Tonight is Oscars night! Even though I'm sure Twelve Years A Slave will win Best Picture this year, I would love to see Gravity take top honours. Hopefully director Alfonso Cuaron will win Best Director; if he doesn't, that will be a huge fail. We've already seen a couple snubs this year as far as nominations (Tom Hanks wasn't even nominated for his role in Captain Phillips, and neither was Robert Redford for All Is Lost, either actor could have easily won in my opinion) but these ten Oscar snubs, flubs, and miscalculations are the worst the Academy has to offer.
10. 78th
Academy Awards: Why did Crash win
Best Picture?
2004's Crash is nothing
special. It’s a meandering movie about racism and social tensions with a
talented ensemble cast and not much else. A 76% Rotten Tomatoes score shows it
wasn’t beloved by all, and though a contender for Best Picture, it didn’t seem
like a sure fire winner. Brokeback
Mountain, on the other hand, had much stronger critical praise and was
strongly favoured as the Best Picture winner. Starring Jake Gyllenhal and Heath
Ledger as two homosexual cowboys, the film did win Best Director for Ang Lee,
but was robbed by a much less deserving film of top honours. This stirred a lot
of controversy regarding the Academy’s stance on homosexuality: did Brokeback Mountain not win because it
was just that gay cowboy movie and not as culturally important as Crash’s socio-racial themes? I don’t
know the answer and don’t really care. I think what it came down to was the
Academy just thought Crash was the
better film overall (and overall that assessment is wrong, in my opinion).
9. 23rd
Academy Awards: Gloria Swanson loses to Judy Holliday?
Sunset Blvd. is
debatably the greatest film about Hollywood ever. It is a classic cinema satire
that was nominated for numerous awards, and yet only won three Oscars. While I
can understand why it didn’t win Best Picture, among other categories, the one
award I think it was most robbed of was Best Actress for Gloria Swanson.
Swanson’s character was a representation of how the silent film era’s stars had
to either adapt or die, so to speak, when “the talkies” took over Hollywood—the
addition of sound meant actors who were used to relying on exaggerated,
physical acting now had to become adept at spoken dialogue, or their careers
were finished. Swanson perfectly encapsulated the character of Norma Desmond, a
former silent film star who is convinced that she’s still big, “...it’s the
pictures that got small.” Unlike Judy Holliday’s performance in Born Yesterday, which earned her the
award, Swanson’s performance has become synonymous with Sunset Blvd., and is still studied in film classes to this day.
8. 71st
Academy Awards: Saving Private Ryan
loses to...Shakespeare in Love?
This one really surprised me. Typically, war films always
hog all the awards, even when they don’t deserve them. Some examples of war
films that won Best Picture: Platoon,
Schindler’s List, The Hurt Locker, The Deer Hunter, Patton.
I have no problem with war films winning, especially when they deserve to win,
but what’s even worse is when they deserve to win, and don’t. Shakespeare in Love was a well made,
surprisingly entertaining comedy depicting William Shakespeare (played by
Joseph Fiennes) falling for a woman (Gwyneth Paltrow) while he writes Romeo and Juliet. However, Saving Private Ryan was an unflinchingly
realistic look at the brutality of the Second World War, and stands as one of
the best war films—if not the best—in the history of cinema. Steven Spielberg
got his well deserved Best Director Oscar, but the film lost Best Picture to a
fictional romantic comedy? A wholly deserving, gut wrenching war epic loses to
a fluffy Shakespearian yarn? I guess the Academy preferred reading Shakespeare
plays over history textbooks in high school.
7. 31st
Academy Awards: Vertigo
wins...nothing?
The Academy has made more than a few wrong calls over the
years, but one of their biggest stumbles was not giving the Alfred Hitchcock
classic Vertigo more praise.
Nominated for two measly awards—Best Art Direction and Best Sound—it won
nothing. At first, Vertigo didn’t
receive overwhelming critical praise, but as the years went by, it quickly
picked up traction and became more significant than anyone originally thought.
