Some Oscar Travesties

In anticipation of this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, I’m looking back in time to see when the Academy just flat-out got it wrong. I won’t be addressing too many snubs below, and rather trying to focus on the awards themselves, what won, what should have, and why it was a mistake.

1961 Oscars:

• The Winners. The Apartment, a romantic dramedy about extramarital affairs, wins 5 Oscars including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, and Editing. Spartacus, directed by legendary Stanley Kubrick, wins 4 Oscars. Psycho by also-legendary Alfred Hitchcock, wins nothing.

• The Right Choices. All three of these films are revolutionary; The Apartment revolved around, joked about, and discussed sex in a way that hadn’t been done before, Spartacus was a massive epic with a dark and cynical streak that got Stanley Kubrick the right to make the films he wanted to make, and Psycho is perhaps the greatest horror film of all time, revolutionizing the genre and the film industry at large. I understand that the Academy didn’t want to recognize a horror movie, so I’ve come up with a deal: Best Picture to Spartacus, Best Director and Editing (do you remember that shower scene?!?!) to Psycho. The Apartment keeps its Screenplay win.

• Why It Matters. I’ll say this again – Psycho is probably the greatest horror movie ever, so rewarding it in its time matters. Oh, and both Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick died without having won a Best Director Oscar. In the course of cinema history, that sure ain’t right.

1975 Oscars:

• The Winners. The Godfather Part II won real big, and Chinatown won a couple. But, somehow, in a year where both Al Pacino in The Godfather and Jack Nicholson in Chinatown give two of the best performances you’ll ever see, Art Carney wins for Harry and Tonto. Unthinkable.

• The Right Choices. Just give it to Al Pacino. I’m aware that Art Carney was something of a T.V. legend; I’m also aware that this award often turns into a legacy award but missing the right performance at the right time in favor of someone overdue is a mistake. I also think that Chinatown could have picked up some technical awards that went to Towering Inferno because, you know, it’s Chinatown.

• Why It Matters. Beyond The Godfather II and Chinatown becoming recognized as among the best 100 films ever made, and therefore any Oscar not given to them seems like a silly choice in hindsight, the lack of an Oscar for anything Godfather for Al Pacino seems to have had some serious ripple effects. Nicholson got his first Oscar the next year, and Robert De Niro managed to pick up Best Supporting and announce himself as the major talent. Pacino, chasing his award, chased increasingly stunty and wild roles such as Scarface before getting his due by playing a disabled man, and old Oscar trick. He won in 1993 for Scent of a Woman, where he plays a blind former soldier. In doing so, he wrongly beat out Denzel for his incredible performance in Malcom X, where he took on essentially 4 different characters to portray this single man over the course of 3+ hours onscreen. Missing Denzel for that is wrong, and it could have been avoided by rewarding Pacino in ’75.

1977 Oscars:

• The Winners. Rocky wins Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Editing. Network wins Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Original Screenplay. All the President’s Men wins Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, and a couple others. Taxi Driver wins nothing, only nominated for Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Picture, and Best Director.

• The Right Choices. Taxi Driver winning nothing sure doesn’t feel right. Rocky winning Best Picture in the year of Taxi Driver, All the President’s Men, and Network as well as its director John Alvidsen winning over Alan Pakula, Sydney Lumet, and the not-even nominated Martin Scorsese doesn’t feel right either. Network winning virtually all the acting awards is fine; those are terrific performances. So to fix this, we would nominate and award Paul Schrader’s Original Screenplay for Taxi Driver, give All The President’s Men Best Picture for its relevance and awesomeness, and give Sydney Lumet Best Director for directing 3 out of the 4 Acting Oscar winners. It’s not hard, people, and Scorsese’s time is still coming.

