Episode – 2078 : The Greatest Oscar Snubs
Every year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hosts the biggest celebration of movies and moviemaking: The Oscars.
Thousands of members vote in multiple categories to honor the best films and performances of the previous year.
…and in many years, they get it completely and totally wrong.
Learn more about the biggest Oscar snubs and the times the academy completely blew it on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
The Academy Awards are the world’s premier event for the recognition of films and filmmaking. Millions of people around the world tune in to the televised event to see who won and to gawk at celebrities.In a previous episode, I covered the history of the Academy Awards.
In this episode, I want to focus on the times when the Academy got it wrong, and sometimes totally blew it.
To limit the discussion, I’m going to just focus on the Best Picture category. There have been bad calls across every category, but I need to lay some guardrails given time constraints.
This is going to be a very subjective episode, but I think I have a good background for compiling such a list. I have every Best Picture winner on Blu-ray or 4K disc, except for the 1957 Best Picture Winner, Around the World in 80 Days, which has never been released on anything other than DVD. However, I do have it on DVD.More on that in a bit…
I’ve watched the vast majority of the Best Picture winners, but not all of them, but I think I have a good idea of when the Academy got it right and when they really whiffed.
I also freely admit that, compared to the Academy voters, I have the benefit of hindsight. The decision and opinions made at the time might look horrible in hindsight, and if that is the case, so be it.
So let’s start with the most obvious Oscar snub, the first one that everyone brings up, and the one I did an entire episode on, Citizen Kane.
Citizen Kane is widely considered the greatest film of all time and has topped many greatest-film lists over the last 80 years.
It was nominated for Best Picture at the 1941 Oscars, but lost to “How Green Was My Valley.” It is a nostalgic drama about a young boy growing up in a close-knit Welsh coal-mining family as their community and way of life slowly unravel under the pressures of industrialization and labor conflict.
It starred a young Roddy McDowall and was directed by John Ford. It is not a bad film, but unfortunately, its greatest claim to fame is beating Citizen Kane for the Oscar. It is far from John Ford’s best film.
If you remember back to my episode on the film Citizen Kane, it was the not-so-subtle retelling of the story of William Randolph Hearst. Hearst was very much alive when the film came out and was an extremely powerful media mogul. With his connections in Hollywood, he pressured Academy members to vote against Citizen Kane.
While Citizen Kane was the most obvious example of the Academy getting it wrong, it is far from the only one.
At the 71st Academy Awards in 1999, Shakespeare in Love beat out Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture.
Shakespeare in Love has been all but forgotten since it won the Oscar over a quarter-century ago. Saving Private Ryan has only grown in stature since, and it is widely considered one of the greatest war films ever made. The opening scene showing the D-Day landings is one of the most powerful in cinema history.
So, how did Shakespeare in Love beat out the film that, even at the time, was considered better?Shakespeare in Love was produced by Harvey Weinstein and released by Miramax, and benefited from what was then one of the most aggressive awards campaigns ever run.
Weinstein’s strategy involved extensive screenings, direct outreach to Academy voters, heavy advertising in trade publications, and a narrative that framed the film as a clever celebration of theater and storytelling. It was also one of the first films to send DVD copies to every Academy member so they could watch it at home.
At the same time, the campaign subtly criticized Saving Private Ryan, suggesting its emotional impact faded after the opening battle sequence.
By the time voting concluded, Shakespeare in Love had built enough support across multiple branches of the Academy to win seven Oscars, including Best Picture.
Needless to say, the whole Harvey Weinstein involvement hasn’t helped the film’s perception over time.
Both of the snubbed films that I’ve mentioned were at least nominated for Best Picture. One of the biggest snubs took place in 1959.
The film that won best picture is one that I’m guessing that many of you have probably never even heard of: Gigi.
Gigi was directed by Vincente Minnelli, the husband of Judy Garland and father of Liza Minnelli.
The film has aged poorly primarily because the central premise revolves around grooming a teenage girl to become the mistress of a wealthy older man in turn-of-the-century Paris.
In the story, Gigi is raised by her grandmother and aunt, both former courtesans, who train her in etiquette, fashion, and social behavior specifically so she can attract and financially depend on a rich patron.
While the film presents this as lighthearted and romantic, modern audiences often find the situation troubling and creepy because it shows a system in which young women are essentially prepared for transactional relationships with older men.
In Gigi, the character Gigi, played by the great Leslie Caron, is portrayed as about 15 to 16 years old for most of the story, while the male lead, Gaston Lachaille, played by Louis Jourdan, is depicted as a wealthy Parisian bachelor in his late 20s to early 30s.
