At the beginning of March 2018, the jubilee, ninety Oscars will be held. In preparation for such a momentous event, The Guardian prepared a rating of the Oscars most notorious failures in history.
Films, directors and actors that went unnoticed by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts got into it.
10. Robert Mitchem
The talents of this actor were too sophisticated for the Oscar. Basically, he got the role of negative heroes: Rev. Harry Powell in the movie "Night of the Hunter", the owner of the metallurgical factory John Dickinson in "Dead Man" and others.
Despite the fact that the Oscar passed by Mitchem, in 1992 he received the Golden Globe Award for his contribution to cinema.
9. The film "Oil"
Like his last film The Phantom Thread, the philosophical drama The Oil by Paul Thomas Anderson in 2007 was very strange, because the ending of the picture nullified the rest of it.
Daniel Day-Lewis, who played the main character - oil tycoon Daniel Plainview - received an Oscar for best actor, but Oil turned out to be too unusual and daring a movie, and members of the Academy did not appreciate it.
8. Judy Garland
It is unbelievable that the star of The Wizard of Oz, The Child Is Waiting, and The Star Is Born did not receive a prize as the best actress, although she was twice nominated for an Oscar and received an honorary award for minors for frolic on the Yellow Brick Road .
7. The film "The Great Illusion"
Non-American films are rarely awarded an Academy Award. And even the deep drama and timely anti-war mood of the “Great Illusion” of Jean Renoir failed to overcome the jury's dislike for reading subtitles. But he won several other awards, such as the Venice Film Festival Prize and the prize of the National Council of Film Critics of the United States. And the German propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, declared Renoir "the number one cinematic enemy" and ordered that all copies of The Great Illusion be destroyed.
6. The film "Taxi Driver"
Martin Scorsese has a long and difficult relationship with the American Film Academy. His films have been nominated for an Academy Award many times, but each time they have been inferior to other films.
The jury chose “Rocky” to the film “Taxi Driver” - not a bad film, but hardly able to compete with Scorsese’s tape in drama, tension and direction.
It wasn't until 2007 that Scorsese became an Academy Award winner for best directing in the film The Departed, a remake of the Hong Kong thriller Double Castling.
5. Charlie Chaplin
Over the course of his career, the great comedian has repeatedly received an Oscar:
- one - at the beginning of a career (in 1929);
- another at the end (in 1972 for “an invaluable contribution to the process of turning cinema into twentieth-century art”);
- and in 1973 he was awarded the best soundtrack for a dramatic film ("Ramp Lights", filmed in 1952, but not seen in the United States for 20 years).
Why did he enter the top 10 largest failures of the Oscars? The irony is that Chaplin never received awards for such masterpieces as “City Lights”, “New Times” and “The Great Dictator”.
4. Mirna Loy
The detective comedy The Thin Man and a number of its sequels remain one of the masterpieces of early Hollywood, but the Academy considered it necessary to present the prize to only one of the main characters (William Powell). And the magnificent Mirna Loy had to wait until 1991, and only then, two years before her death, she was awarded the coveted Oscar for outstanding services to the cinema.
3. The film "Citizen Kane"
In third place in the ranking of the most notorious failures of the Oscar is the story associated with the 1941 masterpiece. Orson Welles’s film claims to be not only the title of best picture of all time, but also the title of “best film that has never won an Oscar for the best picture.”
Citizen Kane had 8 Academy Award nominations, although the motion picture received only one award for “Best Screenplay” and lost the title “Best Movie” to John Ford’s family saga, “How Green Was My Valley.”
Filmmaker Polina Kael said that every time the name of the Wells movie was read out or the director’s name was spoken, “hissing and loud booing” sounded, the debate surrounding Citizen Kane was so intense.
In 2015, Citizen Kane "became the best American film according to a BBC poll.
2. Stanley Kubrick
Four times this director was nominated for an Oscar as the best director. However, aerophobia - the fear of flying on air transport - did not allow Kubrick, who lives in England, to attend the award ceremony. According to rumors, it was because of this that he was deprived of the prize.
1. Alfred Hitchcock
Here it is, the loudest failure of the Academy Award. The great Alfred Hitchcock never received a prize for best directing. In the end, he was awarded the Irving Thalberg Award for outstanding producer contribution to the development of film production. “Thank you,” is all Hitchcock said before leaving the stage.
