An odd fact about the Oscars is that best picture — the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ top award — is usually the worst prize.

For years, the biggest movie always won, and if it was both big and stupid, all the better. By that measure,“Dune”and “West Side Story” would be the front-runners to win in 2022. And because “Dune” is exponentially stupider, it would be a lock. But the voting rules changed in 2008, leading to a change in the kinds of movies that win best picture.

The Academy instituted ranked voting, in which Academy voters could vote for a number of nominees, in order of preference. This has allowed, in the years since, for smaller movies to slip in there, with results both good (“The Artist,” “The Hurt Locker,” “Moonlight“) and bad (“Argo,” “The Shape of Water“). Only one pattern has emerged in recent years: Favorites often lose. The reason? Partisans forothermovies make sure not to include it among their second and third choices.

That would seem to spell trouble for this year’s favorite, “The Power of the Dog.” But theJane Campionmovie retains an advantage, in that its two main competitors, “Belfast” and “CODA,” are small, lovable family dramas that appeal to the same audiences. They’ll probably split their votes, allowing “The Power of the Dog” to slip through and join the teeming ranks of “best pictures” that weren’treallytheir year’s best picture, or anything close to it.

What an odd thing. It’s like every year since 1929 the Academy gets roaring drunk and wakes up with a new tattoo. Like real tattoos, these unfortunate best-picture choices start fading from the first day, but they never really go away, because they’re part of the historical record.

“Driving Miss Daisy” (1989)? Three decades later, nobody watches it. It’s famous only as the movie that won in the same year that Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” and Steven Soderbergh’s “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” weren’t even nominated.

“Argo” (2012) andnot“Lincoln” or “Zero Dark Thirty” that same year? “Crash” over “Brokeback Mountain” (2005)? “Forrest Gump” over “Pulp Fiction” (1994)? “Ordinary People” over “Raging Bull” (1980)? “Cavalcade” over two absolute classics, “I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang” and “42ndStreet” in 1933?

From the distance of time, it seems impossible that in 1957, the two best movies of that year — “Sweet Smell of Success” and “A Face in the Crowd” — weren’t even nominated. Then the next year, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” wasn’t nominated.

This is not to say that Academy voters have never gotten it right. Some great movies have won best picture — for example, “Grand Hotel” (1932), “Casablanca” (1943), “My Fair Lady” (1964), “The Sting” (1973) and “Schindler’s List” (1993). But sometimes, even when a great movie wins, it feels like a coincidence, like it didn’t win because it was great but because it happened to conform to the Academy’s notion of what a best picture is: huge, serious and with lots of stars.

The Academy’s mistaking of size for quality goes back to the early days of the awards and to what I call the Oscar’s “original sin.” It’s not widely known that in the very first Oscar ceremony in 1929, which honored films of 1927 and 1928, there weretwo最佳影片奖项。被称为“outstan一奖ding picture,” and the other was called “unique and artistic picture.” The idea was that the outstanding picture award would be given to a movie that’s big, fun and well-crafted, while the unique and artistic award would go to a more profound and original film.

In that year, “Wings” (1927), an entertaining aerial epic, won outstanding picture. And F.W. Murnau’s “Sunrise” (1927), a masterpiece, beat another masterpiece, King Vidor’s “The Crowd” (1928) in the artistic category. The Academy Awards were off to a good start.

Then came the original sin. In 1930, in time for the second Oscar ceremony, the Academy scrapped the unique and artistic award and kept outstanding picture. You might imagine it did that figuring that one category could absorb the other and that the movies that would have been nominated for the artistic award would be included in the outstanding category as well.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, the Academy simply stopped honoring its unique and artistic achievements.

Outstanding picture morphed into “outstanding production” (1930), then into “outstanding motion picture” (1941), then into “best motion picture” (1944) and then finally into “best picture” in 1962, completing a journey in which the quality of a production became synonymous with the quality of a movie.

So when you’re watching the Oscars this year, just remember: No matter what film wins best picture — whether the news is good (“West Side Story,” “Belfast”), bad (“King Richard,” “The Power of the Dog”) or ridiculous (“Nightmare Alley”) —it doesn’t matter.

At worst, it’ll just be another zany tattoo that the Academy will be stuck with that no one will ever want to look at again.

The 94th annual Academy Awards:Hosted by Regina Hall, Amy Schumer and Wanda Sykes. 5 p.m. Sunday, March 27, broadcasting on ABC from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.