The Academy Awards have been getting it wrong since 1927, and they’ve been getting it wrong in specific, diagnosable ways. The Oscar doesn’t go to the best film. It goes to the film that best satisfies the preferences of one voting body at one cultural moment: a body that historically has favored sentiment over rigor, prestige over originality, and the comfortable over the challenging.
These thirty entries are cases where the wrong film won over a specific right film: where the alternative was both better and demonstrably, historically, inarguably superior. The gap between what won and what should have won is the measure of the Academy’s failure, and in several cases on this list that gap is a canyon.
Some of these votes still look indefensible. One bad year I could forgive, since every jury has one. What I can’t forgive is the Academy making the same mistake decade after decade, picking the safe picture while a better film sat in the same category. That matters to you, because the trophy follows a film around for the rest of its life, and plenty of people choose what to watch by it.
These are opinions. Strong ones. The correct ones.
1. How Green Was My Valley (1941) – Best Picture
► Read the full review of How Green Was My Valley (1941)
► Read the full review of Citizen Kane (1941)
The original sin. Citizen Kane is the most influential film in the history of cinema (the single work that did more to establish the grammar of modern filmmaking than any other) and it lost Best Picture to John Ford’s sentimental Welsh mining community drama. How Green Was My Valley is a fine film. It’s not Citizen Kane. Nothing is Citizen Kane. The Academy looked at the invention of modern cinema and voted for the warm, conventional picture about a family in a valley.
The consolation is that history has issued its own verdict and there’s no appeal. Every film school, every list, every serious critical assessment places Kane above How Green Was My Valley so definitively that the original result reads as a historical curiosity. Evidence of what the Academy is.
I enjoy How Green Was My Valley for what it is, a warm family picture from a director who knew his craft, though it lays the sentiment on thicker than I’d like. Kane I put near the top of anything I’ve seen. My one quibble is that it keeps Kane himself at arm’s length, so I admire him more than I feel for him. The Academy looked at both and chose the valley, an inexcusable call.
2. The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) – Best Picture
► Read the full review of The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
► Read the full review of High Noon (1952)
Should Have Won: High Noon
Cecil B. DeMille’s circus spectacle beat High Noon (Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Fred Zinnemann, a perfect allegory for McCarthyism dressed as a Western) for Best Picture.
The Greatest Show on Earth is widely cited as one of the worst Best Picture winners in Oscar history, a title it holds with distinction. It’s a competent circus movie. High Noon is one of the ten best American films ever made.
The politics weren’t subtle: Carl Foreman wrote High Noon, and the House Un-American Activities Committee blacklisted him during production. John Wayne and Gary Cooper were friends, but Wayne publicly attacked the film as un-American propaganda. The Academy gave the prize to the circus movie. DeMille accepted graciously.
This one is a travesty. The Greatest Show on Earth bores me, a bloated parade of circus acts with a plot that exists to fill the gaps between them. High Noon is as close to a perfect film as I know, lean and tense from its first scene to its last. Giving the Oscar to the circus over that is the Academy at its most cowardly.
3. Around the World in 80 Days (1956) – Best Picture
► Read the full review of Around the World in 80 Days (1956)
► Read the full review of Giant (1956)
Should Have Won: Giant, The King and I, or Friendly Persuasion
Mike Todd’s travelogue spectacular beat Giant (George Stevens’s three-and-a-half-hour American epic spanning decades of Texas history with Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and a career-defining James Dean performance) along with The King and I, Friendly Persuasion, and The Ten Commandments. Around the World in 80 Days is a very expensive slide show. It’s been all but forgotten. Giant hasn’t.
The film’s win is typically attributed to Mike Todd’s legendary promotional campaign and the novelty of the Todd-AO widescreen process. The Academy voted for the technology and the showmanship and ignored the filmmaking. This pattern, spectacle over substance, recurs throughout Oscar history and is the Academy’s most consistent failure mode.
4. Rocky (1976) – Best Picture
► Read the full review of Rocky (1976)
► Read the full review of Network (1976)
Should Have Won: Network, Taxi Driver, All the President’s Men, or Dog Day Afternoon
1976 may be the single worst Best Picture decision in Oscar history given the competition.
