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Sunday's Academy Awards promise to be full of exciting new changes, all of which will hopefully keep audiences watching for three-plus hours. But one maxim will remain: You will disagree with at least one of the winners.

Everyone has their picks for the least deserving winners in Oscar history, and in honor of this year's many great nominees -- along with the great many omissions (ahem, "The Dark Knight") -- we present our list of some of the most questionable winners of years past. In this category, it's an honor not to be nominated.

10. Roberto Benigni for "Life is Beautiful" (2000)
Granted, Oscar-acceptance-speech montages wouldn't be the same without an exuberant Benigni nearly kicking Steven Spielberg in the head. But regardless of what you may think about Roberto's mawkish Holocaust clown performance, you can't deny that an Oscar loss would've saved us all from his embarrassingly awful "Pinocchio" movie.

9. Marisa Tomei for Best Supporting Actress, "My Cousin Vinny" (1992)
Granted, Tomei has turned out to be a marvelous actress who bravely follows the Kate Winslet "serious acting equals shedding clothing" rule. But the controversy surrounding her victory over heavy hitters like Joan Plowright ("Enchanted April") and Vanessa Redgrave ("Howards End") in '93 was so great that it inspired whispers that she wasn't actually supposed to win. (Rumor has it that a drunken Jack Palance read the wrong name off the TelePrompter during the ceremony.) While the rumor has been pretty much debunked, there's no denying Tomei started the Oscar trend of honoring hot young supporting actresses over old British bitties.

Open the envelope and see the rest of our picks for most egregious Oscar award winners, after the jump.


8. Renee Zellweger for Best Supporting Actress in "Cold Mountain" (2003)
2004 saw Zellweger winning for her moving portrayal of "Lil' Abner"'s Mammy Yokum ... Oh, wait, she won for her terrible Appalachian accent in "Cold Mountain." That she beat out "House of Sand and Fog"'s Shohreh Aghdashloo only proves that the Academy pretty much votes for whatever pretty young American face is nominated in this category.

7. "Ordinary People" for Best Picture (1980)
Robert Redford's WASP weepie is a perfectly serviceable drama with strong performances. But history has been kinder to its fellow Best Picture nominee that year, "Raging Bull." Looking back, Redford's win over Scorsese foreshadows the Academy's preference for softly lit character drama over visceral filmmaking. ("The Reader" over "The Wrestler," anyone?)

6. "Shakespeare in Love" for Best Picture (1999)
"Saving Private Ryan" fans still cry bitter tears over the war epic's loss to Gwyneth Paltrow making goo-goo eyes at Ralph Fiennes' less talented brother. "Shakespeare in Love"'s win is less a tribute to the film than to just how terrified everyone in Hollywood is of Harvey Weinstein. If "The Reader" ends up beating "Slumdog," wonder aloud if Weinstein filled someone's pockets and/or threatened to break their thumbs.

5. Cuba Gooding Jr. for Best Supporting Actor, "Jerry Maguire" (1996)
Yes, Gooding was the best thing about "Jerry Maguire," and his Oscar speech was pretty memorable. But he really shouldn't have beat William H. Macy in "Fargo." Plus, we have Gooding's Oscar win to thank for "Boat Trip," "Radio," "Snow Dogs," "Daddy Day Camp," and pretty much everything he's been in since.

4. Mira Sorvino for Best Supporting Actress, "Mighty Aphrodite" (1995)
It's a known fact among Hollywood actresses that a surefire way to get an Oscar nod is to let Woody Allen grope you on film. Sure, Sorvino played a pretty good airhead, but so did Anna Faris in "The House Bunny." Sorvino's fellow nominee that year, Kate Winslet (for "Sense and Sensibility"), went on to become the most acclaimed actress of her generation. Meanwhile, Sorvino recently starred in "The Last Templar," aka filler NBC played between repeats of "Deal or No Deal."

3. "How Green Was My Valley" for Best Picture (1941)
"How Green" might have been deserving the previous year, but not when placed against "Citizen Kane" and "The Maltese Falcon." Maybe with the country still reeling from the Pearl Harbor attack, dark, cerebral cinema just didn't have a chance.

2. "Forrest Gump" for Best Picture (1994)
Few Best Picture winners have provoked such a mixed reaction. (Okay, maybe "Crash.") Whatever your opinion of "Gump" is, it's hard to rationalize its win over "Pulp Fiction" or "The Shawshank Redemption" today. Plus, it's pretty much responsible for "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," for good or ill.

1. Art Carney for Best Actor in "Harry & Tonto" (1974)
Who doesn't love Art Carney? (He'll always be a legend to us for his part in "The Muppets Take Manhattan.") But the fact that Carney as an old man traveling cross-country with his cat beat Al Pacino in "Godfather II," Dustin Hoffman in "Lenny" and Jack Nicholson in "Chinatown" just proves that even in the maverick '70s, the Oscars were decided by stuffy old people.