Um, I thought that Titanic was a trite plot with a change of scenery. Blah, ick, I’m outta here.
I think Bladerunner should have taken at least a cinematography oscar. Not to mention Ridley Scott for best director. IMHO: It’s one of the very best sci-fi movies ever made.
I can’t believe no-one has mentioned this, although it could just be me being patriotic - Dame Judi Dench in Mrs Brown. I mean that was criminal, even the woman) who won it (forgotten who it was) said in her speech that she thought Judi Dench should have got it. I suppose they made up for it with the best supporting actress for Shakespeare in Love but hmmmmmmmmm… NOT GOOD ENOUGH!!!
Ok, I’m calm now.
I completely agree about Jim Carrey for The Truman Show and Ed Norton is just magic to watch. They were robbed.
I concur with the others who say Three Kings got the shaft.
A couple of other recent missteps has been Michael Caine getting the Best Supporting Actor award for The Cider House Rules, when I felt that Haley Joel Osment from The Sixth Sense should have been a no-brainer choice.
Titanic getting the best picture award instead of L.A. Confidential didn’t sit well with me either. Don’t get me wrong, Titanic is an OK movie, but I was more blown away by the writing and acting (two things I’m more impressed by than special effects) in L.A. Confidential.
Out of Africa was given the best picture award in 1985. I can’t find a list of the other nominees for that year, but I know somebody got screwed here. Ditto for the year The English Patient won. Watching a burned up man have flashbacks for three hours about people that I couldn’t care about was one of the most boring movie experiences in my life.
Annie Hall (another one of Woody Allen’s angst-ridden flicks, where Allen plays essentially the same character that he plays in most of his other movies) got the best picture award instead of Star Wars. Idiotic. Anybody gonna be flocking to see an Annie Hall re-release twenty years from now?
Dame Judi Dench (Mrs. Brown) gets passed over for Kim Basinger (L.A. Confidential) in the Best Actress award? Stupid, stupid, stupid. I loved L.A. Confidential, but I didn’t think Basinger did anything special in that movie.
I’m still annoyed that Samuel L. Jackson didn’t get the Best Supporting Actor in Pulp Fiction. I think it was Kevin Spacey who got it that year for The Usual Suspects, which is a fine movie, but nothing about Spacey’s performance really stood out for me.
I thought that was Rob Reiner.
Eh, love you too Tasha. But I’m not in the mood to argue. It’s just that every other person in that movie was nominated except for him. Granted none of them won, but that’s besides the point.
hypergirl: The screenplay for Titanic wasn’t nominated either, for what it’s worth. If I remember my Oscar history, it’s the only time a film has ever won Best Picture when its screenplay wasn’t nominated.
I concur with many of the foregoing choices: lissener’s acknowledgement of John Malkovich and Crissy Rock, Jack Batty’s nod to Vincent Gallo, xizor and others for Carrey’s Andy Kaufman, JosephFinn’s recognition of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Gadarene’s comments regarding Andre Braugher and the best damn police series in television history, and many others.
I’ll also point out a couple of Atom Egoyan films that were seriously overlooked: The Sweet Hereafter should have been nominated for Best Picture. From that film, Bruce Greenwood and Sarah Polley should have been nominated for supporting acting awards, and Ian Holm absolutely should have been recognized for his lead performance – the best male performance that year, by far. Also, Bob Hoskins should have been nominated for best actor from Egoyan’s Felicia’s Journey, and of course Terence Stamp should have been nominated for Soderbergh’s The Limey. Going back a few years, John Wayne should have gotten his Oscar for The Searchers instead of True Grit.
Note that these are all acting awards. A few from the other artistic categories:
David Holmes’s score for Out of Sight. (The editor, Anne V. Coates, was at least nominated, but also should have been chosen before the winner, the overly obvious Saving Private Ryan.)
The Wachowski Brothers should have gotten a screenplay nomination for Bound. The film also deserved a cinematography nod for Bill Pope’s sinuous camerawork. (Hmmm. I think it’s time to watch this movie again.)
In 1989, Do the Right Thing should have been nominated for Best Picture. Kathleen Turner, as presenter, said as much before she opened the envelope to announce the “official” winner.
Hoop Dreams should have been nominated for Best Picture, but wasn’t even given a nod in the documentary category. You can fill in the same comments for just about any Errol Morris documentary, as well.
