Who Didn't Win an Oscar Who Should Have? (1 Viewer)

[Mike Kelly]

For me it's Robert DeNiro's Travis Bickle in TaxiDriver losing to the overbaked performance of Network's Peter Finch. Hell, Finch wasn't even the best in his own picture. William Holden was the voice of moderation among the rest of the cast who seemed to want to out shout each other.

Nice tribute to E.G. Robinson, whose Little Caesar, Scarlet Street, Double Indemnity, Woman in the Window or many others deserved at least one nomination. Other non-nominated actors include Myrna Loy and Donald Sutherland (who hopefully will get one before he's done.)

 

[Bill J]

Robert Duvall and Francis Ford Coppola for Apocalypse Now
Ridley Scott for Black Hawk Down
Ed Harris for Apollo 13
Willem Dafoe for Platoon
Russell Crowe for A Beautiful Mind

 

[Dome Vongvises]

It's true that Kubrick, Hitchcock, and Scorsese not winning an Oscar outright is a travesty. But if you think about in another light, being given (posthumously [sp?] in Kubrick and Hitchcock's case) a lifetime achievement award from the Academy is a lot better. I mean, hell, anybody can get a best director award, but not everybody's going to be in the ranks of lifetime achievement.

Personally, I think Scorsese will win it outright. Not to imply that he doesn't belong in the ranks of Kubrick and Hitchcock, but I hope somebody gets my point.

 

[Reginald Trent]

Denzel Washington for Malcolm X and The Hurricane.

 

[Joshua_Y]

Spike Lee for...well...anything really. Malcolm X would be the one that would go on the Academy's list more than likely. Its just a shame that he hasnt won anything.

 

[Reginald Trent]

Yeap, Joshua you're right! I don't know how I overlooked Spike Lee in my previous post when mentioning Malcolm X. The academy sucks like a vacuum.

 

[Eric Bass]

Second the Saving Private Ryan. Spielburg shocks the nation with a war movie that slaps you in the face. I don't know a single person who came out of that 3 hours and wasn't affected. Lost best picture to an entertaining but hardly groundbreaking romance.

My personal #1 moment of disbelief in Oscars lately was FOTR losing screenplay adaptation to A Beautiful Mind. One takes a set of books that people said could not be put on film and has to translate it to appeal to die hard fans of the story and those who have never even heard of it. No need to go into how successful the first installment was. And they lose adaptation to ABM which takes the story of a crazy genius' wife who leaves him and turns it into a love conquers all story. I don't know if I'll ever choke that one down.

 

[TerryRL]

Kubrick did win an Oscar. He won an Oscar as FX supervisor on "2001: A Space Odyssey". Orson Welles also won an Oscar. He and Herman Mankiewicz won in the Best Original Screenplay catagory for "Citizen Kane".

These are some of the biggest Oscar snubs I've seen in the last several years...

The great Akira Kurosawa never winning an Oscar, what's also sick is that he was only nominated once (for 1985's "Ran"). He did get a lifetime acheivement Oscar though.

The great Alfred Hitchcock also had to get his Oscar via a lifetime acheivement honor.

Al Pacino failing to win for either "The Godfather" (Best Supporting Actor) or "The Godfather Part II" (Best Actor).

Robert De Niro failing to win Best Actor for "Taxi Driver".

Martin Scorsese failing to win Best Director for either "Taxi Driver" or "Raging Bull".

"Raging Bull" failing to win Best Picture ("Ordinary People" won instead).

Spike Lee not winning an Oscar for any of his work on "Do the Right Thing" (he served as writer, director and producer).

"Glory" failing to even get a Best Picture nomination (I still think it was the best film of '89).

"Saving Private Ryan" losing to "Shakespeare in Love".

"Gladiator" winning Best Picture over "Traffic". The fact that "Almost Famous" failed to even get nominated that year is a shame.

 

[Tim Glover]

Many, many great films and performances listed here. And a great thread too. Here's some of my Oscar Beefs:



Hitchcock: Only a lifetime achievement award. Truly a travesty.

Cary Grant not winning one. He was so natural that he appeared not to be acting. One of the most popular and yet underrated actor of our time.

