WORST SNUBS
For every worthy Best Picture Oscar winner, there’s just as many unjust ones, writes Neala Johnson
WITH the Academy Awards just a week away, there is still no clear frontrunner for the night’s top prize.
This seems the year that, no matter which movie takes home the Oscar for Best Picture, pundits will declare another deserved it more.
In that spirit, let’s look back at 10 of Oscar’s biggest Best Picture clangers — and the films that should’ve won.
1995 Won: Forrest Gump
Should’ve won: Pulp Fiction
Like the hypodermic needle John Travolta plunged into Uma Thurman’s chest, Pulp Fiction gave an instant shot of adrenalin to the movie world. But it’s a dose traditionalist Academy voters weren’t quite ready to take. While Quentin Tarantino’s cool and credibility has waxed and waned over the years, Pulp Fiction’s cultural impact and sheer quotability remains.
1981 Won: Ordinary People Should’ve won: Raging Bull
There was a time where a glamorous leading man, making his directorial debut, took home the gold … and it remains one of the big Oscar injustices. Robert Redford’s melodramatic family film Ordinary People should have been knocked out cold by Martin Scorsese’s gritty, black and white boxing biopic Raging Bull. At least Robert De Niro won Best Actor for his portrayal of troubled fighter Jake LaMotta.
1939 Won: Gone With The Wind Should’ve won: The Wizard Of Oz
This “should’ve” is merely a suggestion … Throw a dart at the Best Picture class of 1939 and you’d hit a worthy winner – most nominees remain Hollywood classics 80 years later: Goodbye, Mr Chips; Of Mice and Men; Mr Smith Goes to Washington; seminal western Stagecoach; and romantic benchmark Wuthering Heights.
1999 Won: Shakespeare In Love Should’ve won: Saving Private Ryan
Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, with its unforgettable beach landing sequence, is one of the great World War II films. Mark the fact it was overlooked down to the disgraced Harvey Weinstein’s mastery of marketing. Everything wrong with the frothy Shakespeare’s triumph is rolled up in memories of the insincere sobbing of its leading lady Gwyneth Paltrow as she accepted Best Actress (which, by the way, should have gone to Cate Blanchett).
2005 Won: Crash Should’ve won: Brokeback Mountain
Ten years prior to the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, the Academy was accused of homophobia and shocked into attempting to diversify its voter base by the outcry that greeted what is now known as ‘the worst Best Picture winner ever’. Crash was a clunky comment on race relations in America; Brokeback Mountain was a beautiful, trailblazing story about two cowboys in love. Even presenter Jack Nicholson raised an eyebrow when announcing the winner.
1989 Won: Driving Miss Daisy Should’ve won: Dead Poet’s Society
One of this year’s Oscar frontrunners, Green Book, is the odd-couple story of a white man driving a black musician around the Deep South. In ’89, the top prize went to a movie in which the seating arrangements were switched: a black man chauffeuring a wealthy white woman. Driving Miss Daisy’s rose-tinted view of the past irked some at the time — and more today. If only they’d listened to Robin Williams and chosen to carpe diem.
1979 Won: Kramer vs. Kramer Should’ve won: Apocalypse Now
Sure, divorce — as depicted in the Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep drama Kramer vs. Kramer — is hell. But it’s got nothing on the hell of war. Transporting Joseph Conrad’s literary classic to the Vietnam War and setting Martin Sheen down the river to find Marlon Brando’s mad colonel, Francis Ford Coppola created a movie masterpiece in Apocalypse Now.
1942 Won: How Green Was My Valley Should’ve won: Citizen Kane
John Ford’s family drama may have been fine for its time, but it’s hard to hold a candle to the film history has judged to be the greatest made. Oscar went some way to righting this wrong in 1971 by giving Kane filmmaker Orson Welles an honorary statuette.
1977 Won: Rocky Should’ve won: Network
Rocky is a movie icon — 40 years on, the underdog champ is still spawning sequels. But was it better than Scorsese’s confronting Taxi Driver, the political tension of All The President’s Men or media satire Network? Given its prophetic nature, and in honour of its Australian star Peter Finch, we’d give this to Network by a whisker.
1982 Won: Chariots Of Fire Should’ve won: Raiders Of The Lost Ark
The Academy has never been much for awarding popcorn movies, even when they’re as good as they are popular. Marvel superhero hit Black Panther is rightly a nominee this year but does anyone really think it will get the gong? If Spielberg’s rollicking and hugely influential Raiders couldn’t win in 1982, what hope does any blockbuster have?