Bad parents are popular villains in any awards season, but, as others have pointed out, this fall — a year after Mo’Nique child-abused her way to Oscar glory in Precious — there’s a stampede of crappy mothers chasing trophies. In Black Swan, Barbara Hershey starred as an overbearing mom whose smothering costs Natalie Portman her sanity. But where does she rank among 2010’s other matriarchal malefactors? Read on!
Bad Mom Cred: The Kids Are All Right’s two moms are generally great at mothering, but lose a couple of points each for getting shouty at dinner parties after a few glasses of wine (Nic) and nearly destroying their family by sleeping with Mark Ruffalo (Jules).
Bad Mom Cred: Since the movie takes place after her 4-year-old son Danny is killed by a reckless teenage driver, we don’t really know for sure that Becca was a bad mom — but at least kids of the other mothers on this list all made it to their fifth birthdays.
Bad Mom Cred: It’s the Queen’s chilly mothering style that gives King George VI his nervous stutter. You can probably expect Colin Firth to thank the real-life Queen Mary before God and his agent at the Oscars.
Bad Mom Cred: Gothel kidnapped Rapunzel and sequestered her in a tower for eighteen years; also, strictly forbade haircuts.
Bad Mom Cred: As bad a mom as she is to boxing brothers Micky (Mark Wahlberg) and Dicky (Christian Bale) — doing little to discourage Dicky’s crack habit, or the pair’s outrageous Beantown accents — Alice is an even worse manager, allowing Micky to take a life- and career-endangering beating from a much heavier opponent in an mismatched fight.
Bad Mom Cred: Bone’s Connie (not pictured) is mentally incapacitated and leaves it to her 17-year-old daughter to raise her younger siblings, track down her meth-making father, and save the family’s house from foreclosure. In her defense, all of that stuff sounds like a total pain in the ass.
Bad Mom Cred: A failed ballerina herself, Erica keeps her dancing daughter nerve-racked and delirious with a strict regimen of guilt-tripping and supervised fingernail-clipping.
Bad Mom Cred: As the string-pulling den mother of Kingdom’s Australian crime family, Smurf manipulates cops, tampers with witnesses, and creepily kisses her sons right on the mouth. “It’s a little inappropriate,” Weaver told us recently.
