For a pop culture nerd, it’s the most wonderful time of the year. No, not the holiday season—awards season. Prestige pictures are returning to movie theaters, and with them the chattering, the constant handicapping: which films, actors, writers, and directors are likely to win?
As you prepare for the awards ceremonies early next year, The Stake will be bringing you some awards-themed posts and lists in the weeks and months ahead. First up, a rundown of the biggest mistakes the Academy ever made, the masterpieces and great performances they snubbed in favor of lesser fare. Have a look, and use the comments to tell us what mistakes we’ve made. What are we wrong about? Any horrible Oscar travesties we’ve missed?
10. 2000, Phil Collins for Best Original Song. This category included two deserving songs: Aimee Mann’s “Save Me” from the movie Magnolia, and Randy Newman’s “When She Loved Me,” from Toy Story 2. The Oscar should have gone to Aimee Mann, but the songwriter who ultimately took it home was…Phil Collins, for the song “You’ll Be in My Heart,” from the Disney movie Tarzan. Mann seems to have taken her loss in stride, once reportedly referring to “Save Me” in a live performance as “the song that lost an Oscar to Phil Collins and his cartoon monkey love song.”
9. 1993, Al Pacino for Best Actor. The Academy has the unfortunate tendency of screwing up and then trying to fix things later in a way that only compounds the error. Case in point, the 1993 Academy Awards, when someone finally realized that Al Pacino had never won an Oscar despite being nominated for both Godfather movies, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Glengarry Glen Ross. So they finally gave him a statue…for Scent of a Woman, an over-the-top performance full of shouting and “hoo-ah”-ing that helped push latter-day Pacino into full scenery-chewing mode. Meanwhile, Denzel Washington was denied the prize for his superior performance in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X—another mistake that the Academy further compounded by giving him a consolation Oscar for a strong but still less-memorable performance in Training Day.
8. 2001, Gladiator for Best Picture. In 2001, Gladiator won Best Picture. Looking back, it’s not hard to see why—it’s a fun movie, lots of action, decent story, with a subject matter that undoubtedly reminded the Academy of its glorious Ben-Hur past. But Oscar-worthy? Nearly every film nominated alongside Gladiator is better: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, even Erin Brockovich. The Oscar should have gone to Traffic, Stephen Soderbergh’s intelligent, well-crafted, and well-acted story of the drug trade.
7. 1995, Forrest Gump for Best Picture. Have you seen Forrest Gump lately? That movie has not held up well. (Nor, it should be said, has Tom Hanks’ performance, which is starting to look ridiculously broad.) Also nominated that year were Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption, which almost twenty years on are obviously among the best films of the 90s.
6. 1951, Judy Holliday for Best Actress. I’ll confess that I’m not familiar with Judy Holliday or the 1950 movie Born Yesterday, for which she won an Oscar. But I am certainly familiar with the performances of two other actresses nominated that year—Bette Davis in All About Eve, and Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. Perhaps Ms. Holliday’s performance rivaled those of Davis and Swanson. But I doubt it.
5. 1981, Ordinary People for Best Picture. In 1981, there were two major contenders for Best Picture: Robert Redford’s Ordinary People and Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. Ordinary People won (as did Robert Redford for Best Director), but it’s clear now that this was one of the worst choices in Academy history. With the passage of time, Raging Bull is still as powerful as ever; Ordinary People, while not bad, is about as hard-hitting as a TV movie of the week.
4. 1990, no nomination for Do the Right Thing. In 1990, the big mistake was a snub: no recognition for Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, a masterpiece on race that bursts with life, anger, and intelligence. (Lee himself has never been nominated for Best Director; another travesty.) Instead, the Oscar went to Driving Miss Daisy.
3. 2006, Crash for Best Picture. Sometimes, the Academy’s mistakes only become apparent with the passage of time; other times, it’s obvious almost immediately that they screwed up. The 2006 Oscar for Crash was one such situation. While hardly horrible, Paul Haggis’s film of intersecting lives and racial tensions in Los Angeles was just a little too on the nose, practically advertising its themes with neon lights. Brokeback Mountain, on the other hand, was a bit more subtle, a true work of art that was quietly devastating—and deeply influential. At the time, Brokeback‘s story of the love between two cowboys was regarded as controversial, but as acceptance of same-sex relationships and marriage has continued to grow by leaps and bounds, the Academy’s choice looks more cowardly with each passing year.
2. Alfred Hitchcock’s career-long Best Director drought. Though he was nominated five times, including for his work on the classics Psycho and Rear Window, the master of suspense never got a statue. Later, he received a lifetime achievement award, the Academy’s way of admitting that it fucked up. (See also: Orson Welles, Robert Altman, Cary Grant.)
1. 1942, no Best Picture for Citizen Kane. Widely regarded as the best film ever made, Citizen Kane was nominated for Best Picture but lost to John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley. Also nominated was The Maltese Falcon, another undeniable classic. Nothing better encapsulates the Academy’s unfortunate penchant for rewarding dull efforts that are soon forgotten rather than recognizing true greatness.