In 2012, Vertigo was named by the
British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound critic’s poll as “the greatest film
of all time”. I’m not sure this is a title you could truly give to any film and
have everyone agree, but Vertigo is
undoubtedly a classic and important film—something the Academy failed to
realize back in 1958. Extremely re-watchable and superbly well made, this short
sightedness on the Academy’s behalf has led many people to question their
ability to truly award the most deserving films of the year.
6. 53rd
Academy Awards: The Shining is
nominated for...nothing?
The only thing I could say that is sort of a criticism
regarding The Shining is it’s not
that faithful of an adaptation of the Stephen King book (a fact the author has
acknowledged). However, a film adaptation doesn’t have to be a perfect
iteration of the source material to be good, and there’s no better example of
this than Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant and haunting horror film. Rich in detail,
atmosphere, scares (both subtle and explicit), and an extremely strong
performance from Jack Nicholson, The
Shining is one of the most unsettling and competently made horror movies of
all time. So why didn’t it get nominated for anything? Horror films have often
been neglected by the Academy, but in the case of The Shining, it’s just baffling. Jack Nicholson gave one of his
best performances ever in this film. No nomination. Kubrick’s cinematic eye
brought the Overlook Hotel eerily to life. No nominations. None. Why? This
stigma that horror films are lower grade entertainment is just stupid. Genre
does not define quality, and the quality of this film far exceeds many other
movies that have won awards in the past. It’s too bad the Academy was more
interested in boxing (Raging Bull)
and elephantiasis (The Elephant Man)
in 1980 than ghosts and cabin fever.
5. 67th
Academy Awards: Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption beaten by Forrest Gump?
1994 was a great year for film, with multiple big hits and
critical favourites. Quentin Tarantino’s instant classic Pulp Fiction had a talented cast and crew working with fast, sharp
dialogue and a well assembled plot. Samuel L. Jackson was the highlight as
Jules Winnfield, perfectly described by what’s stitched on his wallet. The Shawshank Redemption, Frank
Darabont’s directorial debut and his first of three Stephen King adaptations,
was a critical hit, but was not a box office success. It has since enjoyed
overwhelming (and well deserved) praise. Both these films received multiple
nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor among others, yet both lost
in the major categories (Best Picture, Director, and Actor) to Forrest Gump. Yes, Tom Hanks’
performance was brilliant, as was Robert Zemeckis’ direction. But was the movie
really that good? Samuel L. Jackson’s
performance was unforgettable: surely he deserved Best Supporting Actor, and The Shawshank Redemption was a brilliant
film all around, an obvious choice for Best Picture. Instead, Pulp Fiction only won Best Original
Screenplay, and Shawshank won
nothing. I guess it’s like Mr. Gump’s well known saying: “Life’s like a box of
chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get”. Maybe if the Academy had read
the label on their box of chocolates more closely they wouldn’t have got it
quite so wrong.
4. 85th
Academy Awards: Ben Affleck doesn’t even get nominated for Best Director for Argo?
I might be completely out of line saying Argo was a little overrated. Yes, it was
extremely well made, but so were multiple other films from 2012. It was an
obvious choice for awards due to its subject matter—if a movie is about making
a movie, it seems to be a shoe in for awards (Ed Wood, The Artist, Sunset Blvd. and many other past
winners/nominees come to mind). I actually thought the 2012 Oscars were well
divided up, and no single film hogged all the big awards. But the biggest screw
up I’m still confused about is Ben Affleck’s Best Director snub. At the very
least Affleck should have been nominated, if not won the award. Argo was an extremely well shot movie
and there had already been lots of talk about Affleck being a sure fire
nominee. Argo did end up winning Best
Picture—of course, it had to after Affleck’s obscene omission. This was the
fourth time a film won Best Picture without the director being nominated. I’m
really not sure why Affleck wasn’t nominated. Maybe the Academy caught a brief
glimpse of the future and saw him as Batman, which swayed their votes...
