(Continued)

Tim Robbins, "Mystic River" (2003)
The first Oscar-winning performance on this list, and therefore possibly the most controversial, right? Nonsense! This is "Dances With Wolves II"; wait 10 years, then see if anything about "Mystic River" still seems genuine or gripping. Sean Penn -- there he is again -- may be the center of Clint Eastwood's fictional Boston here, but Robbins, playing Penn's slow-witted childhood buddy, is its leaden heart. Equal parts Lennie from "Of Mice and Men" and the Abominable Snowman from Bugs Bunny, Robbins' portrayal of Dave, the grown-up victim of child abuse, not only verges on sentimentality, it charges right through the line to become pure bathos. The motor of this lousy performance is his thick Boston accent, which coats every word Robbins speaks like a bad suit. There have been other poor Boston accents in movies -- even other Oscar-winning ones (see Robin Williams in "Good Will Hunting") -- but this one makes the whole city sound like a huge baked bean. It's had to stomach after a while.

Winona Ryder, "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (1992)
Many have pointed to Keanu Reeves' atrocious attempt at Anglicism in this misbegotten adaptation of the world's most famous vampire novel, but come on! You expect bad accents from Reeves (see "Dangerous Liaisons"). Winona Ryder, just entering the peak of her star power, is abominable as Mina, wife to Reeves' Jonathan Harker (there's an unpleasant household to imagine) and object of the amorous attentions of good old Drac (Gary Oldman). Leaving aside the fact that Ryder seems utterly bound to the 20th century, and is dwarfed by the campy spectacle surrounding her, she also sounds like a small girl hosting a tea party for her dolls when she affects an upper-crust British dialect. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's almost enough to make you long for "Reality Bites."

Forest Whitaker, "The Crying Game" (1992)
To put it bluntly, what the hell was anyone thinking when they let this performance happen? Whitaker is often a brilliant actor, and, as his Oscar-winning turn in "The Last King of Scotland" proved, he can do accents. But he can't do a limey British one, at least not in this otherwise fantastic Irish political-sexual thriller whose big twist had audiences lining up in 1992. In the 30-minute prologue that sets up the entire film, Whitaker plays a British soldier who so loves his "girl" back home that he makes the IRA gunman (Stephen Rea) who kills him promise to look in on her when he gets back home. And while no one would condone such acts of violence in real life, there's some sense that the solider is executed for crimes against the English accent. However fine an actor he may be under normal circumstances, Whitaker is inconsistent, half-hearted and unconvincing in "The Crying Game" -- you can imagine that it seemed like good casting to begin with, but someone should've checked to see if he could handle the load.

Liam Neeson, "Schindler's List" (1993)
It doesn't exactly feel good to criticize a film with such high-flying moral and aesthetic credentials, but let's be serious: Neeson is horrible as Oskar Schindler. Handsome, obviously. Heroic, acceptably. But German? Please. From the very first moment he opens his mouth, Irish-born Neeson is the tragic flaw in the most well-meaning film there ever was. And while Schindler plays out his noble scheme, the actor who plays him is busy molesting the music of Germanic dialect, choking on words, flattening vowels, sucking. By the time he is reduced to muttering, "I could have saved more" over and over toward the end, you wonder if he really means that he could've studied more.

Special Award: Kevin Costner, "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" (1991), "JFK" (1991), "A Perfect World" (1993) and "Thirteen Days" (2000)
A lot of people hate Costner now, and with plenty of good reason, but I've always had a soft spot for him. That softness, however, only covers the roles in which he speaks in his native flat accent. In the films listed above, and in many others, Costner reveals that the ego of megastars often leads them to believe they are capable of any feat. Four feats this former megastar is not capable of: an English accent ("Robin Hood"), a New Orleans accent ("JFK"), a Texas accent ("A Perfect World"), and a Boston accent ("Thirteen Days"). The films in question vary wildly in scope and excellence -- "JFK" is obviously a messy mish-mash; "Perfect World" a wildly underrated meditation on the nature of authority and violence; "Robin Hood" a coulda-been-great action flick undone by stunt casting; and "Thirteen Days" is an ambitious political thriller -- but Costner's performances in each are all the same: sloppy, arrogant, painful. His Robin Hood English is a famous calamity, all over the map and prone to disappearance. But his "JFK" New Orleans is just as cartoonish -- unrecognizable even. The Texan he plays in "A Perfect World" yearns to be accurate, and at times slips into reason, but never for long. But the lahf-able Boston brogue he affects in "Thirteen Days," playing an adviser to the Kennedys, takes the all-time prize for not just inaccuracy, but for gall. No one in the world, not even in New England, sounds like that. And for that, at least, we can be grateful.

What is the worst movie accent of all time? Write us at heymsn@microsoft.com

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Sean Nelson is a Seattle-based writer and musician. He is the author of "Court and Spark," a book about Joni Mitchell, published by Continuum Books.