Top 10 Biggest Oscar Snubs of All Time

Dear readers, this upcoming Sunday is the night of the Academy Awards, and true to form, it looks like all of the pictures and performances actually worth any recognition got snubbed in favor of returning favorites or the tofu of cinema, Oscar bait. Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was one of the only film I saw last year even worth a Best Picture nomination, yet it gets passed over in favor of forgettable fluff like The Help or Moneyball; of the nine nominated, the only one worth a nomination is The Artist or Hugo. At least Rooney Mara got a Best Actress nomination for her phenomenal performance as Lisbeth Salander, not that she has a chance of winning against more Oscar friendly performances that include Meryl Steep’s somewhat questionable portrayal of Margaret Thatcher, Viola Davis for being the bright spot in yet another white guilt fable, and Glenn Close for wearing drag. Of course, Andy Serkis got screwed again because lord knows Brad Pitt and George Clooney deserve another nomination rather than a motion capture chimp that gave a performance containing more humanity than either of them. Even Tintin didn’t get a nomination for best animated feature, in spite of being the best thing Spielberg’s tacked his name onto in a decade. Needless to say, I’m not happy with this years awards - that’s part of the reason I’m give my own for the second time this Sunday.

So yes, Hollywood has a long tradition of mind-boggling and puzzling award choices and winners that it can add to with this year. However, there are some snubs that go beyond simple head scratching and make you wonder just what the hell the Academy was thinking at the time. These range from things like the Academy continually getting suckered by forgettable period romances like the English Patient, Titanic or Cold Mountain, giving out Oscars to oddball movies like Chariots of Fire or Crash, and any film that didn’t have Lord of the Rings in the title even winning an Oscar from 2001-2003. Yet even these are forgivable to what's on the list you have before you today.

You see, for your enjoyment (or shame, depending on your perspective) I’ve pieced together a list of what I feel to be the ten biggest Oscar Snubs of All Time - and hopefully did so without snubbing anything that should be here. On that note, read on, and lets start the show!

10) 1978 Best Picture - This is not the winner you’re looking for

Little known fact: In the entire 84-year history of the Academy Awards, only one science fiction or fantasy film has ever won best picture, and that was the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King in 2004. While the theorized reasons behind that vary depending on who you ask, a shocking number of snubs can be seen to films from the two genres, and while I’ll list a few later, lets take a look at some that didn‘t make the cut. Prior to Return of the King taking Best Picture in 2004, it was ignored in 2002 and 2003 respectively in favor of a largely forgotten Russell Crowe movie and the musical Chicago. In 1983, Gandhi trumped ET, an upset to the point the director of Gandhi himself said he didn’t deserve to win. Just the year before that, in 1982, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Arc lost to Chariots of Fire. And of course, for our number ten biggest snub of all time, in the 1978 Oscars, Star Wars lost Best Picture to Annie Hall.

Look, I love Woody Allen movies, and Annie Hall is one of my favorites, buts lets take a look at the facts. Star Wars popularized science fiction with the general public, was one of the biggest blockbusters in history, revolutionized special effects and filmmaking, and was a movie that defined a generation. Annie Hall had Jewish humor and Diane Keaton wearing men's clothing. While both are fantastic films, and the only reason this is number ten is because Annie Hall is a superb movie in its own right, there is no question which was the better film and which deserved Best Picture.

9) 1990 Best Picture - (The Academy didn't) Do the Right Thing

Almost as bad as the genre snobbery are the years the Oscar goes to some forgettable fluff film clearly fishing for Oscars. The perfect example of this is the winner of Best Picture in 1990, Driving Miss Daisy, which follows an old Jewish lady in the South who treats her elderly black driver like crap. It's dull, pedantic, and entirely forgettable unless you're curious to see the first film to feature a number of annoying tropes that continue to earn Oscars, or want to see the movie that made Morgan Freeman's career - a few exceptions aside, he's been playing the same character ever since.

Honestly, any other film from that year would have been a preferable pick - I'd go with Glory or My Left Foot. What makes this a snub more than just a bad year is that if you wanted to give an Oscar to a movie in 1990 that talked about race, and in way that did it without having some rich white lady teach a black man how to read: Do the Right Thing. the Spike Lee movie would be the first major Hollywood film to recognize a divide between the races in America still exists, and one that would set half of Los Angeles ablaze in 1993 in a fashion very similar to the movie. While Driving Miss Daisy was fluffy Oscar Bait, Do the Right Thing struck a cultural nerve and would prove all too prophetic in the blink of an eye. It was the better film, and it deserved the Oscar. Of course, Mookie didn't have magic powers.

