The Oscars just concluded with the most spectacular goof-up with Damien Chazelle’s La La Land mistakenly receiving the statue for Best Picture. Thankfully, the mistake was corrected and Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight emerged victorious. Jenkins’s masterpiece will be remembered as one of those rare occasions when the Academy made the right choice. But history remembers how the Academy faltered on many occasions, displaying odd choices for the top prize, which are not necessarily terrible, but undeserving compared to films released in that year. After all, every judgment passed on what is the best, however persuasively argued, is subjected to rectification of the past.
How Green Was My Valley (1941)
History now remembers How Green Was My Valley solely as the undeserving film that beat Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane , which usually tops most lists as the greatest film ever made. Probably the ultimate blunder in the history of Academy Awards, Citizen Kane only won the Best Original Screenplay, even though the movie completely changed the way we look at cinema. And the other nominees included the great detective noir The Maltese Falcon , Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion and Howard Hawks’s Sergeant York . In fact, even the Disney animation Dumbo, which released the same year , was probably a more meritorious film.
The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
Some of the rumours floating at the time said the film’s Best Picture win was due to the political climate of the ’50s Hollywood, a time when Senator Joseph McCarthy was pursuing Communists at the time, and Cecil B. DeMille was one of his supporters. Another Best Picture nominee the same year, High Noon , was produced by Carl Foreman, who would soon be on Hollywood’s blacklist. It was also seen as atonement by the Academy to award DeMille for his showmanship. Whatever the case, this glorious case of the Academy’s slip-up has been highly publicised since then as its unworthiness is exulted during every Oscar season. Singin’ in the Rain was not even acknowledged by the Academy that year.
Gigi (1958)
Gigi won nine Oscars, including Best Picture, and it was purely mediocre in comparison to some of the films released that year. If Alfred Hitchcock made his most personal work in Vertigo , Orson Welles gave us Touch of Evil and Richard Brooks adapted Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. To be honest, there is hardly any dancing or musical footwork going on in Gigi .
Around the World in 80 Days (1956)
Unlike the Jules Verne novel, which fuelled the imagination of incalculable readers worldwide, the film version is a long and tedious one. With countless cameos of Hollywood stars at the time, it might have won the golden trophy thanks to the people associated with it. Tediously outdated, it looks like a dull travel video put together set piece after set piece minus any focus on plot or a sense of wonder that made the novel, well, so novel. And it won against films like The Ten Commandments and Giant. The embarrassing part is that John Ford’s classic The Searchers , widely regarded as the greatest western ever made, failed to receive a nomination that year.
Oliver! (1968)
It’s largely believed that since Carol Reed was ignored by the Academy for his noir masterpiece The Third Man , they corrected their error by handing him the Oscar for a musical based on the Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist competing against Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet . It was the same year Mel Brooks came up with the hilarious The Producers , John Cassavetes changed the face of independent cinema with Faces , Roman Polanski haunted us with Rosemary’s Baby and Gillo Pontecorvo created The Battle of Algiers . But the most disappointing was Stanley Kubrick winning the Oscar for best visual effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey , the only Oscar he would ever win.
Rocky (1976)
The rags-to-riches story of an American dream was a film where Sylvester Stallone mumbled his way through two hours of a formulaic boxing script. The year’s nominations had Alan J. Pakula’s brilliant political thriller All the President’s Men , Sidney Lumet’s media masterpiece Network and above all, Scorsese weaving his mastery in Taxi Driver . These three movies are major classics of that era.
Braveheart (1995)
Granted, it had grand battle scenes, which Hollywood loves. But Mel Gibson’s story of William Wallace and his battle against the English rule in medieval Scotland has too much going against it . The film has faltered in reputation with abundant historical inaccuracies and alleged anti-gay depictions, while The Economist famously called it ‘xenophobic’. It came out in the year of Apollo 13, Dead Man Walking, Leaving Las Vegas, Se7en, Il Postino, The Usual Suspects and above all, the ground-breaking animated film, Toy Story .
Shakespeare in Love (1998)
Putting Shakespeare in the title doesn’t mean that it comes with the Bard’s seal of approval and is hence a worthy winner. That year saw one of the best war epics of all time: Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan . And Terrence Malick, who makes films very rarely, gave us the haunting The Thin Red Line . The biggest cult film of the Internet era, the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski, wasn’t even nominated.
Chicago (2002)
Rob Marshall is no Bob Fosse. It’s still a mystery how his adaptation of the satirical stage musical actually managed to win the big prize. It had competition from Roman Polanski’s The Pianist , Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York . Other prominent films in the run for other categories were Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven , Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt , Spike Jonze’s quirky Adaptation and Pedro Almodovar’s heartbreaking tale of love, Talk To Her .
The Departed (2006)
Everyone still hisses about Martin Scorsese’s many masterworks being snubbed for Best Picture: Taxi Driver, The Goodfellas and Raging Bull, to name a few. That said, The Departed was not potent enough if you consider other Best Picture nominees that year like Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine and masterpieces relegated to foreign language category like The Lives of Others (Germany) and Pan’s Labyrinth (Mexico). It’s barely Scorsese’s best work, and it fails to even measure up to the magnificently twisted plotting of the Hong Kong original it was based on: Infernal Affairs (2002).