• Why It Matters. Taxi Driver is frequently named on various polls of critics and directors as among the 10 most important movies ever made, and it won nothing. I get the attraction to the optimism of Rocky and its influence on sports movies is still felt to this day, but it’s certainly not as important to the medium as Network nor captured significant political events the way that All the President’s Men did. Oh, I’ll also have you know that directing legends Sydney Lumet and Alan J. Pakula died without any Oscar wins – go ahead and compare their filmography to Alvidsen’s and decide for yourself if that was right. I’ll wait. Moreover, a blatant rip-off of Taxi Driver called Joker was nominated for 11 Oscars 2 years ago, maybe as some kind of make-up; that already feels like a mistake.

1990 Oscars:

• The Winners. Two young actors named Daniel Day-Lewis and Denzel Washington take home their first Oscars, Oliver Stone picks up a second Directing Oscar, Driving Miss Daisy wins Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Dead Poets Society beats Do The Right Thing for Best Original Screenplay.

• The Right Choices. Do the Right Thing was under-nominated, so I’ll bend my rule from above; it should have won Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, and Spike should have at least been nominated for Best Director.

• Why It Matters. Do the Right Thing is still the best film that the legendary Spike Lee ever made and is an out and out masterpiece. Its depiction of tense racial relations in Brooklyn that boil over in the course of a single day remain sadly timeless; it has lost none of its pure entertainment value; it was directed in an aggressive, stylish, indie way that would become ever more popular in the 90’s, and it’s one of the more brilliant screenplays you’ll encounter, and it won nothing. Spike was correct when he decried this decision, claiming that no one would be thinking about Miss Daisy within a decade of its release, but these comments cost him dearly with the Academy. It wasn’t until 2019 that he won his first competitive Oscar, for having written the magnificent BlacKkKlansman. Unfortunately, that movie lost Best Picture to another “white savior overcomes their bias by spending time in a car with a black man” movie, this time called Green Book. Spike, they’ve been doing you wrong for decades now.

1991 Oscars:

• The Winners. Dances with Wolves is the resounding success of the night, winning 7 Awards including Best Picture and Director. Joe Pesci scores a Best Supporting Actor award for some darned gangster movie that embraces the ugly and realistic side of mob life – gasp – called Goodfellas, but otherwise that movie leaves empty-handed.

• The Right Choices. Get out of here with that crap. Dances with Wolves really is quite good, and quite epic in its scope and its nod to both the Western and war genres, but this is Goodfellas we’re talking about here. It’s also Scorsese that we’re talking about.

• Why It Matters. This is so frequently pointed to that I’m sure you’ve heard about it before I made this list. If anything, you should use this as an excuse to be blown away by Goodfellas again – go watch it, I’ll still be here, waiting with my shinebox. Scorsese would have to wait until the really good, but not Goodfellas good, The Departed to finally win his first Best Directing Oscar; to date, it’s his only one, even though he might be the most significant and influential American filmmaker ever.

1995 Oscars:

• The Winners. Forrest Gump nabs an awful lot of Oscars, Pulp Fiction secures Best Original Screenplay, and The Shawshank Redemption walks away empty-handed. Martin Landau wins Best Supporting Actor in Ed Wood.

• The Right Choices. Let’s work in reverse order here; I can’t believe in the year that Morgan Freeman was nominated for The Shawshank Redemption and Samuel L. Jackson was nominated for Pulp Fiction that Martin Landau won. Give it to either of them! Forrest Gump is a great movie, but it’s neither Pulp nor Shawshank. Let Hanks keep his Oscar, let the film keep its technical awards, but just give the Best Picture award to Shawshank, even if it’s the more basic choice between the other two. Oh, and give the cinematography award to Roger Deakins for filming it, because he’ll have to wait a long time if we don’t.

• Why It Matters. Shawshank is ranked by users as the #1 movie on IMdB because it’s simply that powerful, affecting, and ultimately life-affirming and satisfying. I’m glad that Tarantino got recognized for writing Pulp Fiction, and it would have likely won had it been considered by the Academy that recognized Parasite in such a special way. Compared to those two films, Gump just doesn’t have the same amount of impact, but I would still consider it a great American film; this is just how good of a movie year 1994 was that these choices are so hard.