Rocky beat Network (Paddy Chayefsky’s prophetic satire of television culture, possibly the most accurate prediction of modern media culture ever committed to film) and also beat Taxi Driver, All the President’s Men, and Dog Day Afternoon. Rocky is a fine, warm, expertly crafted inspirational sports film. The other four nominees are among the greatest American films of the 1970s.
The Academy’s comfort level with Network’s fury was apparently limited. A film that screamed at the audience about media manipulation was always going to lose to a film that made the audience feel good about an underdog boxer. The Academy picks the film it wants to celebrate at a party, not the film that will matter in fifty years.
Rocky is a film I adore, and it deserves every cheer it gets. If I had one gripe, it’s that it goes a little soft in places. Network is still the better film by a wide margin, and it gets sharper every year as the world turns into the thing Chayefsky warned about. A loss to the boxer would’ve been bad enough on its own. With Taxi Driver and All the President’s Men in the same field, that vote looks like a joke to me.
5. Ordinary People (1980) – Best Director
► Read the full review of Ordinary People (1980)
► Read the full review of Raging Bull (1980)
Should Have Won: Martin Scorsese – Raging Bull
Critics frequently cite Raging Bull as the greatest film of the 1980s despite its release in 1980.
That gives some sense of how completely the Academy misjudged it. Robert Redford’s directorial debut (Ordinary People, a well-crafted family drama) beat Scorsese’s operatic, formally radical masterpiece. Raging Bull also lost Best Picture to Ordinary People. Scorsese didn’t win Best Director from the Academy until 2006, for The Departed, a good film and not his best work by considerable distance.
The failure here’s directorial: Scorsese’s visual choices in Raging Bull (the black and white photography, the sound design, the boxing sequences that are pure cinema, not sports coverage) represent filmmaking at its highest technical and artistic level. Redford made a competent film. The Academy chose competent over great.
6. Driving Miss Daisy (1989) – Best Picture
► Read the full review of Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
► Read the full review of Do the Right Thing (1989)
Should Have Won: Do the Right Thing (not nominated), Born on the Fourth of July
Do the Right Thing wasn’t nominated for Best Picture. Let that sit for a moment. Spike Lee’s film about race in America (formally inventive, emotionally devastating, arguing that the comfortable liberal position on race is itself a form of racism) wasn’t nominated. The Academy nominated Driving Miss Daisy, a film about a white woman learning to appreciate her Black chauffeur, and gave it the prize. Academy voters preferred the story about race that made white audiences feel comfortable over the story about race that challenged them.
The gap between these two films is a document of institutional preference for certain kinds of racial narratives over others: narratives where the white character’s growth is the story, and the Black character’s humanity is the catalyst for that growth instead of the subject in its own right.
7. Dances with Wolves (1990) – Best Picture & Director
► Read the full review of Dances with Wolves (1990)
► Read the full review of Goodfellas (1990)
Should Have Won: Goodfellas
This is the one that still produces angry reactions in anyone who cares about cinema.
Goodfellas (Scorsese’s kinetic, formally dazzling, morally complex examination of the American gangster myth) lost Best Picture and Best Director to Kevin Costner’s three-hour Western about a Union soldier who goes native with the Lakota Sioux. Dances with Wolves is a well-intentioned, beautifully photographed, somewhat patronizing film. Goodfellas is a masterwork.
The disparity between the two films as directorial achievements is the most strong element of the loss. Scorsese’s camera in Goodfellas is an instrument of specific intelligence (the Copa shot, the final cocaine sequence, the freeze frames that interrupt the story’s momentum) while Costner’s direction is handsome and invisible. The Academy gave the prize for not being noticed over the prize for being extraordinary. This is the Oscars’ central dysfunction in a single vote.
Dances with Wolves is a handsome film and I enjoy my time in it, but it’s far too pleased with its own good intentions, and three hours of Costner looking noble tests my patience. Goodfellas sits among the handful of films I’d call perfect. The Academy had a masterpiece in front of it and picked the prettier postcard, and of every vote on this page, that’s the one I’d most like to take back.
