was filled with the desire to start a forest fire, as the tortured cries of dying animals is less painful than hearing anyone in this movie bitch for one more minute.