The Social Network

(Actual winner: The King’s Speech)

The Academy's choice to award Best Picture to Tom Hooper's "The King's Speech" over David Fincher's "The Social Network" is largely regarded as one of the most heinous judgments in Oscar history.

The win demonstrated that a crowd-pleasing nonfiction period drama about overcoming adversity was always going to perform stronger with Oscar voter base than a chomping social critique from an original concept (yes, "The Social Network" is also a biographies drama, but Fincher avoids the genre trappings that are prominent in "The King's Speech"). At the very least, Aaron Sorkin, Atticus Ross, and Trent Reznor did not go unnoticed in the contests for Best Original Score and Best Adapted Play, respectively.

To this day, "The Social Network" unfolds like a surreal Shakespearean tragedy, gaining weight by the minute. It's both an exciting, unsettling investigation into how Facebook grew to be and a scathing critique of what it will ultimately become. According to IndieWire, it is the sixteenth finest film of the twenty-first century.

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Year of Release: 2010

Director: David Fincher

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 95/100

IMDB Score: 7.7/10