8. Forrest Gump (1994) – Best Picture
► Read the full review of Forrest Gump (1994)
► Read the full review of Pulp Fiction (1994)
1994 produced Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, Quiz Show, and Four Weddings and a Funeral, and the Academy chose Forrest Gump, a sentimental fantasy in which a simpleton with a good heart accidentally shapes American history while the actual historical participants are implicitly blamed for their own suffering by comparison with his passive virtue. The film is technically well-made and emotionally manipulative in ways that the Academy has always found irresistible.
Pulp Fiction reinvented American cinema. The Shawshank Redemption is among the most beloved films in history. Forrest Gump has aged into something considerably more uncomfortable than it seemed in 1994, its implicit argument that passive acceptance is more virtuous than political engagement didn’t improve with time. The Academy picked the most immediately gratifying option in a year when the most gratifying option was demonstrably not the best one.
My feelings about Forrest Gump are mixed. Hanks is good and some scenes move me. Then the film asks me to admire a man for drifting through history without a thought in his head, and I lose interest. Pulp Fiction is the opposite experience for me, a film so alive and so sure of itself that it still feels dangerous. Of the two, I know which one I’d rather put on tonight.
9. Braveheart (1995) – Best Picture & Director
► Read the full review of Braveheart (1995)
► Read the full review of Se7en (1995)
Should Have Won: Se7en, Heat, Casino, Sense and Sensibility, or Dead Man Walking
1995 was an extraordinary year for American cinema.
Se7en redefined the serial killer thriller. Heat set the standard for crime film ensemble work. Casino gave Scorsese another masterwork. Dead Man Walking was Tim Robbins’s most accomplished direction. Sense and Sensibility gave Emma Thompson her best work. The Academy looked at this field and gave Best Picture and Best Director to Mel Gibson’s historically inaccurate Scottish independence epic in which the Scots wear kilts three hundred years before kilts existed.
Braveheart is a well-mounted crowd-pleaser with real emotional momentum and no interest in historical accuracy. It’s a good film that happened to compete against extraordinary ones. The Academy chose the most emotionally uncomplicated option in a year when complexity was abundantly available.
10. The English Patient (1996) – Best Picture
► Read the full review of The English Patient (1996)
► Read the full review of Fargo (1996)
Should Have Won: Fargo
The English Patient is a beautifully photographed, elegantly constructed romantic epic that the Academy has always been predisposed to love: sweeping landscapes, tragic love, Ralph Fiennes being tragic and handsome, North Africa looking gorgeous. Fargo is the Coen Brothers at their most precise: a crime film set in Minnesota in winter, with a pregnant police chief as its moral center, showing that decency and competence and love are available even in a world organized around stupidity and greed.
Frances McDormand won Best Actress for Marge Gunderson. It’s correct. The film losing Best Picture to The English Patient is one of the cleaner examples of the Academy’s preference for one kind of cinematic beauty over real originality. Fargo’s beauty is in its precision and its warmth. The English Patient’s beauty is in its cinematography. The Academy votes for the cinematography.
11. Shakespeare in Love (1998) – Best Picture
► Read the full review of Shakespeare in Love (1998)
► Read the full review of Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Harvey Weinstein’s campaign for Shakespeare in Love is the most studied example of Oscar manipulation in Academy history: screeners, parties, personal lobbying, a campaign so aggressive and so effective that it beat Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg’s technically and emotionally devastating recreation of the D-Day landing, the most viscerally honest war filmmaking in American cinema) for Best Picture. Shakespeare in Love is charming, well-made, and approximately as important as a pleasant weekend.
The Omaha Beach sequence in Saving Private Ryan changed how filmmakers shoot combat. The first twenty-five minutes of that film are the most accurate cinematic representation of what it means to be in a battle (the noise, the chaos, the randomness of who dies and who doesn’t) that anyone’s ever committed to screen. The Academy gave the prize to the romantic comedy. Weinstein’s campaign had worked.
