The Worst Movie to Ever Win an Oscar Was Directed by a Monster
If you're wondering what the lowest-rated film on IMDb to win an Academy Award is, it's not some campy cult classic or overlooked oddity.
It's You Light Up My Life, a syrupy 1977 melodrama directed by Joseph Brooks — a man later indicted on 91 counts of sexual abuse.
That's right. A movie barely anyone remembers, by a man most people now try to forget, somehow walked away with Oscar gold.
The film stars Didi Conn (aka Frenchy from Grease) as a struggling singer named Laurie Robinson, stuck between a career she doesn't have and a fiancé she doesn't want. Critics hated it. Audiences mostly ignored it. And it currently holds a 17% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 4.8/10 rating on IMDb, which is low even by IMDb's generous standards.
And yet, it won an Oscar. For Best Original Song.
The title track, also written by Brooks, became an unstoppable juggernaut when Debby Boone recorded it. Her version dominated the charts and turned what should have been a forgotten soundtrack footnote into a full-blown cultural takeover.
The numbers:
- You Light Up My Life (song) hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for 10 straight weeks
- It was the second-highest charting song of the 1970s
- It held the record for longest-running #1 until 1992, when Boyz II Men dethroned it
- The film grossed $8.5 million on a $1.2 million budget (roughly $45 million on a $6.3 million budget today)
The movie didn't win anything else. Just that one Oscar. But it was enough to secure its place in Academy history — and make it, statistically, the worst-reviewed film ever to take home a golden statue.
As for Joseph Brooks, his brief film career tanked shortly after You Light Up My Life. His follow-up movies bombed, and by the mid-1980s, he'd vanished from Hollywood. But it didn't end there.
In 2009, Brooks was arrested after being accused of running a casting couch operation.
He lured dozens of women to his apartment under the guise of auditions, then allegedly drugged and assaulted them. He was indicted on 91 counts of sexual abuse. His trial was set for 2011 — but he took his own life before it began.
To make things even worse, his son, Nicholas Brooks, was convicted of murdering his girlfriend in 2013.
So: a forgettable movie. A wildly overhyped ballad. An Oscar win no one talks about. And behind it all, a predator who escaped justice.
Somehow, You Light Up My Life is still technically an Academy Award winner. But it's also a reminder that even Hollywood's most sentimental stories can hide the absolute worst behind the curtain.