KINO favorites: 10 worst best picture snubs in Oscar history
Scott Roxborough
March 2, 2018
The Oscars may be prestigious, but sometimes they fail to recognize the best picture. DW's KINO team picked 10 movies that were snubbed by the Academy Awards — and that are now generally acknowledged to be film classics.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/United Archives
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KINO favorites: 10 worst best picture snubs in Oscar history
DW's KINO team picked 10 movies that were snubbed by the Academy Awards — and are now generally acknowledged to be film classics.
Image: picture alliance/KPA
#10: 'Easy Rider' — 1970
Released the same year as the Woodstock Festival, Peter Fonda's and Dennis Hopper's road movie encapsulates the hippy counterculture like no other work. While Jack Nicholson got a nomination for best supporting actor, the movie wasn't even included among the best picture candidates. Admittedly, it was a year of strong productions; John Schlesinger's "Midnight Cowboy" well deserved the award.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/United Archives
#9: 'High Noon' — 1953
Possibly the best Western film ever made, Fred Zinnemann's work centers on a marshal with a strong sense of duty, starring Gary Cooper, alongside Grace Kelly in the role of his wife. It has been cited by many US presidents as their favorite movie. It won four Oscars, but not the one for best picture. That honor went to Cecille B. DeMille's Technicolor circus drama, "The Greatest Show on Earth."
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
#8: 'Pulp Fiction' — 1994
In a competition reminiscent of the Beatles vs. Rolling Stones feud, the year Quentin Tarantino's cult movie "Pulp Fiction" came out, it faced another culturally significant work at the Oscars: "Forrest Gump," starring Tom Hanks. The good-natured Gump won over the sexy pulp.
Image: picture alliance/KPA
#7: 'Do the Right Thing' — 1990
Spike Lee's Brooklyn masterpiece "Do the Right Thing" got countless kids into reading Malcolm X and fighting the power with Public Enemy. Depicting the racial tensions of the NY neighborhood, the film has lost nothing of its cultural relevance today. However, the Academy didn't even nominate it for best picture, picking instead the cozier "Driving Miss Daisy" as that year's winner.
Martin Scorsese's neo-noir thriller won the Palme d'Or in Cannes in 1976, but the film's violence was perhaps too intensely graphic for the Academy. It obtained four Oscar nominations, including nods for actors Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster, who was still a teen at the time. However, it didn't pick up any of the golden statuettes, and "Rocky" won best picture that year.
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#5: 'Wall Street' — 1988
"Greed is good," Michael Douglas's character (picture) famously said in Oliver Stone's "Wall Street." The archetypal depiction of the 1980s' vision of success — and its excesses — wasn't even among the contenders for the best picture Oscar. Bernardo Bertolucci's ambitious epic "The Last Emperor" will be remembered as that year's Academy Award champion, picking up nine awards.
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#4: 'L.A. Confidential' — 1998
Curtis Hanson's "L.A. Confidential," based on James Ellroy's novel of the same name, remains a cult reference in the neo-noir genre. Supporting actress Kim Basinger (picture) won an Oscar, but a gigantic ship stood in that year's best picture course: "Titanic." Plus, the portrayal of corrupt police mingling with Hollywood celebrity in the 1950s was perhaps too anti-studio for the Academy.
The shower scene in "Psycho" is one of the best-known in cinema history. The low-budget black-and-white thriller didn't impress critics at first, but it's now ranked as one of Alfred Hitchcock's best works. He didn't win the best director Oscar, and the influential movie wasn't even a candidate for best picture. Billy Wilder's romantic comedy "The Apartment" picked up that year's top honor.
Image: AP
#2: 'The Pianist' — 2002
Based on an autobiographical World War II memoir, Roman Polanski's "The Pianist," starring Adrien Brody, remains one of the most important works on the Holocaust ever made. Yet that year, Hollywood preferred to celebrate the American Jazz Age, awarding the best picture Oscar to the musical "Chicago," starring Renée Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Richard Gere.
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#1: 'Citizen Kane' — 1942
This masterpiece is still considered by many critics to be THE greatest movie ever made. It was not only Orson Welles' first feature as a director, he was also the film's producer, co-writer and star (picture). Nominated for an Oscar in nine categories, "Citizen Kane" finally harvested a single one, for best screenplay. John Ford's "How Green Was My Valley" won the best picture award that year.
Image: STUDIOCANAL
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"It's an honor just to be nominated." So goes the Oscar cliché. And certainly the group of nominees that will gather in Hollywood March 4 for the 90th Academy Awards, are members of an illustrious group. But even the most magnanimous nominee will admit, it's a much bigger honor to actually win an Oscar.
And in its long history, the Academy Awards has often gotten it wrong. Some of the best films — ground-breaking movies that defined a genre, all-time greats later hailed as cinema classics — were snubbed at the Oscars. Many didn't even get nominated.
Posterity will judge this year's selection. We'll see how many of Sunday's winners will be remembered in a year's or decade's time.
Cult: John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson in "Pulp Fiction"Image: Imago/Cinema Publishers Collection
At KINO, with the 20/20 benefit of hindsight, we're judging the Oscar winners of years past. We have picked what we think are the most egregious and unforgivable snubs in Oscar history.
Yes, it's a crime that neither Stanley Kubrick nor Alfred Hitchcock ever won a best director Oscar (I know! Inconceivable!). Yes, Denzel Washington should have won best actor for playing Malcolm X in Spike Lee's historic epic and not for the corrupt cop in "Training Day."
And yes, "Groundhog Day," which didn't get a single Oscar nomination, deserved, at the very least, an Academy Award for best original screenplay. There are a wealth of candidates to choose from, so we limited ourselves. First, we're only looking at 10 best picture snubs.
Second, while picks are personal, we went for snubbed movies generally acknowledged to be film classics — these are all pictures that still hold up, years, or even decades, later.
We favored films that had an outsized impact on the movies that came after them. Or ones that redefined a genre, be it the Western, the horror film or the period drama. Finally, we picked snubs where the directors got it right — accurately predicting social movements years before the Academy was ready to acknowledge them.
So, here is our selection of the 10 worst best picture snubs in Oscar history. Tell us what you think. Which Academy oversight have we overlooked and who have we unfairly dismissed? Give us your pick of the best film that Oscar missed: kino@dw.com
