When the right Oscar was given at the wrong time
Since the early 00s the internet has groaned under the weight of ‘Oscar snub’ pieces (and this was pre-The Dark Knight furore). Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock never won, there were eternal nominations for Roger Deakins and Leonardo DiCaprio without success , Crash won the Best Picture over Brokeback Mountain, Apocalypse Now was snubbed for Kramer vs Kramer…
It’s easy to be cynical about awards in general, and the Academy Awards in particular with their reliance on politicking and influence, but at the very least they stimulate a conversation (even one as banal as what film was ‘best’ of the year).
And mistakes, if they can be called as such, are inevitable — even more so with the power of hindsight.
The Academy will often, years later, try to correct themselves, even if it means the wrong film or performance wins in a subsequent year.
So, without further ado, here are the right awards given at the wrong time (I’ve stuck mostly to the last 25 years or so).
Kate Winslet — The Reader (should have won for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)
Winslet was five-times nominated before she finally took home the silverware for her role as illiterate concentration camp guard Hanna Schmitz at the 81st Academy Awards. A tactical ploy for Winslet not to also be nominated for Revolutionary Road (therefore risk splitting her vote) proved to be a sound one as Winslet beat out competition from Anne Hathaway, Angelina Jolie, Melissa Leo and eternal-nominee Meryl Streep.
The decision for Winslet to win for The Reader was one of particular embarrassment to the Academy given the actress had previously joked about starring in a Holocaust drama in order to finally win the golden statuette in Ricky Gervais’ Extras.
But Winslet should have won four years prior, for her iconic role as the impulsive, annoying, charming Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (come on, Swank had already won one award, did she need two?).
Jennifer Lawrence — Silver Linings Playbook (should have won for Winter’s Bone)
The Academy generally doesn’t like to dole out their prestigious awards to any young upstart.
Lawrence got awards buzz as soon as Winter’s Bone debuted in 2010. Her performance as the hard-up but determined Ree Dolly the most remarkable thing in a remarkable, austere film.
There was talk of Lawrence, just 18 at the time it was filmed and 19 when it was released, being one of the youngest winners ever of the Best Actress Oscar.
But instead that year the award went to Natalie Portman for ballet-horror Black Swan.
Not that it mattered to Lawrence, who has continued a remarkable track record ever since Winter’s Bone and took home the award just two years later for Silver Linings Playbook with a much more awards-friendly performance as a forthright young woman with an unnamed mental disorder. She won Best Actress at the age of just 22.
Martin Scorsese — The Departed (should have won for Raging Bull, Goodfellas)
There was nervous laughter when hip-hop group Three 6 Mafia won Best Original Song at the 78th Academy Awards and host Jon Stewart quipped: “For those of you who are keeping score at home, I just want to make something very clear: Martin Scorsese, zero Oscars; Three 6 Mafia, one.”
Well, as luck would have it, Scorsese was finally given Best Director the very next year for police/mob thriller The Departed — a remake of Hong Kong crime drama Infernal Affairs.
It was a long, long time coming for perhaps America’s greatest living filmmaker who had become accustomed to high-profile snubs.
Perhaps the most egregious of Scorsese’s career was at the 53rd Academy Awards in 1981 when Robert Redford’s Ordinary People (author’s note: I’ve not seen it) won Best Picture ahead of boxing masterpiece Raging Bull (the Academy may have been suffering from boxing fatigue after Rocky).
Ten years later Goodfellas likewise lost out to Dances with Wolves.
If Scorsese had won for either of these (or, I don’t know, any of the other masterpiece’s he’s put out), then the quasi-lifetime achievement award for The Departed could instead have gone to a more deserving winner which nicely brings us onto…
Guillermo del Toro — The Shape of Water (should have won for Pan’s Labyrinth)
There is a school of thought that the 79th Academy Awards was a ‘weak’ year that was the perfect opportunity for the Academy to finally undo their decades-long snubbing of Marty.
And the Best Picture nominees don’t exactly set the pulse racing (the exceedingly pedestrian The Queen earned a nomination) but a quick glance at the Best Foreign Language Film category reveals the remarkable Pan’s Labyrinth and The Lives of Others which should have been in the mix at the top table.
It is particularly galling Del Toro’s nightmarish fantasy set during the Spanish Civil War was snubbed (although it did take home Best Cinematography).
Pan remains the high watermark of Del Toro’s career but he was instead honoured for The Shape of Water 11 years later, but then The Shape of Water had the smarts to be a send-up of old-time Hollywood (cat nip for the Academy).
Peter Jackson — The Return of the King (should have won for Fellowship of the Ring)
Is anyone out there going to argue that RotK is a better film that Fellowship? No, I thought not.
But the Academy had to be primed (for THREE years) on the prospect of giving out such a slew of awards to a fantasy film.