8) 1995 best Picture - The Oscars are like a Box of Chocolates

Cinema in 1994 gave us not one, but two films nominated for Best Picture that would in time become timeless classics. First, you had the Shawshank Redemption, which to this day is the highest rated film on IMDB. However, the Oscar should have gone to Pulp Fiction, which was unlike any other film made at the time. It was bloody, witty, clever and absolutely insane, all at the same time, and would in time prove to be one of maybe two or three films from the last twenty five years that changed filmmaking. Of course, rather than pick one of these two masterpieces, the Best Picture statue went to Forest Gump, a tale about a slow-witted Southern bumpkin that manages to be responsible for almost every major historical event of the last fifty years. Granted, the movie is not terrible, just a terrible choice for Best Picture.

Pulp Fiction would change the way people looked at and made movies, has been referenced at least a hundred times, and made folks like Quinton Tarantino, Uma Thurman and Samuel L. Jackson household names, the later two of which should have taken home Best Supporting Actress and Best Supporting Actor awards respectfully. Forest Gump changed the way people said Jenny for a few years and led to the ‘never go full r****d’ joke in Tropic Thunder.

7) 70th Academy Awards - Titanic wins 11 awards (and wasn't even nominated for the only one it earned)

Aside from maybe perhaps Juno, I'm of the opinion that Titanic is the most overrated and overblown film of my lifetime. It takes all the things I hate about period pieces, all the things I hate about chick flicks, and then takes some hammy acting and a shoddy script into the equation before unleashing it on the world. Hell, the only thing that seperates it from a Nicolas Sparks movie or Remember Me movie is the admitedly impressive production value and the fact the end twist of death is a century old naval disaster - well, that and the nearly $2 billion dollars it made at the box office and 11 Academy Awards it won.

Winning some Oscars for the production values would have been okay, but winning Best Picture, Best Director and earning nominations for its acting was a bridge too far. First bear in mind that the only two films aside from Titanic to earn 11 nominations were Ben-Hur and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. The former was a grand scale historical epic and is arguably the best film ever made in old Hollywood. The latter was a sweeping fantasy epic that boasted a superb ensemble cast, revolutionary special effects, and is one of the greatest movies ever made, to say nothing of being the only science fiction or fantasy film to ever win Best Picture. Both are among the most flawless films ever crafted and two of the most beloved movies ever made. Titanic had Billy Zane playing a cartoon baddy and a Celine Dion song. Not even the same league. What's really sad is the one actor who gave a noteworthy performance in the film was Leonardo DiCaprio, and he wasn't even nominated, which is sad, seeing he was a bright spot in an otherwise way too stuffy film.

The film that should have won Best Picture and Best Director was LA Confidential, a delightfully twisted film noir which, between its superb ensemble cast and script, was one of the most critically acclaimed films of the nineties, and aside from the Oscars, swept nearly every other critics list and award show that year. The Oscars however, set it out to drift, no pun intended.

6) 1980 Best Picture and Best Director -Kramer now, Apocalypse later

Before he spent most of his time trying to insist to the world that his daughter Sofia has an ounce of talent as either an actress or a director, Francis Ford Coppola actually used to make movies himself. While this includes a number of stinkers that include the likes of Jack and One from the Heart, to say nothing of Godfather III, most critics, myself included are willing to give him a pass for a glorious period of his career back in the 1970s where Coppola cranked out three of the greatest cinematic masterpieces ever produced. The first two are The Godfather and Godfather II, which together won countless awards and accolades, including two Oscars for Best Picture, and effected everything from ethnic identity to organized crime in the popular consciousness. The other, was Apocalypse Now.

Adapted from Heart of Darkness, the classic novel by Joseph Conrad, Apocalypse Now would, in many ways, be Coppola's magnum opus, with his perfectionism and attention to detail, as well as numerous problems with the last and set in the Philippines, caused the film to go through several re-shoots and go over budget several times - some even say the stress of making the movie is why his following work was so flawed in comparison. Whatever issues it had in production the film itself is a masterpiece, with a top notch performance from its ensemble cast, some of the best cinematography ever put to film, and presenting audiences with one of the most masterfully done war films of the post-Vietnam era, and one that not only manages to avoid being anti or pro-war, but focuses entirely on the horrors of conflict and human nature. It is for good reason that the movie is hailed as one of the finest movies ever crafted.

Which is more than we can say about the movie that won both Best Picture and Best Director, Kramer vs. Kramer, for those of you who don't know, a movie about gender roles and divorce that earned Meryl Streep her first Oscar. While it is an OK film, with a little over thirty years of hindsight, in retrospect it is just an above average soap opera trying to pass as a serious drama. Half of you have likely never even heard of it, let alone seen it. The fact it beat Coppola's last masterwork is a crime that makes my head spin. The horror, the horror...