I’m fond of Shakespeare in Love. It’s witty and the cast is having a ball, but it’s a trifle, and it knows it. Saving Private Ryan left me shaken, and that opening on Omaha Beach is the closest I ever want to come to a battle. The worst part of this result is how the studio won it: it campaigned its way to the prize with parties and screeners, and the Academy let it happen.
12. Gwyneth Paltrow, Shakespeare in Love (1998), Best Actress
► Read the full review of Shakespeare in Love (1998)
► Read the full review of Elizabeth (1998)
Should Have Won: Cate Blanchett – Elizabeth
Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth is one of the great screen performances of the decade, a young queen discovering the cost of power and choosing to pay it, transforming across two and a half hours from vulnerable girl to the Virgin Queen, each stage of the transformation specific and earned. Paltrow’s Viola in Shakespeare in Love is charming and capable and approximately one-third as demanding a role as Blanchett’s Elizabeth. The campaign won Paltrow a trophy that Blanchett deserved and has since more than compensated for with her actual career.
Also nominated: Fernanda Montenegro in Central Station (extraordinary) and Meryl Streep in One True Thing (excellent). 1998 was a strong year for female performances, and the Academy picked the least demanding of the available nominees.
13. Roberto Benigni (Life is Beautiful (1998)) Best Actor
► Read the full review of Life is Beautiful (1998)
► Read the full review of Saving Private Ryan (1998)
The performance itself complicates Benigni’s win. He’s good in Life is Beautiful, the film has real emotional power, and his acceptance speech was among the most joyful in Oscar history. The problem is the competition: Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan does something technically extraordinary (playing a man who establishes his authority entirely through specific behavior, not through dialogue or exposition) and Ian McKellen in Gods and Monsters gives a farewell performance that ranks with the great ones in cinema. Benigni is charming. The others are essential.
The wider question Life is Beautiful raises (whether the Holocaust can be used as the backdrop for a fable about love and imagination) is one that the film answers in its own favor and that critics have disputed since 1997. Benigni’s choice to make the film light is the film’s central artistic decision. Whether it’s the right decision is a legitimate debate.
14. American Beauty (1999) – Best Picture
► Read the full review of American Beauty (1999)
► Read the full review of The Insider (1999)
American Beauty‘s win requires a kind of historical honesty: in 1999, the film felt like a devastating critique of American suburban complacency, a film that saw through the surface of comfortable life to the emptiness beneath. In 2025, after the events surrounding Kevin Spacey and the film’s later reassessment, it’s considerably harder to watch Lester Burnham’s obsession with his daughter’s teenage friend as the liberating fantasy the film presents it as.
Hindsight is a legitimate critical tool when it reveals what was always present in a work instead of imposing external context. The discomfort with American Beauty’s central fantasy was available on first viewing for anyone inclined to notice it. The Insider, Michael Mann’s film about corporate suppression of scientific truth, has only become more relevant. Being John Malkovich invented a new kind of cinema. The Academy picked the film about feeling trapped in suburbia.
15. James Cameron, Titanic (1997), Best Director
► Read the full review of Titanic (1997)
► Read the full review of L.A. Confidential (1997)
Cameron is a real technical filmmaker of extraordinary capability and his direction of Titanic’s spectacular sequences is masterful. L.A. Confidential is the most perfectly constructed Hollywood screenplay of the 1990s, Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson’s adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel manages a cast of nine significant characters across a multi-strand mystery plot without losing any of them, and Hanson directs it with the precision of someone who has studied what makes classical Hollywood narrative work and understood every lesson.
The directorial achievement in L.A. Confidential is invisible in the way the best direction is invisible: nothing calls attention to itself, every shot serves the story, every scene works. Cameron’s direction of Titanic’s spectacle is very visible and very impressive. Invisible excellence lost to visible impressiveness. This is a recurring Academy pattern.