Excalibur was nominated for its cinematography (and lost to Reds, which is fine), but was not nominated for art direction or costumes.
Brazil was nominated for Art Direction and for Screenplay, but won neither. It deserved a lot more recognition.
Tim Robbins should have been nominated for writing Bob Roberts. And there were a bunch of songs in that film, too, that deserved recognition.
Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures was worthy of a whole slew of nominations. It got exactly one, for its screenplay, and lost to Pulp Fiction.
Foreign films rarely cross over into U.S. awards (though this has been happening somewhat more frequently lately), but the films of Almodovar, Woo, Von Trier, and others have been sorely overlooked. Hard-Boiled, for example, should have been recognized for its editing.
Tim Roth’s The War Zone should have been nominated for every goddamn award they could think of.
Michael Apted’s Thunderheart is an underappreciated gem that died at the box office and got no award recognition. In addition to Graham Greene’s warm and funny performance, it could have earned cinematographic and writing nominations.
John Carpenter’s The Thing should have been nominated for its editing.
Oh, and one more acting nomination: Eric Bogosian in Talk Radio.
I could do this all day, so I’ll stop for now.
I concur with most of Cervaise’s mentions, and add these comments:
Even though Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic was that movie’s best performance, I don’t think it was Oscar material. No one in that movie deserved an acting Oscar, but DiCaprio was the only one who made any effort to find some dimension in his character; everyone else just played their cardboard cutouts as written. And the glaring omission of the screenplay from the nominations was the Academy’s way of saying, “Okay, we’re all prostitutes, but we’re not whores!”
And Out of Sight should have won every conceivable Oscar. A nearly flawless film.
And what about Nicole Kidman, in To Die For? I don’t usually like her, but that performance was just astounding. That movie also should have won for screenplay.
Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress should have won for adapted screenplay, cinematography, and directing, and should at least have been nominated for best picture.
And yes, Cervaise, Bob Roberts should have swept the awards. Likewise Charles Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger and Kasi Lemmons’ Eve’s Bayou.
And ShyGhost, Kim Basinger didn’t win over Judi Dench; Helen Hunt did, and as has been mentioned elsewhere here, she acknowledged Dench’s deserving the award. Basinger won for supporting. And here’s the thing: her performance in LAConfindential deserved it, but otherwise she’s an abominable actress. I really don’t get it. It’s a rare example of the Oscar actually going for a single performance: it usually goes for a career, or box office, or politics.
Nobody mentioned “Saving Private Ryan”
I’m sorry, but how does a film sweep Oscar night, and then not win Best Picture? I mean honestly. I enjoyed “Shakespeare in Love” but it was not even CLOSE to Saving Private Ryan.
And I would like to make a stipulation that Helen Hunt and that Paltrow chick should not win for anything, ever. They shouldn’t even be allowed to make movies.
The worst Oscar vote I’ve ever seen was The Right Stuff (best movie I’ve ever seen) losing Best Picture to Terms of Endearment. Criminal.
D’OH!
I agree. (Of course I worked at Edwards at the time, and as an extra on the film.)
Really ripped off at the Oscars®
Roddy McDowell in Cleopatra. I’ve never seen the movie, but McDowell was the odds-on favourite for Best Supporting Actor. Unfortunately, a clerical error listed him in the wrong category and he was disqualified. The studio made a public apology.
Er…what?!?
First off, let me back up a couple of earlier posters:
I agree wholeheartedly with astorian’s rant. Subtle performances are not rewarded, and Hollywood loves disabilities. I’ll add Sling Blade, Shine, and Mask to his list of disability movies.
I also agree with Cervaise that The Sweet Hereafter should have received a nomination. Also, from that film, the actor who played the bereaved father (the one who had been following the bus) should have received a nomination for Best Supporting Actor. (Don’t know the actor’s name or the character’s name, unfortunately.) (I think it’s Bruce Greenwood in the role of Billy Ansel.)
I’m a big fan of the movie Lone Star, and its director, John Sayles. Although Lone Star got a nomination for Best Screenplay, it should have been nominated for (and won) Best Picture in 1996. Sayles should at least have gotten a nomination for Best Director. Also, from that film, I would have nominated Miriam Colon for Best Supporting Actress in the role of Mercedes Cruz, and Joe Morton in the role of Colonel Payne. Like astorian said, subtlety is not rewarded.
