*WHY* it's the worst Best Picture ever
People have to remember the Academy votes on five nominees. In a great year, the winner of Best Picture needs to garner only 20% of the vote, plus one.
There've been a lot of good years (1939 anyone?), and 1952 wasn't so shabby. Coop in "High Noon," John Wayne in "The Quiet Man," and Jose Ferrer in "Moulin Rouge," surely got a lot of votes from the Academy that year. Liz Taylor was hot in a (crappy, but nominated) "Ivanhoe."
So all it took, probably (and we'll never know unless somebody bribes someone at Price-Waterhouse), was a 20-something percent of the vote to win.
Further, the Academy *did* honor other films. Coop was Best Actor that year for "High Noon." John Ford was Best Director for "The Quiet Man." Jean Hagen probably lost Best Supporting Actress because the year before Judy Holliday won Best Actress playing, essentially, the same character.
But this was 1952! The year of the trans-continental coaxial cable! Don't know about it? It was a big deal at the time. All of a sudden all of the United States was wired for television and Hollywood was scared spitless.
All of a sudden Hollywood went for technicolor and Cinerama and "big" movies; stuff you couldn't see on your 16" Admiral TV.
DeMille's epic was nostalgia-meets-nostalgia. It's the story of a circus coming to grips with changing tastes, mixed with a certain amount of documenary-worthy behind-the-scenes stuff about how the circus works. I've been to a few circuses in my day, but I'm told that the first one was during the last year Ringling Bros & Barnum & Bailey performed under canvas; before they went to indoor arenas. I think I remember a few of those moments. Or maybe it's DeMille's opus. Either way, TGSOE is a good historical record.
"Will they go another season 'under the Big Top,' just as every "big top" movie house in America was suffering because of Uncle Milty and "I Love Lucy?" (In fact, Lucille Ball was originally cast for Gloria Grahame's Oscar-winning Supporting Actress role and had to drop out because she became pregnant with "Little Ricky.)
It was a confluence of circumstances (as are many Academy Awards, like when Liz Taylor won for "BUtterfield 8" simply because she was on her assumed death bed just as the voting deadline approached). As a result, TGSOE isn't simply the worst Best Picture on record, it's the longest movie ever made; or, at least, seems like it.
It's a big, sloppy, sentimental, schlocky, sappy, overblown, Technicolor time capsule of a time that never really existed. It's maybe old Hollywood's obituary. And maybe, just maybe, 20-something percent of 1952's Academy voters knew it.