16. Gladiator (2000) – Best Picture
► Read the full review of Gladiator (2000)
► Read the full review of Traffic (2000)
Should Have Won: Traffic, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, or Almost Famous
Gladiator is a very good action film with a weak villain and a third act that loses momentum significantly after the second act’s spectacle. Traffic, Steven Soderbergh’s interlocking portrait of the American drug war from multiple perspectives, is a formally sophisticated film about systemic failure that the Academy recognized with a Best Director award while denying the film itself the prize it deserved. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon reinvented what martial arts cinema could do. Almost Famous captured something true about music journalism and adolescence that’s never been equaled.
Gladiator’s win is the most recent example of the Academy’s specific weakness for epic historical action, the same weakness that gave The Greatest Show on Earth and Around the World in 80 Days their undeserved prizes. Big, expensive, emotionally simple, and set in the past: the formula works on the Academy reliably.
17. Julia Roberts, Erin Brockovich (2000), Best Actress
► Read the full review of Erin Brockovich (2000)
► Read the full review of Requiem for a Dream (2000)
Ellen Burstyn’s Sara Goldfarb in Requiem for a Dream, a widow whose addiction to amphetamines and television produces one of cinema’s most thorough portraits of psychological disintegration, is the most demanding female performance of its decade and possibly of its generation. Roberts’s Erin Brockovich is charismatic, well-deployed, and a good performance of a personality-driven role. The comparison is between a role that required everything Burstyn had and a role that required Roberts to be very good at being Julia Roberts.
Requiem for a Dream wasn’t widely considered a serious Oscar contender because Darren Aronofsky’s film is difficult to watch and doesn’t resolve comfortably. The Academy prefers performances in films it can endorse. Sara Goldfarb’s arc ends in a mental institution. The Academy gave the prize to the woman who won the lawsuit.
I like Erin Brockovich. Roberts is fun to watch and the film moves, but it’s a crowd-pleaser that never asks her to go anywhere uncomfortable. Burstyn’s performance is the most harrowing thing I’ve seen an actor do, and it devastates me. If I’d change anything, it’s that Aronofsky’s style sometimes shouts over her. Punishing her because the film is hard to sit through is the Academy protecting its party at the expense of the work.
18. Chicago (2002) – Best Picture
► Read the full review of Chicago (2002)
► Read the full review of The Pianist (2002)
Should Have Won: The Pianist or Gangs of New York
Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (the story of a Polish Jewish pianist surviving the Warsaw Ghetto, directed by a man who survived the Krakow Ghetto as a child, starring Adrien Brody in a performance of extraordinary physical and psychological specificity) lost Best Picture to a glossy musical about celebrity murder trials. Chicago is well made, well performed, and a completely suitable entertainment. The Pianist is a personal and historical document of a different order entirely.
Academy voters gave Polanski Best Director (in absentia, as he remains a fugitive from a 1977 statutory rape charge) and gave the film itself to Chicago. Scorsese’s Gangs of New York also lost, adding to the accumulating Scorsese injustice catalog. The Academy wanted to have an energetic, fun evening. Chicago delivered that. The Pianist didn’t.
19. Titanic (1997) – 11 Oscars
► Read the full review of Titanic (1997) – 11 Oscars
► Read the full review of L.A. Confidential (1997)
Eleven Oscars. Eleven. For a film with a door problem, a historically incoherent class critique (the first-class passengers are cartoonishly villainous while the third-class passengers dance), and a romance between two characters who are types. The technical achievement of Titanic is real and real. The film as drama is considerably less impressive than its production. L.A. Confidential (which appears on this list twice. That tells you something) lost both Best Picture and Best Director.
Eleven Oscars is the record tied with Ben-Hur and later The Return of the King. The company it keeps is instructive: all three films are spectacular achievements of production over storytelling. The Academy responds to spectacle with a generosity that it withholds from films that achieve their effects through more invisible means.
I like Titanic once the ship starts going down, and that back half is a thrill. I lose patience with the first half, with dialogue so thin I’m counting the minutes until the iceberg. L.A. Confidential is the film I’d hand to anyone who wants to see a Hollywood thriller built properly. It lost twice in one year to a movie that couldn’t write its way out of a lifeboat, and that still stings.
