2) MICHAEL CAINE (The Cider House Rules) – Best Supporting Actor winner, 1999: Lasse Hallström has a lot to answer for. The movie was dodgy enough – but Caine's bizarrely lauded turn as Dr. Wilbur Larch plumbed its capacious depths. Much better in Little Voice the year before (but not nominated), he got this one as a consolation prize – for being suicidally miscast as an avuncular abortionist. His accent might lead you to surmise that New England was a small, sparsely vegetated mid-Atlantic island with a population of one.

3) ALAN MENKEN & TIM RICE, "A Whole New World" (Aladdin) – Best Original Song winner, 1992: For a few years at the beginning of the Nineties, Disney’s animated features were assured of picking up the music awards every time, perhaps through the pre-arranged sabotage of older Academy voters’ hearing aids. The trend meant Menken and Rice won for this upsettingly naff magic carpet ditty, which lopped a whole star off the movie for posterity.

4) ROBIN WILLIAMS (The Fisher King) – Best Actor nominee, 1991: Terry Gilliam's Holy Grail whimsy was 1991's clear front-runner for the honorary Oscar they should hand out each year: "Best Picture in spite of Robin Williams." Jeff Bridges does much more robust work in the same film, but the Academy, gleefully renouncing the evidence of their own senses, chose to reward his co-star's relentlessly coy contribution.

5) MATT DAMON & BEN AFFLECK (Good Will Hunting) – Best Original Screenplay winners, 1997: William Goldman wrote almost all of it anyway (more fool him). And it's pants, frankly – an onanistic calling card for a couple of frat-boys.

6) BRENDA BLETHYN (Little Voice) – Best Supporting Actress nominee, 1998: Blethyn's ghastly re-run of her mannered screeching in Secrets and Lies nabbed her a nomination where co-stars Jane Horrocks (deservedly) and Michael Caine (shamefully) missed out. Proof that looking and sounding like a frog in tights will generally do if you can't be bothered to act.

7) CHARIOTS OF FIRE – Best Picture winner, 1981: "The British are coming!", proclaimed Colin Welland on collecting his statuette for the screenplay. In slow motion, or what?

8) ALEC GUINNESS (Star Wars) – Best Supporting Actor nominee, 1977: So I'll probably get death threats for this – but Guinness himself frequently moaned about how boring he found the whole thing. It shows: his Obi-Wan is just lazy gravitas, not worthy either of him or of going anywhere near an Oscar.

9) JOEL & ETHAN COEN (O Brother, Where Art Thou?) – Best Adapted Screenplay nominee, 2000: Those larky Coens gave Homer credit as a joke, apparently. Rollers in the aisles obviously didn't belong to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

10) KENNETH BRANAGH (Hamlet) – Best Adapted Screenplay nominee, 1996: The rest is silence.

Tim Robey