We all have them. Oscars that we believe never should have been given in the first place. There’s generally one every year that ends up in the wrong hands (at least one, anyway). So I’m proposing a new Oscar Category: Our Bad.
So who deserves to give their Oscar back? Please state reasons.
I’ll start:
Halle Barry for Monster’s Ball. She was doing okay until that “make me feel good” line before she nailed Billy Bob. Lost all credibility with me.
Gwyneth Paltrow for Shakespeare In Love. It’s bad enough being a bad actress who got her start because of Mommy and Daddy being actors. But this was a perversion of an award.
Sean Penn for Mystic River. Great performance, but it seems to me that the Academy was saying, “this is because we should have given you one for Dead Man Walking.”
Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas. As noted above, this should have gone to Sean Penn.
I’ll not mention Renee Zellweger or Catherine Zeta-Jones in Chicago (or the movie itself, for that matter). I tried to watch it, and thought it sucked. I couldn’t buy either one of them as realistic. Where’s Bebe Neuwerth when you need her? She’s three times the Roxie (Roxy?) that Renee is, easily.
1984 Best Song Award to Stevie Wonder for “I Just Called to Say I Love You”.
A steaming pile of syrupy puke. Say what you will about Phil Collins, but his “Against All Odds (take a look at me now)” was a helluva lot better. It didn’t that Ann Reinking mutilated the song. The audience, especially Collins, could not hide their discomfort at the performance.
The Grammy’s overcompensated Collins by giving him the Best Album for No Jacket Required.
Murcielago, did you happen to see the Conan O’Brien clip where they showed some of The Bourne Supremacy, but dubbed over Damon’s dialogue to give the impression that he was bummed over Ben’s career?
I’m paraphrasing, but it was something like, “He hasn’t done a good movie in three years. I saw Gigli and Jersey Girl…”
“Jersey Girl was good.”
“No, it sucked. He hasn’t done a good movie since Changing Lanes.”
Julia Roberts for Erin Brockovitch. She stunk up the screen in an amateurish, hammy performance. The real life Erin deserved much better.
Renee Zellweger for Cold Mountain. She played the whole thing like a female Yosemite Sam. A cartoonishly chiched and buffoonish performance. I kept waiting for her to say “rootin’ tootin’”
No way did Robert Zemeckis deserve the directing Oscar (for Forrest Gump) over Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction).
Tim Robbins did not deserve the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in Mystic River and Ken Watanabe should have gotten it for The Last Samurai instead. Even if you hate the movie, you cannot dispute his magnificence in that role.
Bowling for Columbine for “Best Documentary Film.”
I think the film is a good “make you think” piece, and I find it to be fairly entertaining as well (while I find virtually all other post 1995 or so Moore works to be completely stupid, inane, and loaded with a heaping load of retarded.) I’m no Moore fan, I despise the guy and his methods but I found BfC to be good as what it was, but what is was WASN’T a documentary.
It takes quite a stretch of the Academy’s definition of documentary film to make it one.
Give BfC an Academy Award in a new category, like “Film Editorial” or something. But the documentary genre isn’t well represented by BfC at all.
EVERY actor or actress who won an Oscar for playing a retarded or otherwise mentally challenged infividual should giver the Oscar back. Those are the easiest perfoemances an actor can give, and no one should win an award for such roles.
That includes Dustin (Rain Man) Hoffman, Tom (Forrest Gump) Hanks, and John (Ryan’s Daughter) Mills. All are gifted actors, and have deserved awards for OTHER performances, but should be embarrassed they received Oscars for one-note, gimmicky performances.
Shrek for best Animated Film of 2002. By all rights, it should have gone to Monsters Inc., which was a better example of animated storytelling and a better movie to boot. Shrek was a good movie, but it wasn’t a great one.
Mark my words, ten years from now, people will look at that Animated Movie Oscars race and go, “What were they thinking?”
Gotta disagree with you. While I prefer Pulp Fiction, have seen it many times and have only seen the treacly Forrest Gump once, the fact is Pulp Fiction, like all Tarantino films, is athematic. Stylistic, great-looking and full of nice performances, but it is devoid of theme. The Best Director needs to have at least a theme to win.
Really, I’m hard-pressed to think of a single Tarantino movie with a message weightier than “violence looks cool.”
I’ll second gladiator. thoroughly underwhelming, made worse for all the acclaim it got. astorian, I remember reading an article, I think it was in men’s health or esquire, remarking over the fact that whenever an actor plays a mentally challenged character you’re bound to automatically hear “the performance of his career” or “a touching and brilliant perfomance.” well, pretty much everyone I know can do a spot-on forrest gump or radio impression. and that’s without a day of acting experience.
At the risk of hijacking this thread, care to explain why?
Here’s the Academy definition:
*"I. DEFINITION
An eligible documentary film is defined as a theatrically released non-fiction motion picture dealing creatively with cultural, artistic, historical, social, scientific, economic or other subjects. It may be photographed in actual occurrence, or may employ partial re-enactment, stock footage, stills, animation, stop-motion or other techniques, as long as the emphasis is on fact and not on fiction.
A film that is primarily a promotional film, a purely technical instructional film or an essentially unfiltered record of a performance will not be considered eligible for consideration for the Documentary awards."*
I hated the syrupy feel-good Forrest Gump and would’ve preferred to see Pulp Fiction win Best Picture in 1994, but you know what? The Shawshank Redemption should have beaten them both. What a rip-off.
And L.A. Confidential should have taken it over Titanic in 1998, no two ways about it.