20. The King’s Speech (2010) – Best Picture & Director
► Read the full review of The King’s Speech (2010)
► Read the full review of The Social Network (2010)
The defining modern Oscar wrong call. David Fincher’s The Social Network (the founding myth of the digital age, a film about how someone constitutionally incapable of connection built the thing that connected everyone, with Aaron Sorkin’s best screenplay and Fincher’s most complete direction) lost Best Picture and Best Director to The King’s Speech: a well-acted, warmly conventional drama about a king learning to speak properly. One film is about how we live now. The other is about a king with a stammer.
Tom Hooper over David Fincher is the Ordinary People / Raging Bull failure repeated thirty years later with different names attached. The Academy chose handsome competence over formal intelligence. Fincher’s direction of The Social Network (the opening conversation, the Henley sequence, the deposition structure) is cinema operating at the level of precision instrument. Hooper’s direction of The King’s Speech is well crafted period drama. The distinction between the two isn’t subtle.
The King’s Speech is a pleasant, well-acted evening, and its two leads are fun together, but nothing in it stays with me. The Social Network affected me deeply, and I still think about it. My only complaint about it is that every one of Sorkin’s characters talks at the same speed. When the Academy chose the stammer picture over that, it told me they hadn’t learned a thing since Ordinary People.
21. Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side (2009), Best Actress
► Read the full review of The Blind Side (2009)
► Read the full review of Precious (2009)
Should Have Won: Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia or Gabourey Sidibe, Precious
Sandra Bullock’s Leigh Anne Tuohy is a strong performance of a character the film presents uncritically, a wealthy white woman who takes in a homeless Black teenager and helps him become an NFL player, framed as pure generosity without engaging with any of the complicated questions about race, class, and the dynamics of the relationship that a more honest film might have raised. Gabourey Sidibe’s Precious is a first performance that requires everything from a first-time actor and receives it. Meryl Streep’s Julia Child is a feat of physical and vocal transformation.
The Blind Side is the Academy’s comfort food problem expressed as a performance award: a film that makes its predominantly white audience feel good about race relations is more likely to receive industry recognition than a film that makes them uncomfortable about the same subject.
22. Argo (2012) – Best Picture
► Read the full review of Argo (2012)
► Read the full review of Lincoln (2012)
Argo is a well-made, entertaining, historically simplified thriller that Ben Affleck directed with considerable competence and that invents a climactic airport chase sequence that didn’t happen, a choice that’s both dramatically understandable and intellectually dishonest for a film that presents itself as based on a true story. Lincoln (Spielberg’s most disciplined political film, a procedural about the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment) is a more serious and more lasting achievement. Zero Dark Thirty raised important questions about the American relationship to torture that the industry wasn’t comfortable acknowledging.
Affleck wasn’t nominated for Best Director, a slight that drove considerable sympathy voting for the film. The Academy gave Argo Best Picture partly because its director had been wrongly excluded from the directing race. The politics of the vote determined the outcome more than the quality of the films.
23. Crash (2005) – Best Picture
► Read the full review of Crash (2005)
► Read the full review of Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Should Have Won: Brokeback Mountain
The most baffling Best Picture winner of the modern era. Paul Haggis’s Crash (a film that defines every character by a single racial attitude and then challenges it, producing a series of lessons about prejudice that feel like a diversity training seminar constructed as a thriller) beat Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, a formally restrained, emotionally devastating love story that the Academy was apparently not ready to endorse.
The suspicion, widely reported at the time, is that a significant number of Academy members voted for Crash to avoid voting for the gay cowboy movie.
Crash’s racial politics are also more complicated than the film acknowledges, a film that argues everyone is a little bit racist while structuring every scene around easily digestible lessons doesn’t so much engage with racism as process it into comfortable realizations. Brokeback Mountain is simply a better film by every available measure, including the measure of honesty about its subject.
Crash is a worse pick than almost any winner on this page. Every character exists to deliver a lesson, and the coincidences are rigged so each one sets up the next, until the film plays like a lecture that thinks it’s a thriller. Brokeback Mountain trusts its audience, and it breaks my heart without once raising its voice. I’d take one quiet scene from it over the whole of Crash.
