best picture (2014)
Winner Birdman Or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance)
Shoulda won Boyhood
If there’s one thing the Academy loves, it’s movies about how great artists are – so of course voters fell hard for Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s frenetic salute to his own creative brilliance, packaged as a two-hour panic attack in which has-been actor Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) races to jump-start his career with a Broadway adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story.
Yes, it’s very busy, with Iñárritu juggling half a dozen supporting characters while master cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki orchestrates the action to appear as one continuous shot. But it’s hollow and peevish and doesn’t really have anything to say. (Remember the moment when Riggan’s ex and current girlfriend are alone for a moment and almost kiss? What the hell was that about?)
Still, its empty flash was enough to distract voters from the genuine artistic accomplishment of Richard Linklater’s magnificent study of the formation of a young man’s personality as America transitions from George W. Bush to Barack Obama. NW
best actor (2014)
Winner Eddie Redmayne, The Theory Of Everything
Shoulda won Michael Keaton, Birdman
Wait, what? Didn’t I just say Birdman was a steaming pile?
Well, it is – except for Keaton’s remarkable performance. The guy’s in practically every shot, and for all Iñàrritu’s look-at-me technical flourishes, it’s Keaton’s energy that keeps the movie flowing and coherent from one moment to the next, moving from forced calm to bug-eyed panic and back again without ever hitting a false note or forcing a beat.
Redmayne, on the other hand, never lets us forget how difficult the role of Stephen Hawking is. He’s so fixated on the technical aspects of his performance that he neglects to find the character within the disease. NW
best director (2010)
Winner Tom Hooper, The King’s Speech
Shoulda won David Fincher, The Social Network
The King’s Speech is crowd-pleasing teatime fare for the Metamucil crowd. So it wasn’t surprising that the Academy preferred it for best picture over hip, cerebral and brilliant Facebook movie The Social Network.
The bigger offence, though, is Tom Hooper’s victory in the best director category over David Fincher. Where Fincher brought style, narrative complexity and the perfect visual scheme for his subject, Hooper won the prize for safe, old-school storytelling and some truly ugly fish-eye framing. (Just on a technical level, he may be the worst director to win the best director prize.)
Hooper’s win only encouraged more offences in Les Misérables and The Danish Girl. Can’t wait to see what he does with Cats. RS
best picture (2001)
Winner A Beautiful Mind
Shoulda won Mulholland Dr.
Hollywood loves safe, earnest pictures about noble geniuses overcoming obstacles (in this case schizophrenia) to triumph.
So of course it lauded this film even though Akiva Goldsman’s script ignored some complex parts of Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash’s life, and Russell Crowe, so much better a couple of years earlier in The Insider, had little to do but stare off into the middle distance.
Any of the other picture nominees would have been preferable – Gosford Park! Moulin Rouge! Fellowship Of The Ring! – but what a shame that David Lynch’s masterful, puzzle-like critique of the dark side of Hollywood wasn’t even in the running.
Fifteen years later, Mulholland Dr. remains as influential as ever, but who re-watches A Beautiful Mind? GS
best picture (1994)
Winner Forrest Gump
Shoulda won Pulp Fiction
“Life is like a box of chocolates,” says Forrest Gump, dropping such wisdom as he narrates his history to strangers at a bus stop.
Forrest’s life includes being named after his ancestor (a founding father of the KKK), going to war in Vietnam and having odd run-ins with the civil rights movement, Nixon, the Black Panthers and John Lennon.
His story is the rot of American history served up in Robert Zemeckis’s movie all sweet and gooey, like those chocolates.
For that it won best picture and a slew of other prizes over Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece, Pulp Fiction. Which “muthafuckin” movie would you rather quote today? RS
best actor (1992)
Winner Al Pacino, Scent Of A Woman
Shoulda won Literally anybody else.
You know what a do-over Oscar is, right? Paul Newman winning best actor for The Color Of Money because he lost out for The Verdict, or Martin Landau winning for Ed Wood because he didn’t win for Tucker: The Man And His Dream or Crimes And Misdemeanors – stuff like that.
The Academy does do-overs all the time, but giving someone an award after the fact means you’re screwing over the person who actually deserves the prize that year. Newman’s victory cost James Woods a richly deserved win for Salvador Landau winning for Ed Wood meant that Samuel L. Jackson’s Pulp Fiction breakout was denied.
And when six-time loser Al Pacino won for his shameless showboating in Scent Of A Woman, that meant turning down not just Denzel Washington in Malcolm X and Robert Downey Jr. in Chaplin, but Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven and Stephen Rea in The Crying Game – any one of whom deserved it.
The worst thing, though? Pacino could have won an Oscar that year for a performance that was actually great. He was also up for best supporting actor that year for Glengarry Glen Ross. His winning that would have meant Gene Hackman losing for Unforgiven, though, so what’re you gonna do? NW
best picture (1989)
Winner Driving Miss Daisy
Shoulda won Do The Right Thing!
Of course Driving Miss Daisy was going to win best picture.
Bruce Beresford’s quaint melodrama got voters misty-eyed over a cantankerous rich white lady (Jessica Tandy) warming up to her subservient, shucking-and-jiving chauffeur (Morgan Freeman) and his “Ain’t nobody never gave me no book before, Miss Daisy.” That’s exactly the kind of regressive take on race relations the Academy loves to reward.
Never mind that this was the year Spike Lee dropped Do the Right Thing, his dazzling comic eruption of a movie about racial tensions boiling over in Bed-Stuy. Do The Right Thing wasn’t even nominated for the top prize, a sleight the badass Kim Basinger refused to let pass unnoticed.
Mounting the Oscar stage for a best picture presentation that year, she called out the Academy for missing out on the film that she described as capturing “the biggest truth of all.” RS
best picture (1964)
Winner My Fair Lady
Shoulda won Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb
The 60s was the decade the Academy went apeshit over musicals, giving their best picture Oscar to four song-and-dance pics.
My Fair Lady is one of the more beautiful – so I’m fine with Cecil Beaton getting his Oscar for best costume – but it featured yet another female actor who could not sing. Like Natalie Wood’s in West Side Story (and unlike La La Land’s Emma Stone’s, by the way), Audrey Hepburn’s voice was dubbed (bravo, Marni Nixon). And, like all of the 60s musical Oscar winners, My Fair Lady started out on Broadway, so don’t bother to look for anything remotely original.
Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, on the other hand, turns a very earnest anti-nuke novel into a completely unhinged comedy. It bitterly satirizes Russian and American diplomats (“You can’t fight in here! This is the war room!”), macho army brass worrying about their precious bodily fluids and innocent soldiers sent in to do the generals’ dirty work. (Peter Sellers, playing three wildly diverse roles, was also Oscar-nominated – and lost.)
But Kubrick was an irritable guy, who had a hate-on for Hollywood and had left the U.S. to work in Britain, while My Fair Lady director George Cukor was a beloved American icon. Anyway, Dr. Strangelove’s material was way too radical – the conservative Academy could never go for it. SGC
