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Likely stung by the failure of adaptions of known quantities - most notably the Phantom flop - the people behind the Producers likely wanted to safely hew to the script to avoid any risks. This was a bad move, at least in retrospect, as the movie ended up with nothing to offer except a whole lot of pizzazz. And while some of the showy dance numbers are fun and exciting, even the dance sequences seem of poor quality compared to some of those in better movie musicals.

Perhaps the biggest lesson to learn from failures such as the Phantom and the Producers adaptions (as if we didn’t know this lesson) is that Hollywood’s money machine’s pathetically transparent attempts to cash in on surprise victories never ends well. We know this because sequels to the Ocean’s Eleven movies were terrible - as were other revisits of 1950s and 1960s classics like the Italian Job. We know this because attempts to emulate the success of The Sixth Sense or of American Beauty or of The Lord of the Rings at the Oscars gave us Pay It Forward, Signs, and The Hobbit. All colossal mistakes. And we know that because the craze over musicals that characterized the mid- to late 2000s after the stunning victories that Moulin Rouge! and Chicago pulled off, not just before the Academy but with audiences, gave us things like the Producers and The Phantom.

Will they never learn?

1. An American in Paris

But without a doubt the worst musical movie I have ever seen is the winner of the Best Picture Oscar in 1951, Gene Kelly’s An American in Paris. One word suffices: boring.

To put it simply, not much at all happens in this contrived and obnoxiously happy-go-lucky movie. The story nominally revolves around a struggling painter in post-World War II Paris as he pursues deems of artistic redemption, and the woman who takes an interest in helping him.

I’m fully aware that the other movies on this list, as well as many others that I ignored, are objectively worse than An American in Paris, a movie that some critics at the time called fantastic. But my own personal vitriol for this movie puts it at the top of my list because I simply cannot believe that this was somehow anointed the best movie of any year - by anyone, even the foolhardy Academy.

Perhaps this means that this movie belongs on my list of Worst Best Picture winners of all time. Perhaps I will write that column soon. But in the meantime, no rant about bad musicals is complete without this uneven pastiche of drama, comedy, and music that amounts to a whole ball of nothing.

To add insult to injury, one need to look only to some of the much better movies that An American in Paris ousted: A Streetcar Named Desire and A Place in the Sun. Two difficult, challenging movies fall to the easy, not-challenging fluff. Sound familiar? This was the beginning of the heyday of the movie musical with the Academy - but the choices that succeeded this movie, like My Fair Lady, West Side Story and the Sound of Music and even Oliver!, are masterpieces (or in some cases good movies) in their own right. At least the Academy corrected course from getting off decidedly on the wrong foot when it came to recognizing movie musicals.

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