24. Green Book (2018) – Best Picture
► Read the full review of Green Book (2018)
► Read the full review of Roma (2018)
Should Have Won: Roma or The Favorite
Green Book is Driving Miss Daisy thirty years later: a story about race in which the white character’s growth is the arc and the Black character’s humanity is the catalyst for that growth. Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (a formally precise, personal film about a domestic worker in 1970s Mexico City, shot in black and white, in Spanish and Mixtec, with non-professional actors) lost to a crowd-pleasing road movie whose historical accuracy Don Shirley’s family disputed. The Favorite was Yorgos Lanthimos’s most accessible and most complete film.
The Green Book win is the Driving Miss Daisy win restated for the current moment, not 1989, the same structural preference for comfortable racial narratives in contemporary form. The Academy hasn’t resolved this pattern in thirty years.
25. Rami Malek, Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), Best Actor
► Read the full review of Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)
► Read the full review of Vice (2018)
Should Have Won: Christian Bale – Vice
Rami Malek’s Freddie Mercury is a technically accomplished impersonation in service of a biopic that sanitizes its subject’s life into an inspirational arc. Christian Bale’s Dick Cheney in Vice required gaining forty-five pounds, adopting a physical posture and vocal quality entirely unlike his own, and finding a way to make a man who’s deliberately opaque to observation comprehensible without making him sympathetic. The two performances aren’t in the same category of difficulty, and the easier one won.
Bohemian Rhapsody‘s critical reputation is one of the strangest in recent Oscar history: the film received mixed reviews, was directed by Bryan Singer (who was fired during production amid serious allegations), is widely considered a mediocre biopic, and won Best Picture Editing and Best Actor. Malek is excellent in it. He’s not as excellent as Bale is in Vice, which the Academy apparently found too dark and too strange to reward.
26. Renée Zellweger, Judy (2019), Best Actress
► Read the full review of Marriage Story (2019)
Should Have Won: Charlize Theron, Bombshell or Scarlett Johansson, Marriage Story
Zellweger’s Judy Garland is a technically impressive transformation and a tribute performance in a film that’s otherwise ordinary, the kind of biopic that exists to show the performance. Charlize Theron’s Megyn Kelly in Bombshell required physical transformation, vocal adjustment, and the challenge of playing a real person whose public persona is well documented in ways that make any deviation immediately noticeable.
Scarlett Johansson’s Nicole in Marriage Story is the most fully realized performance in Noah Baumbach’s career, a woman who’s right about everything and wrong about how she handles being right.
Oscar voters tend to reward transformation performances (the actor who becomes someone visibly different) over inhabitation performances, in which the actor finds the character from within their own resources. Transformation is more visible. Inhabitation is frequently more difficult and almost always more interesting.
27. Tom Hanks, Philadelphia (1993), Best Actor
► Read the full review of Philadelphia (1993)
► Read the full review of In the Name of the Father (1993)
Tom Hanks is good in Philadelphia. His first Best Actor win, which he followed immediately with a second for Forrest Gump, making him the first actor since Spencer Tracy to win back-to-back. The performance is warm, accessible, and carefully designed to make the audience comfortable enough with an AIDS victim to feel sympathy. Daniel Day-Lewis in In the Name of the Father (as Gerry Conlon, wrongly imprisoned for fifteen years for the Guildford bombings) gives a performance of rage, grief, and eventual transformation that’s technically more demanding in every dimension.
Philadelphia is the more important film culturally (it was one of the first mainstream Hollywood films to address AIDS with any sympathy) which may have influenced a vote that was partly a statement about the disease, not purely an assessment of the performance.
28. Mel Gibson, Braveheart (1995), Best Director
► Read the full review of Braveheart (1995)
► Read the full review of Leaving Las Vegas (1995)
Should Have Won: Mike Figgis, Leaving Las Vegas or David Fincher, Se7en (not nominated)
Mike Figgis shot Leaving Las Vegas (an alcoholic’s deliberate death in Las Vegas, Nicolas Cage’s finest performance, Elisabeth Shue’s finest performance) for $4 million in sixteen days on Super 16mm film, and the low budget and tight schedule produced a look perfectly matched to the material’s desperation and claustrophobia. David Fincher wasn’t nominated for directing Se7en. Mel Gibson won for directing Braveheart, a technically accomplished but conventionally executed historical epic that anyone with Gibson’s resources and enough extras could have made.
