Four Major (Historical) Oscar Oversights
In case you weren't aware, the Oscars are coming up and there are some major snubs this year. So in honor of that, we present some of the biggest oversights in the awards' history.
Stanley Kubrick Goes 0-for-4
In one of the best known failures ever made by the Academy, the man who might have been the greatest director to ever live somehow never won Oscar for Best Director — despite four nominations, three of which were for Dr Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange. That's three of the most celebrated movies ever made. And it’s not like the fourth, Barry Lyndon, is a piece of junk, either — but, in fairness, it was going up against another all-time great in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In the end, Kubrick won just a single Academy Award, and it was for — of all things —Best Visual Effects for 2001, which is something like giving LeBron James an award for being well-dressed.
Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton Go a Combined 0-for-15
Think missing out in every one of four tries is bad? Try making that case to actors Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton, who combined for fifteen nominations for acting and lost every single one. Burton (six nominations for Best Actor, one for Best Supporting Actor) and O’Toole (eight nominations for Best Actor) were two of Hollywood’s brightest stars in a period when American cinema was the be-all, end-all of the international film community. There are many legendary instances of two stars onscreen together, but the greatest may be Becket, for which both actors were nominated for Best Actor. Admittedly, they had some stiff competition in their careers — O’Toole lost his first nomination to Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, for example — but if a guy can’t win an Oscar for playing Lawrence of Arabia, well, what is he supposed to do? O’Toole at least was given an honorary award in 2003; Burton died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1984 and is now mostly remembered for his tumultuous relationship with Elizabeth Taylor.
Annie Hall Over Star Wars
Look, plenty of great movies have been overlooked at the Oscars — either because of stiff competition (in retrospect, No Country For Old Men beating out There Will Be Blood looks like a mistake, but an understandable one) or woeful misguidedness (Crash winning Best Picture). And, if you had to lose Best Picture, you could do much worse than losing to Annie Hall, which is one of those rare romantic comedies that’s so good that it doesn’t matter whether or not you find it funny. Nonetheless, there may not be an Oscar choice in history that looks worse than Annie Hall beating out Star Wars for Best Picture in 1978 — perhaps the greatest example ever of the Academy poo-pooing popular filmmaking on account of genre. Annie Hall is great — but it’s not Star Wars.
Ozu Never Nominated
Everyone knows that the Oscars are Anglophone-centric: only nine foreign-language films have ever even been nominated for the top prize. Nonetheless, the Academy usually finds a way at some point to honor the legends of foreign cinema, either through the Best Foreign Language Film category, or through honorary awards like those given to Vittorio De Sica, Ingmar Bergman, and Akira Kurosawa. There are, however, a few that they never got to, and the most distinguished of these is probably Yasujiro Ozu, the legendary Japanese director of long, slow, virtuosic domestic dramas like Late Spring and Tokyo Story. It’s not exactly surprising that Ozu, whose movies it would generous to call "slow-paced," didn’t earn an international reputation during his life: his style of filmmaking is particularly foreign to American audiences. In retrospect, though, one wishes that the Academy had done a little more to figure out a man who is among the great directors of world cinema.
[Pic via flickr - Davidlohr Bueso]