Tom Cruise for his performance in Jerry Maguire and Magnolia.

Russell Crowe for A Beautiful Mind.

Star Wars not winning Best Picture for 1977

Saving Private Ryan not winning Best Pic for 1998

Magnolia not even being nominated for Best Pic in 1999 which to me was the best film of 1999.

Pearl Harbor not even nominated for the 2001 original score! Love it or hate it type movie but few can argue about the absolute beautiful score by Hans Zimmer. Clear case of Oscar bias.

Thats all I can think of for now.

 

[Arman]

Of course, I'm assuming that everyone knows here that what mattered most for Hitchcock, Welles & Chaplin (& fans) was at least an Academy Award for Best Direction (and not a Lifetime Achievement or Honorary Award because the Academy felt, "since it appears that you already past your peak & you will never even get nominated again so here's an award for all your excellent works in the past" ) IMHO, looking at some of the past awardees (not the industry's cream of the crop!), the Academy's Lifetime Achievement Award is not that prestigious.

 

[Paul J Anderson]

the fact that Johnny Depp has never even been nominated for an Oscar blows my mind. easily one of my favorite actors of all time.

Roger Deakins, although nominated several times, has never taken home the statue for Cinematography. major snub.

David Mamet has only been nominated twice and has never won for best Screenplay. another snub.

Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris and Nick Nolte also come to mind as very underappreciated by the Academy.

oh yea, and how in heck did Julia Roberts beat out Ellen Burstyn for her performance in Requiem for a Dream. boggles my mind.

 

[John Spencer]

Who should have won one? That's easy: Harvey Korman for Blazing Saddles. Heck, he even talked about it in the movie.

 

[Seth Paxton]

I mean, hell, anybody can get a best director award, but not everybody's going to be in the ranks of lifetime achievement.

I was just getting ready to say this, Dome. Winning a yearly award has a lot to do with TIMING and the specific competition. The Lifetime award is all about a great career and is much harder to win (and you get more stage time for it anyway).


BTW, hand up anyone who disagrees with at least 2 of the posts in this thread so far.

Opinion is obviously at work here on some of these travesties.

While I think Scorsese's Taxi Driver was better, I would never argue that Rocky, President's Men or Network were vastly inferior. Rocky and Network still made the AFI 100 (and the HTF AFI 100 revote too). It's like calling the Raiders loss to the Bucs a "major" upset. Losing to solid competition might seem wrong to you, but it's not some horrifying oversight, especially at the time.

Remember that groundbreaking work can often ALIENATE audiences first, only becoming digestable as time catches up to the work. That has certainly hurt some of the greatest film pioneers.

I will say that I think the Academy has changed and that Spielberg is in many ways what Hitchcock was - artistically gifted yet making films with a popular sensibility to them. And SS hasn't come up short on Oscar noms. Had Hitch being working in the last 30 years instead, I think he would have received many nominations from the more mature Academy (mature in the sense that they - and we - now have more film history to reflect upon and to put things in perspective with).


My biggest complaints generally come from missed NOMINATIONS rather than winners. It's quite rare that there is an Oscar winner that, across the board of opinion, is utterly unworthy.

SiL over SPR - that was my choice and still is.

Titanic over LA Con. - was my choice, but it was and is close. Spectacle versus writing, I think both have artistic merits.

Ordinary People vs Raging Bull - Well, I would go with Bull, but at the time I thought Elephant Man deserved it. Again, Ordinary People is not chump change here.

Burstyn vs Roberts - yes, Burstyn was better. But Roberts did carry another very solid film. And let's be honest here, Requiem is very powerful but also very inaccessible to many people. I find it quite understandable why this hurts a film or performance in getting an Oscar. The nomination says a lot about the Academy I think.


Of recent snubs I guess I would say I was most bothered by Almost Famous missing the Best Pix nomination (take away the one for Chocolat). Gladiator winning makes a lot more sense to me than AF being dissed for Chocolat.

 

[TheLongshot]

Titanic over LA Con. - was my choice, but it was and is close. Spectacle versus writing, I think both have artistic merits.