Fellowship was such a staggering shot across the bows in terms of filmmaking and storytelling the Academy totally fluffed their lines and instead bestowed Best Picture/Director on the ordinary biopic A Beautiful Mind by Ron Howard. Out of a staggering 13 nominations Fellowship only won 4. The Two Towers won two from six and when RotK rolled around the Academy realised how close they were to missing the boat entirely and it SWEPT all 11 categories it was nominated for (separate gripe: sweeps are bad and generally undeserved).
RotK might have won Jackson the Oscar, but Fellowship is by far the better, more accomplished film.
Roger Deakins — Blade Runner 2049 (should have won for Kundun)
Deakins looked set to be one of those eternal nominees who would never win until, after THIRTEEN nominations, he finally, finally secured the Oscar for his work on Blade Runner 2049, (he duly followed it up two years later with another award for 1917).
But Deakins should have won long before — for Martin Scorsese’s cruelly over-looked Kundun way back in 1998 at the 70th Academy Awards.
A cruel victim of the Titanic sweep (and Kundun’s mixed reaction at the time of release), Deakins himself rates Kundun among his best work (no small feat for a man with an output as ridiculously consistent as him).
Speaking last summer on his own podcast Deakins said:
“It’s a bit of a letdown when you’ve spent so much time on something and then it’s either buried or the audience doesn’t relate to it.
“I feel that way with Kundun. It was one of the best experiences of my life, for a lot of different reasons. Not just the challenge of the filmmaking, but the people involved and the crew and the Tibetans. It was just a wonderful experience. And the film was basically buried, frankly. It was really disheartening.”
Maybe Deakins is destined to only win when there’s a year in the title?
Colin Firth — The King’s Speech (should have won for A Single Man)
A textbook case of the Academy preferring a more ‘prestigious’ performance (does it get more prestigious than actually depicting royalty?).
After a career largely resigned to rom-coms and costume dramas Colin Firth stunned critics and audiences with his shattering central performance in Tom Ford’s directorial debut A Single Man.
The scene where Firth, playing gay lecturer George Falconer, is told of his partner’s death on the telephone is far more affecting than anything Firth delivers in A King’s Speech.
Falconer doesn’t betray much with his eyes or his manner but that inescapable grief is always beneath the surface, bubbling away, ready to explode. It never does. It just simmers.
Leonardo DiCaprio — The Revenant (should have won for The Aviator)
It had became something of an internet meme to see just how much Leonardo DiCaprio would debase himself to finally win an Oscar. First it was peeing in bottles (The Aviator), then it was getting high on quaaludes and struggling to even speak (The Wolf of Wall Street), then it was being mauled and attacked by a fucking bear (The Revenant).
Well, the bear finally did it. And there’s no denying DiCaprio is brilliant as the betrayed and left-for-dead Hugh Glass in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s revisionist Western.
But he’s even better as the obsessive-compulsive Howard Hughes in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator. DiCaprio shows a brilliant range (largely without makeup) showing Hughes from young up-start director, to germ-phobe paranoiac holed up in a cinema screen railing at the outside world.
Heath Ledger — The Dark Knight (should have won for Brokeback Mountain)
Now, maybe this is a slight technicality as The Dark Knight was for Best Supporting Actor (although there was some talk of a Best Actor nomination a la Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal in The Silence of the Lambs).
But Ledger’s steel-jawed Ennis Del Mar, a man wrestling with his own sexuality even as he falls in love, was one of the great performances of the 00s.
That’s not to say Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Truman Capote was undeserving. But whereas Hoffman relied somewhat on mimicry, Ledger created Mar’s closed-off mannerisms himself, and they remain indelible.
When he breathes in Jack Twist’s bloodied shirt at the end, I break down every time.
(Also, FUCK Crash).
Joaquin Phoenix — Joker (should have won for Gladiator)
In recent years the Academy has bowed to the belief that more acting means better acting — no where is that better shown than with Joaquin Phoenix’s win for playing Arthur Fleck (that is, the Joker).
Phoenix’s performance is by far the best thing in Todd Phillips’s reductive, derivative, cliched ‘dark’ comic book adaptation (this film garnered 11 nominations by the way).
But Phoenix is far better still as the vain, immature, puerile, unstable Commodus in Gladiator.
A clear forerunner to Jack Gleason’s Joffrey in Game of Thrones, Commodus’s attempts to cover up his own villainy with masquerades of grief or magnanimity are as perfectly hollow as Phoenix intends them to be. But it never goes into scenery chewing a la Joker. (Phoenix also should have won for The Master)
(NB: You could write a thesis on both Phoenix and Crowe’s early scenes with the late Richard Harris as Caesar. Never mind the battles.)
What do you think? Let me know of any I’ve missed in the comments
I’ve not seen Dead Ringers or Far From Heaven which were both suggested as ‘snub’ selections for performances by Jeremy Irons and Julianne Moore respectively.
I chose not to go too far back in the Oscars timeline because, quite simply, I haven’t seen enough of the films to form an authoritative view.
