Here are the ground rules. You tell us about a person or film that should have won the Academy Award for their year but they weren’t even nominated, and add for context who or what movie won that category for that year. So it is not appropriate to say Saving Private Ryan should have beaten Shakespeare in Love for Best Picture because SPRwas nominated.
So as an example a lot of people think Roddy McDowell should have won Best Supporting Actor for Planet of the Apes. Due to the studio screwing up the paperwork he was not nominated and Jack Albertson won instead.
Special or Honorary awards do not count so Charlie Chaplin and The Circus would work here. The Academy pulled him and his movie out of nomination and substituted a special award saying effectively they were afraid he would sweep the awards in the first presentation.
Feel free to argue with any selections here and add your own. He is my list
A Boy and His Atom (technical award): I don’t know if technically this meets the criteria because I don’t know if technical awards have nominations. In 1983, IBM made a stop-motion motion film with atoms. It was an incredible technical feat.
What Price Hollywood? for Best Picture & Lowell Sherman for Best Actor lost to Cavalcade & Charles Laughton (The Private Life of Henry VIII).
This movie was remade three times as A Star is Born. 'Nuff said? Lowell Sherman’s performance as Max Carey was realistic, gritty and brutal. The movie was about Mary Evans (Constance Bennett) but Sherman’s performance demanded your attention anytime he was on the screen. Maybe because of the subject matter it was snubbed by the Oscars. Bennett deserved a nomination (but not the award that went to Katharine Hepburn) and Best Original Story nomination too but I haven’t seen One Way Passage so I don’t know if it deserved the award too.
Denzel Washington for Best Supporting Actor in Philadelphia.
I know you think I’m mistaken but I’m not. Denzel Washington was not even nominated for his role as Joe Miller. 1993 saw both Philadelphia and Schindler’s List come out but I suspect the argument with this choice is that the Best Supporting Actor should have gone to Leonardo DiCaprio for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, and he was nominated for that. My argument is that Washington’s character changed over the course of the film so he showed more depth in his acting than DiCaprio. Instead Tommy Lee Jones won for his role of every other TLJ character in The Fugitive. Of note is Jonathan Demme as director of Philadelphia. He wasn’t even nominated but he is not on the list because as brilliant as his direction was, Steven Spielberg won for Schindler’s List so that discussion doesn’t even get started.
HOWEVER I am wrong!
The conversation really should be Val Kilmer for Best Supporting Actor in Tombstone.
Isn’t he the archetype for this thread? Kilmer is the only person who played Doc Holliday as wracked with consumption. Other actor play him like he could go out and do a decathlon. So despite what I just said about Denzel Washington above, the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for film year 1993 should have gone to Kilmer. I’m willing to bet that if I take all of the responses and ask who is most deserving of their Oscar that Val would win by a wide margin.
Vertigo is one of my very favourite films and Hitchcock wasn’t nominated for Best Director for that (and just to add, of course, he never actually won in the category full stop). In my opinion it is a masterpiece.
Oh another one. RRR for Best International Feature Film
This may be controversial because everyone lauded the winner All Quiet on the Western Front. As a lover of the book I was disappointed in the movie AQotWF but even ignoring that it had nothing to the book, yeah it was a good war movie but we’ve seen all of that before. It was nothing like the intensity and epicness of RRR. However, India did not submit it as their entry so we’ll never know if it would have won if given the chance.
Not to hijack the thread, but the Oscars always have the same sort of bullshit feel to me that the Heisman Trophy does. Supposedly they’re the best player in college football. But there’s a bunch of unwritten nonsense that basically says it has to be a quarterback or running back, and usually the quarterback of one of the best teams that year. No matter if the best player happens to be a linebacker on an abjectly terrible team, they’re always going to give it to some offensive player on one of the best teams in the country. They don’t even nominate defensive players for the most part, and certainly not players from sub-par teams.
I feel like the Oscars work the same way- if you’re not on a well regarded movie, or your movie isn’t in a genre that’s “cool”, it doesn’t matter how good the performance or direction was. And in 1993, Westerns weren’t exactly cool, not unless you subverted some tropes a-la Unforgiven. Merely having an extremely well done and acted story didn’t really count.
Alan Rickman totally should have won Best Supporting, for any of the Harry Potter movies (but especially the first one).
And I haven’t seen the other nominees to compare, but Godzilla Minus One should have at least been nominated for Best Foreign Film this year (I don’t think the winners have been announced yet).
Patrick Stewart should have been at least nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his work in Logan. (I know it is a “superhero” movie but two actors have won Oscars for playing The Joker.>)
It always amazed me that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was not even nominated for Best Picture in its year, while it was later named best movie of the DECADE by the Onion’s AV Club. I also think that Kirsten Dunst’s performance in that film was wrongfully overlooked and deserved to be at least nominated for Best Supporting Actress.
There are several examples that spring to mind of excellent, groundbreaking films that weren’t nominated for Best Picture by the Academy because they were the “wrong kind” of films – i.e. works in genres like animation, science fiction or superhero films that academy voters of the time looked down their noses at. I’d say the following are better than the actual Oscar winner:
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Best Picture winner: The Life of Emile Zola) 2001: A Space Odyssey (Best Picture winner: Oliver!) The Dark Knight (Best Picture winner: Slumdog Millionaire)
Toni Colette should have won Best Actress for 2018’s HEREDITARY, but she wasn’t even nominated. Yeah, I understand horror rarely gets nominated, but still.
And he should have won a Best Actor Oscar for playing Jim Morrison in The Doors (although I do love Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs, which did win. But surely Kilmer was on par with Nick Nolte in The Prince of Tides, or Warren Beatty in Bugsy, other nominees)
Kilmer sang live in the movie, and as part of his audition made a tape where he interspersed his own songs with actual performances by Jim Morrison. The surviving members of the band couldn’t tell the two apart.
Dennis Quaid was 6’1” and weighed 180 lbs before he played Doc Holiday in Wyatt Earp. When cameras rolled he weighed under 140 lbs. He wasn’t given as many quips as Kilmer but he did a fine job at portraying Holiday.
I can think of three performances in Mike Leigh films that should have been in the running or even won:
Sally Hawkins, for Happy Go Lucky in 2008. Kate Winslet won for The Reader.
David Thewlis for Naked in 1993.Won by Tom Hanks for Philadelphia.
Lesley Manville for Another Year in 2010. Melissa Leo won for The Fighter.
My Life Without Me - A very good movie about a woman who knows about her impending death, and how she chooses to handle it. The movie itself is quite good but, beyond that, the actor who portrays her doctor gives some amazing performances. I would have given him the Best Supporting Actor nomination for that year. (I believe that I’ve seen him in other movies and, in those, he barely stood out or just came across as weird. I guess, this was just the right movie at the right time for him?)
Soldier - Pretty silly movie that, alone, is barely worth mentioning let alone considering for an Oscar. But, that said, I think that Kurt Russell says maybe 4-5 words in the whole thing and yet, through subtle body language, you can tell exactly what he’s thinking and feeling at every moment. I feel like if you can come across like you gave a speech, playing a veritable mute, then you deserve some credit.