3. Where the hell is
Leonardo Dicaprio’s Oscar already?!
The top three Oscar snubs are so severe that they aren’t
even limited to a particular year. This one I really hope gets corrected at
2013’s Academy Awards. Leonardo Dicaprio is one of the most talented actors
working today. He first drew attention with his performance in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, for which
he was nominated, then again in James Cameron’s award winning epic Titanic, which earned him no nomination.
As Leo grew more mature and took on ever more challenging characters, he became
a better and better actor, and closer to that well deserved Best Actor Award.
Nominated for The Aviator in 2005 and
Blood Diamond in 2007, he still
didn’t win. He also had many other great roles, none of which he was even
nominated for, in films including Catch
Me If You Can, Gangs of New York,
and The Departed (that last one, by
the way, won Best Picture in 2007). In 2012, Dicaprio starred in Quentin
Tarantino’s Django Unchained, and
even though he gave a stellar performance, his supporting role was overshadowed
by Django co-star Christoph Waltz,
who took home the award. Leo has been robbed left and right of his damn Oscar,
and maybe, just maybe, this year the dry spell will end and the Academy will
open their floodgates. Dicaprio has already won the Best Actor Golden Globe for
his role as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of
Wall Street, and is a nominee for this year’s Academy Awards. Will he finally
get it? As of reading this, the results are probably already in, and I’m either
ecstatic or pissed off once more.
2. Stanley Kubrick
wins...nothing, ever?!
Kubrick was an elusive, sophisticated, and genius filmmaker
with a striking eye for visuals and the patience to examine every painstaking
detail of every frame. He did not crank out film after film, nor did he ever
make a half ass attempt at anything. He only directed sixteen films in his
entire career, and many of them were not immediately praised or understood,
whether due to their controversial content or opaque themes. Highly regarded as
one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, it is an absolute crime that he
never won an Oscar. Kubrick was nominated multiple times over the years for Best
Director, but never won it once. Instead of awarding Kubrick for Dr. Strangelove, they awarded George
Cukor for My Fair Lady. Instead of
winning for 2001: A Space Odyssey,
Carol Reed won for Oliver! (In fact, 2001 didn’t even get nominated for Best
Picture, which is a travesty on its own). I’ve already drawn attention to The Shining being completely ignored.
It’s recently been brought to my attention that, not only did he never win Best
Director, but he has yet to even win an honorary Oscar (if you weren’t aware,
Kubrick passed away in 1999). It was said that Kubrick was a perfectionist and
had to get everything right before filming. You think the Academy would try as
hard as Kubrick did on his films to award the most deserving people in
Hollywood. Obviously that isn’t the case.
1. Alfred Hitchcock
wins...nothing, ever?!!
Well that’s not entirely true. A filmmaking mastermind who
rivalled even the great Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock was nominated for Best
Director five times. Guess how many he won? Was it three? Nope. Was it one, is
that why he’s number one of the list? Unfortunately not. Hitchcock never won.
Worse yet, two of his greatest film accomplishments ever—Vertigo, which I already mentioned, and North by Northwest—never even got him nominated. How can such
talent go unrewarded? Well, in 1968, Hitchcock was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. This
periodically awarded honour has been given to other great filmmakers, such as
Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, Cecil B. DeMille, and most recently in 2010.
Francis Ford Coppola. When Hitchcock was given this award, he took to the stage
at the 40th Academy Awards to give his acceptance speech. The
speech, in its entirety, was as follows: “Thank you...very much indeed.” And
the award for Greatest Oscar Acceptance Speech Ever goes to, Alfred Hitchcock!
This was Hitchcock giving the Academy the giant, sarcastic middle finger.
Thanks a lot, he said, for taking this long to acknowledge my unparalleled
filmmaking efforts. Surely the most depressing and unforgivable mistake made by
the Academy, Alfred Hitchcock was one of the most deserving directors never to
be given their prestigious directing award.
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