5) 1990 Best Picture - Dances with Wolves trumps Goodfellas

Ask any film buff or filmmaker what the most influential film of the last twenty five years is, and you'll get a few answers of Lord of the Rings or Pulp Fiction, buta good chunk of them will say Goodfellas, and for good reason. It was a labor of love and is the finest work of Martin Scorsese to date, whose tale of the rise and fall of gangster Henry Hill was a well-acted and superbly shot tour-de-force, and is arguably the best mob film ever made, giving even The Godfather pause. It influenced a generation of filmmakers, and in general is hailed as one of the greatest films ever made.

The movie that one on the other hand, was the forgetable and bone dry actor/director effort from Kevin Costner, Dances with Wolves. In spite of the innacurate portrayal of Lakota culture (for one example, they used the wrong dialect of the Lakota language in the movie) and the horrifically hammy-in-hindsight performance by Costner, the Acadamy was enraptured by the film, granting the film and Costner the Oscar for Best Picture, Best Director and five other statues on a night Goodfellas would only win Best Supporting Actor.

Let that sink in: Goodfellas, a movie that inspired or effected a good chunk of cinema over the last quarter century lost to a movie whose sole legacy is 'inspiring' films like The Last Samurai and Avatar, as well as sparking the recent trend for films with the Mighty Whitey trope getting Oscar nominations, which includes this year's The Help. Worse, Scorsese would get snubbed a few more times, before finally winning in 2006 with The Departed, which was itself a remake of Hong Kong's take on Goodfellas. Worst of all though, it made people think Kevin Costner could act - which if his performances in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves or Wyatt Earp, to say nothing of cinematic abortions like Waterworld or The Postman are any indications, borders on a war crime.

4) The Entire 2009 Academy Awards

As a whole, 2008 was a year that gave moviegoers a number of instant classics, including films like Gran Torino, The Dark Knight, Wall-E, and Iron Man to name only four. With so many gems, even a blind man could have chosen one film worthy of the golden statues. Hollywood it seemed, would have to work twice as hard to pick a bunch of forgettable turds to give them to instead.

I could make an entire list of snubs from this one year alone. Aside from Dark Knight or Wall-E, none were nominated for any awards at all, and aside from Ledger’s performance in Dark Knight, none of them were the major Oscars. First, you had The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which not only was essentially just a remake of Forest Gump with Brad Pitt, but somehow managed to beat films like Iron Man and The Dark Knight in the awards for Special Effects and Art Direction, to say nothing of earning a total of thirteen nominations. Best Actress went to Kate Winslet for The Reader, yet another Holocaust movie (which is hilarious if you saw this beforehand), while Sean Penn took home Best Actor for playing gay-icon Harvey Milk in the bland biopic of the same name. Best Picture and Best Director went to a Bollywood movie about a kid who won a game show.

Its hard to imagine how Hollywood could have screwed up more with the Oscars that year. Not only did the three or four big winners last year fade away in less than a year from the cultural consciousness, but some of what they snubbed was an insult to good culture. Clint Eastwood gave the performance of a lifetime in Gran Torino, to say nothing of being better directed than any of the nominees, and boasting a better script than and score than them as well. The Dark Knight and Iron Man took the comic book movie from kids territory to Oscar Contenders in a one-two punch, and fully deserved recognition for doing so. Wall-E was one of the deepest and most clever animated films of all time, at last showing the public at large the kinds of stories animation was capable of showing. Oddly enough, the one major award given out that night that people supported, the Best Supporting Actor for Heath Ledger’s Joker performance is kind of a snub in and of itself, since being alive to collect the statue is pretty much a requirement for winning an Oscar, and it spits in the face of all the living actors who performed their hearts out without overdosing on painkillers.

Needless to say, the way the Oscars went this year did not go well with the larger media or the general public. There was such an amount of controversy after these Oscars that it would prove to be the catalyst for the Academy to increase the number of nominations the in the following years, just to avoid this situation again. Pity they didn’t also learn to nominate truly noteworthy films too.

3) 1999 Best Picture - James Ryan earned it

To this day, Saving Private Ryan is the greatest war movie ever put to camera. At the time of it’s release though, it made all of its predecessors look like Adam Sandler movies in comparison. The opening twenty minutes of the landings at Normandy is one of the most intense and powerful moments in cinematic history, and the following tale of a band of brothers as they trek across the European theater to save the life of the titular Private Ryan is one of the most heart rendering stories ever told, and a career best for all involved, from Tom Hanks to Steven Spielberg. It was more than an instant classic, it was a masterpiece deserving of every accolade, and everyone but the Academy Awards knew it.