Figgis’s direction of Leaving Las Vegas is the rare case of constraint producing the exactly correct aesthetic: the grainy, underlit, unstable image is the alcoholic’s perception rendered as visual grammar. The film looks like it feels to be Ben Sanderson. That alignment of form and content is the highest directorial achievement.
I enjoy Braveheart. The battles have real muscle and the story holds my attention, even while the history makes me wince. As a piece of directing, though, it’s a big film made in a familiar way. Leaving Las Vegas devastated me, and I think Figgis got more out of sixteen days on a shoestring than most directors get out of a war chest.
29. Crash, Paul Haggis (2004), Best Original Screenplay
► Read the full review of Crash (2005)
► Read the full review of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Should Have Won: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (previous year)
This entry requires a clarification: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind won Best Original Screenplay the year before Crash won its. But Haggis also won the year before for Million Dollar Baby, making him a back-to-back winner while Charlie Kaufman received Eternal Sunshine’s deserved recognition. What makes this notable is that Haggis won twice in two years with two films considerably less formally accomplished than Kaufman’s work, while Kaufman (whose Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, and Eternal Sunshine represent the most consistently inventive American screenwriting of the decade) received only the one recognition.
Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine invents a structural metaphor, the reverse chronology of memory erasure, that’s inseparable from the film’s emotional argument: that what makes love worth having is also what makes losing it devastating, and that you can’t erase one without the other. The structure is the argument. This is the highest achievement available to a screenwriter.
30. Million Dollar Baby (2004) – Best Picture
► Read the full review of Million Dollar Baby (2004)
► Read the full review of Sideways (2004)
Should Have Won: Sideways or The Aviator
Clint Eastwood’s film is a well-made boxing drama that pivots in its third act into an assisted suicide debate, and the pivot produces Oscar catnip: a film that starts as one kind of emotionally satisfying story and ends as a morally serious one, allowing the Academy to feel it’s rewarded both entertainment and importance.
Alexander Payne’s Sideways (a film about two middle-aged men driving through wine country, with Paul Giamatti’s career-best performance as a failed writer whose depression is rendered through his relationship to wine) is funnier, sadder, and more honest than Million Dollar Baby.
Giamatti wasn’t nominated for Best Actor for Sideways, a separate injustice. The film losing Best Picture to Million Dollar Baby is simply a case of the Academy preferring the film that announced its importance through subject matter over the film that showed its importance through execution.
This entry hurts because I think both films are wonderful. Million Dollar Baby moves me deeply when that third act turns, and my small complaint is that the turn feels built to win prizes. Sideways is the one I’d rather live with, funny and sad in the same breath, and Giamatti deserved far more than he got for it.
What the Oscars Get Wrong, Consistently
The thirty entries here show a set of institutional preferences that have remained unusually stable across eighty years of Academy voting: spectacle over substance, sentiment over rigor, the comfortable over the challenging, the accessible over the formally ambitious, and the film that’s important for what it’s about over the film that’s important for how it does what it does.
For all its ceremony, the Academy is a trade organization whose members vote based on a combination of real aesthetic preference, industry politics, campaign susceptibility, and the social dynamics of a year’s awards season. Knowing that doesn’t make the wrong calls less wrong. It does explain why the pattern has been so consistent for so long, and why it’ll continue.
Ordinary viewers pay for these mistakes. Plenty of people pick a film because it says Best Picture on the cover, and they end up with The Greatest Show on Earth while High Noon sits on the shelf beside it. Go by the losers on this page instead. Start with Network and Goodfellas, and then try to tell me the Academy got those years right.
Disagree? Good.
The Oscars produce strong opinions. Drop yours in the comments, especially if you think Crash deserved it.