1999 Oscars:

• The Winners. Shakespeare In Love wins Best Picture over Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, and Life Is Beautiful. Ryan manages to win Spielberg his second Directing Oscar, and the film also takes home several technical awards alongside Best Screenplay. Hanks doesn’t win his third Oscar, instead Roberto Benigni triumphs in the category.

• The Right Choices. Saving Private Ryan should have won for everything that it was nominated for. Its influence is still felt today in not just war films, but any kind of action/battle sequence that’s still being filmed, and its intentionally de-saturated look was ripped for another masterpiece, Children of Men. Focusing on this does take away from Hanks’ stellar performance, but if you want to award someone who had not won at the time, why not award Edward Norton? His performance in American History X is insanely good, insanely powerful, and gives that movie a lasting resonance. Roberto Benigni is good, and I appreciate Life is Beautiful, but I also recognize its hokiness and lack of real power, especially in the year of Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line. Shakespeare in Love is delightful, but it’s certainly not as good as Saving Private Ryan.

• Why It Matters. Beyond failing to recognize the right film at the right time, the strongest theme of this writing, Shakespeare in Love was powered by a special Oscar campaign by the producer who ultimately won the award along with the film; his name is Harvey Weinstein, and this won’t be the last time his movie steals Best Picture from the right winner on this list.

2005 Oscars:

• The Winners. Jamie Foxx wins Best Actor for Ray, The Aviator scoops up several technical awards and an Acting Award for Cate Blanchett, but Million Dollar Baby somehow wins Best Picture and Best Director.

• The Right Choices. Let me see here, Clint Eastwood had already won a Best Directing Oscar, and Best Picture, for Unforgiven 10 years before this… I wonder if there’s any other kind of directing legend that we could pick… Or perhaps an incredibly gifted actor and movie star too… It would be convenient if they had worked on the same project…

• Why It Matters. #GetLeoHisOscar started here, and while The Revenant is an incredible technical feat of a film, watching him get mauled by a digital bear and drag himself around the frozen frontier, often in close-up, might have been avoided if we just gave Leo the Oscar for an incredible performance in The Aviator. This is also the kind of movie that the Academy loves to honor: a based-on-a-true-story character epic that manages to capture old Hollywood. Oh, and Scorsese is still two years away from getting his first Best Director Oscar, so there’s that.

• 2006. It wasn’t enough material to cover a whole section, nor all that original, but Crash winning at all, but winning Best Picture by beating Brokeback Mountain is just sad. Carry on.

2011 Oscars:

• The Winner. The King’s Speech wins Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Original Screenplay. Inception wins most of the technical awards, including Best Cinematography. The Social Network wins awards for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editing and Best Score. In news that I won’t quibble with, Toy Story 3 wins two Oscars; don’t say I don’t have a soft heart.

• The Right Choice. Colin Firth turns in an incredible performance in The King’s Speech, but that’s the only Oscar this film should keep. Inception was an absolute sensation and one of the more original ideas for a film (a heist movie inside of dreams that depends on the main character facing his trauma and demons), and so deserved a Best Original Screenplay award. The Social Network then takes Best Picture and Best Director from The King’s Speech.

• Why It Matters. That’s right, just 10 years ago we were still messing this up big-time (we likely still are). Both Christopher Nolan and David Fincher, two of the signature filmmakers of the last 30 years, have yet to win an Oscar. Nolan winning here may not alter much in the course of film history, as he really has gone on to make his own original blockbuster films exactly how he wants them, but wouldn’t it have been great to have already recognized a major talent? Fincher’s lack of an Oscar is egregious considering that he’s directed Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, Social Network, and Gone Girl, among others. If ever there was a film to recognize him for, the best film of the decade was it; his direction is perfect. The reason that The King’s Speech won? A clever campaign by its producer, Harvey Weinstein. I’m sure the Academy would love a do-over, so I'm giving it to them.