No, the award would go to a movie that was mostly forgotten even at the time of the Awards, a little film from Miramax called Shakespeare in Love. For those that do not know, back in the 1990s, Miramax was a studio that had, for that era at least, become the New York Yankees of the Oscars. The studio would do anything to garner as many Oscar wins and nominations as possible, which in the case of the 1999 Oscars, meant spending $16 million dollars on a campaign hyping up Shakespeare in Love, and more relevantly, discrediting Saving Private Ryan for alleged historical inaccuracy - something of a suckers gambit considering the film they were pushing was in essence, a romantic comedy about how old Bill Shakespeare based Romeo and Juliet on an affair he had with a crossdresser, and includes references to Virginia tobacco plantations that wouldn't exist for another twenty years - while Saving Private Ryan made some WWII veterans suffer from flashbacks in the theaters. Sadly, Miramax found their sucker as the Academy gave Shakespeare in Love the award for Best Picture, to the audible shock of the forty-five million people watching.

As mentioned before, Saving Private Ryan was a classic the instant it was released - all Shakespeare in Love is known for these days is for snubbing it.

2) 1975 Best Actor - Art Carney won an Oscar, nobody gets thier due

If you were making a list of the best actors of all time, Al Pacino and Jack Nicholson would both very likely be near the top of that list. The two are Hollywood legends, and in 1975, they'd both given the performance of a lifetime, turning in two of the most iconic performances in the history of American cinema: Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in Godfather II and Jack Nicholson as J.J. Gettes in Chinatown. There have been entire years where the entire nominees list doesn't pack as much power into thier performances as either of them did for that one year. Either one would have fully deserved Best Actor, but of course, since this is a list of the biggest Oscar snubs of all time, you can correctly guess neither of them won.

No, the Oscar that year went to Art Carney for his portrayal of an old man and his cat traveling cross country in Harry and Tonto. Notice how I linked you to the Wikipedia page? That's because I bet ninety percent of you have never even heard of the film, and the remaining ten percent are wondering how the hell the fat guy from Honeymooners got an Oscar in a year when he faced Godfather II and Chinatown. Whats really shocking is how this years snub let to a string of future snubs. For example, after snubbing Pacino several more times, they decided he was 'due' in 1993, awarding him Best Actor for his hammy performance as a blind drunk in Scent of a Woman, snubbing Denzel Washington for his performance in Malcom X, thus making him 'due' in 2002 for his role in Training Day, leading to him snubbing Will Smith, Russel Crowe and Sean Penn all at once, and so on and so on. All because the Academy gave Art Carney an Oscar.

At least Actors can get their 'due'. Movies only get one shot, leading to our number one Oscar snub of all time...

1) 1942 Best Picture - That’s show business

The 1942 Oscars had a number of notable films up for best picture. You had Sergeant York, one of the all-time great war films, with Gary Cooper giving one of his best performances as the titular hero of WWI. You had Suspicion, one of the few Hitchcock films to be nominated for Best Picture. You also had The Maltese Falcon, the now legendary detective story that would launch the film noir genre, and launch the career of Humprey Bogart. Even these three classics pale when you realize they were up against Citizen Kane.

Citizen Kane... to even be agnoloaged as a film buff worth the time of day, you have to admit it is the greatest movie of all time, though you might be given a pass for saying it is behind Casablanca or The Godfather. Why wouldn't that be the case? Orson Welles' famous film affected and influenced filmmaking for decades to come in immeasurable ways. All the movies on this list, snubs and should have wons, owe an immeasurable debt to the style and techniques pioneered by the movie. It was even recognized for this at the time, nominated for nine Academy Awards, a record for the time.

All of that wouldn't mean a damn in the face of studio politics and a smear campaign by media magnate William Randolph Hearst, whom Kane was loosely based. The end result was that in spite of its merits, Citizen Kane would lose every award it was nominated except for Most Original Screenplay, and when its name was called off for even a nomination, the attending crowd booed. The worst insult of all though? It lost Best Picture and Best Director to a film called How Green is my Valley, a movie so obscure I’m sure half of you are googling it right now.

Take that in my dear readers. The most influential and important film of all time was beaten by an answer for a trivial pursuit question. Which is why, in the end, we the general public need to take the Oscars with an ever increasingly large dose of skepticism. What makes a movie or a performance notable isn’t some golden statue or the spur-of-the-moment bias or opinions of a room filled with millionaires, but the feelings and tastes of moviegoers like you and me and the millions of others who enjoy a good movie or a talented performance. The public consciousness has a far better memory and a far brighter shine than even the most deserved of Oscars. After all, its just a statue.