I agree that Johnny Depp is one of the best actors of his generation. (Perhaps the best.) Did he get a nomination for Donnie Brasco? If not, he should have. Incidentally, he also turned in one of the best fake Southern accents on record in The Astronaut’s Wife
I agree with needs2know that Kevin Bacon turned in a great performance in Murder in the First. He is an underappreciated actor, generally.
Lastly, this seems the appropriate place to express my opinion that Robin Williams should have won Best Actor for Awakenings, but not for Good Morning Viet Nam.
Cervaise wrote:
Heck, John Wayne should have won, or at least been nominated, for his role in The Cowboys (which, come to think of it, should have been nominated for Best Picture). I agree that True Grit, while a hugely entertaining movie, was not Wayne’s best performance. He was also better in The Shootist.
Ooo, oo, Lone Star! How could I forget that? Or Sayles’s earlier films, Eight Men Out, Matewan, Passion Fish… Subtlety is not rewarded, indeed. Any one of those films should have provided front-runners for any given acting category, at minimum. Check out Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio’s career-best (so far) performance in Limbo, for example.
And thanks, lissener, for reminding us of Eve’s Bayou, Devil in a Blue Dress, and others. Definitely deserving, and definitely overlooked. Re the latter, Carl Franklin is one of those underrated directors who should get more notice.
And as long as we’re talking Johnny Depp, what about his incredible Hunter S. Thompson riff in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas?
And one last thing: Connor, I’m with you on Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects. ShyGhost (and anyone else who’s wondering), Spacey got the Oscar for finding the very delicate balance required to make not just his role, but the entire movie, work correctly. He was smart enough to realize that Verbal Kint is the fulcrum on which the whole movie hinges; if he played the obvious beats for the first 90%, the ending would be an unsupported and unbelievable bolt from the blue, but if he went the other way, and showed too much, he’d spoil the climax. What he had to do was show just enough so that the ending would be an “A-ha!” moment, instead of a “Huh?” thing. Not only that, he had to provide enough modulations and hints that, in retrospect, it would be obvious to the second-time viewer what he’s doing. If his performance were off in the slightest degree, the whole movie falls apart. That’s why he deserved to win.
And those hints are supported by the brilliant cinematography and editing. For instance, the blink and you’d miss it clue of Kint lighting a Zippo lighter with his left hand, which had previously been useless. Especially, consider how earlier in the movie he had needed Agent Cunyan (Chaz Palminterri) to light a cigarette for him since he couldn’t get the Zippo to work. It’s probably a 2-second shot, and I consider it a very small mistake by Kint, illustrative of just how hard it is to maintain that disguise for that long.
Yes, she was nominated but lost to Jessica Lange for Tootsie
Spielberg has never won a Lifetime Achievement Oscar. He did win the Irving Thalberg award (which is not the same) in addition to his 3 regular Oscars.
This is so incredibly wrong, I don’t even know where to begin. Film score Oscars have always been for the instrumental underscore. Period. There was, for a while, an Oscar for musical score or adaptation, but this was a separate category and only counted for musicals with a single set of songwriters; this was the Oscar Prince won for. However, there has never been a score Oscar that went to “rock” music–only in the Song category, which is a completely different subject entirely.
There was some controversy because for a while, Disney films kept winning the score Oscar, and many suspected that though the nomination was technically for the underscore only, voters were choosing the films because they liked the songs. Even then, though, these were still musicals and not scores with assorted “pop” songs as the post implies.
Under Fire lost to The Right Stuff in 1983. Though a far superior score, I think it’s safe to say nobody could’ve realistically thought Goldsmith had a chance against the more popular, more widely heard (and more hummable) Bill Conti score.
Jackson lost to Martin Landau for Ed Wood
Nope. The Sound of Music, Hamlet, Grand Hotel, Broadway Melody, and Wings were also Best Picture winners with no nominations in the writing categories.
Mask received no major Oscar nominations
Hey, what about Paul Dooley as the Dad in Breaking Away? The father-son chat in that movie is a classic scene, carried by Dooley. (Not to mention Dooley giving us one of the all-time classic double-takes at the end of the movie.) Dooley didn’t get even a nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
Turns out Johnny Depp is from Kentucky. So maybe I shouldn’t have been so impressed by his “fake” Southern accent. 
Also, upon further review, Edward Norton may beat out Depp as the best actor in this generation of actors. Close call, though…