The best-known thing from the film is the song “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.”
Gigi only rates a 6.6 on the Internet Movie Database, which is about average.It actually won a total of 9 Oscars, which at the time was the most ever won by a film.
The other films that were nominated for Best Picture were nothing stellar either. They were Auntie Mame, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Defiant Ones, and Separate Tables.
The film that was completely overlooked and didn’t even get a nomination was Alfred Hitchcock’s classic, Vertigo.
Vertigo, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, received only modest recognition when it was released in 1958, but over the decades it has accumulated some of the highest honors ever given to a film. Today it is routinely ranked among the greatest films in cinema history.
One of the most famous accolades came in 2012, when Vertigo ranked #1 in the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound critics’ poll, ending a 50-year run in which Citizen Kane had held the top spot. The Sight & Sound poll is conducted only once every 10 years and is widely considered the most prestigious survey of film critics worldwide.
The film has also consistently ranked at or near the top of the American Film Institute lists of the greatest American films. On AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies list, Vertigo placed 9th in 1998 and rose to #2 in the 2007 updated list, second only to Citizen Kane.
In addition, the film has received several honors recognizing its cultural importance. In 1989, it was among the first films selected for preservation in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress, a program that preserves films deemed culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.
It has an 8.2 rating on the Internet Movie Database and has a perfect score on Metacritic.com.
Another snub of a film that didn’t even get a nomination took place at the 1968 Oscars. The winner that year was the musical Oliver!. As a film, Oliver! Is OK, but it isn’t as good as the other musicals that won Best Picture Oscars in the 1960s, My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music.
The far better film, which was nominated, was The Lion in Winter, starring Peter O’Toole as Henry II, Katherine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine, as well as Anthony Hopkins, and Timothy Dalton. Katherine Hepburn won her third Best Actress Oscar for her performance.
Oliver! winning over The Lion in Winter was a minor snub. The major snub, especially in hindsight, was a film that wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick, received only modest recognition from the Academy Awards when it was released in 1968, but over time it has become one of the most acclaimed and influential films ever made.
At the 41st Academy Awards, the film won Best Visual Effects, the only Oscar Kubrick ever received. Despite its later reputation, it was not nominated for Best Picture which is often cited as one of the Academy’s greatest oversights.
In 1991, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress, recognizing it as culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant.
Critically, it has ranked extremely highly in major film polls. In the decennial critics’ survey conducted by the British Film Institute for Sight & Sound, the film has consistently appeared near the top of lists of the greatest films ever made. In the latest 2022 poll, it was ranked the greatest film of all time by directors.
The reason is that the Academy has tended to be very conservative about the movies it honors. It has tended to vote for dramas and traditional studio films.
Films that are groundbreaking or that challenge conventional filmmaking haven’t tended to win Best Picture.
Horror, action, and science fiction have never traditionally done well, although there have been some that have won recently.
While the films I’ve listed, I think, are the biggest snubs, they aren’t the only ones.
Do the Right Thing wasn’t even nominated in 1990, and the eventual winner, Driving Miss Daisy, has mostly been forgotten. In fact, all of the nominated films for Best Picture, Born on the Fourth of July, Dead Poets Society, Field of Dreams, and My Left Foot, were arguably all better than Driving Miss Daisy and have had a greater legacy.
In 1953, the Academy Award for Best Picture was given to The Greatest Show on Earth, starring Charlton Heston. Again, its a fine movie, but nothing special.However, it beat out High Noon starring Gary Cooper, which is considered one of the greatest westerns of all time.
In 1957, Around the World in 80 Days won the Oscar for Best Picture. It was a big studio film, which was the type Academy voters really like to vote for. As I mentioned before, it is the only Best Picture winner to have never been released on Blu-ray, as of the time of this recording, which I think says something.
The film that beat it out, which was considered a better critical film at the time, was Giant.
Giant starred Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean. While Giant doesn’t rank as highly as some of the other snubbed films I’ve mentioned, it was clearly better than Around the World in 80 Days.
There were several Martin Scorsese films that arguably should have won Best Picture. The most egregious snub was at the 1981 Oscars when Ordinary People beat out Raging Bull.
Again, Ordinary People was a fine movie, but Raging Bull is widely considered to be the best American film of the 1980s.
So, the next time you watch the Oscars or just read the results, and you are puzzled as to why something you didn’t think was very good won, there is a good chance you are right.It also wouldn’t be the first time it happened.This episode can be found at: https://everything-everywhere.com/the-greatest-oscar-snubs/