That was a really tough year, since you also had Good Will Hunting, The Full Monty, and As Good As It Gets, which were all deserving in one way or another. Hell, one of my favorites of that year, Contact, didn't make it, and I couldn't really see anything that could be bumped.

I still wonder if Helen Hunt is going to be the Marisa Tomei of that year and have people wonder, "Why the hell did she win?" I still think Jodie Foster acted circles around her...

Jason

 

[Chris Baucom]

Concerning SPR over Shakespeare. Why did this happen? I mean no disrespect to SIL, it was a good movie, but with Spielberg winning the Best Director award that year, I figure it was a very close race. What tipped the scales. The fact that SPR was a war movie? I was wondering whether it was because of the intense marketing campaigns put forth by the movie studios, or by the fact that the first half-hour of SPR was so intense that the rest of the movie was considered anti-climatic?

 

[TheLongshot]

I was wondering whether it was because of the intense marketing campaigns put forth by the movie studios, or by the fact that the first half-hour of SPR was so intense that the rest of the movie was considered anti-climatic?

A little bit of both. For me, it was the latter, and the fact that SPR really relies too much on the "shell shock" factor for you to not to notice that there really isn't much going on. It is the same problem I have with "There's Something About Mary", which the big jokes cover up the fact that the little jokes don't work.

Also what was a factor is that SiL literally came out of nowhere. There was almost no buzz about the film until the test screenings came in about a month before the release date. People were really able to grab onto it and make it surprise hit (kinda like American Beauty a year later). Course, Mirimax took the ball and ran with it, which is now causing the bad habit of getting behind films that don't deserve it. (Chocalat, Chicago)

Jason

 

[Holadem]

May I suggest that people list what the snubbed movies or actors were up against? Psycho losing to the Apartment is not a travesty to me, the latter was an excellent film on it's own right. While the former proved to have had far more influence on cinema, it might not have been very obvious in 1960.

Concerning Kubrick, Hitchcock and others, some in this thread are guilty of the very thing they reproach the academy: Wanting to reward a body of work rather than individual achievement. Is it possible that for every year that a Kubrick movie was released, there was a more deserving winner? I am not saying such is the case, but it's certainly possible - I hope someone with better knowledge of movies will confirm or disprove this theory. The greatness of some movies is not very obvious on first viewing, we all know that.

We are judging today with the certain knoledge that these movies have attained "classic" status, which is certainly not the frame of mind the voters were in back then.

[EDIT] Well, I should have read the whole thing first, it seems Seth wrote the same thing earlier, shorter, and better

Remember that groundbreaking work can often ALIENATE audiences first, only becoming digestable as time catches up to the work. That has certainly hurt some of the greatest film pioneers.

--
Holadem

 

[LawrenceZ]

I don't know if he deserved an Oscar, but Oliver Reed wasn't even nominated for supporting actor for Gladiator. I thought he was fantastic, better than Crowe in my opinion.

 

[Seth Paxton]

Marisa Tomei

This is another "mistake" that I don't think was wrong. I stopped and watched My Cousin Vinny again the other day. I had forgotten how lively the writing in that film is and how much her performance really sells the film. Sometimes people just don't want to respect comedy, even with mild drama.

But Kate Hepburn or Cary Grant gave some of their best efforts in comedic roles. Stewart WON for Philly Story in fact, and Kate had a nomination for it as well.

When you look at Grant and see only 2 nominations, no wins, and none for his best comedic efforts, I think you have to be a bit thankful that the modern Academy was able to appreciate a good comedic effort like Tomei's.

Lest anyone think she was just a hack she turned in that In the Bedroom effort which certainly should remove doubts about her true talent.

 

[John Spencer]

I really think that people look down on Tomei's win because, it's hard to see how difficult it is for a female to successfully carry a comedy film, especially harder the farther back you go in the century. It wasn't that the actresses weren't good, or they didn't give fine performances, it's just the bias that used to exist. As such, a woman winning for a comedic, non-stereotypical role seems like a mistake by the Academy. To me, if you put a woman into a more male-centrically scripted movie with accomplished actors, and she still steals every scene, she deserves every accolade she gets. All, of course, IMHO.