At the beginning of March 2018, the 90th anniversary Oscar ceremony will take place. Preparing for such a significant event, The Guardian has prepared a rating of the most high-profile Oscar failures in history.
It included films, directors and actors that went unnoticed by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts.
10. Robert Mitchum
This actor's talents were too sophisticated for an Oscar. Basically, he got the role of negative characters: the Reverend Harry Powell in the film "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 Mitchum, in 1992 he received the Golden Globe Award for his contribution to the cinema.
9. The film "Oil"
Like his last film, Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson’s philosophical drama Oil in 2007 was very strange, as the film's ending canceled out 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 film, and the members of the Academy did not appreciate it.
8. Judy Garland
Incredible that the star of The Wizard of Oz, A Baby Awaits and A Star Is Born did not win the Best Actress Award, although she was twice nominated for an Oscar and received an Honorary Minority Award for frolicking on the Yellow Brick Road ...
7. The film "The Great Illusion"
Non-American films rarely win Oscars. And even the deep drama and well-timed anti-war mood of Jean Renoir's "Great Illusion" failed to overcome the jury's dislike for reading subtitles. But he received a number of other awards, such as the Venice Film Festival and the US National Council of Film Critics Award. And the German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels declared Renoir “cinematic enemy number 1” and ordered the destruction of all copies of “The Great Illusion”.
6. The film "Taxi Driver"
Martin Scorsese has a long and complicated relationship with the American Film Academy. His films have been nominated for Oscars many times, but each time they have fallen behind other films.
The jury preferred "Rocky" to "Taxi Driver" - not a bad film, but hardly able to compete with Scorsese's tape in terms of drama, tension and direction.
It wasn't until 2007 that Scorsese won an Oscar for Best Director in The Departed, a remake of the Hong Kong thriller Castling Double.
5. Charlie Chaplin
Throughout his career, the great comedian has repeatedly received an Oscar statuette:
- one - at the beginning of his career (in 1929);
- another - at the end (in 1972 for "invaluable contribution to the process of transforming cinema into art of the twentieth century");
- and in 1973 he was presented with the award for 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 biggest 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. Myrna Loy
The detective comedy "The Thin Man" and a number of its sequels remain some of the masterpieces of early Hollywood, but the Academy saw fit to award 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 in cinema.
3. The film "Citizen Kane"
In third place in the ranking of the most high-profile failures of the "Oscar" is the story associated with the masterpiece of 1941. Orson Welles' film claims not only the title of the best picture of all time, but also for the title of "best film that never won an Oscar for best picture."
Citizen Kane had 8 Oscar nominations, though the film won only one Best Screenplay award and lost Best Picture to John Ford's family saga How Green Was My Valley.
Filmmaker Pauline Kael said that every time Wells' film was read or the director's name was read at the awards ceremony, there was a “hiss and loud hiss”, so intense was the controversy surrounding Citizen Kane.
2015 Citizen Kane was named the Best American Film in a BBC poll.
2. Stanley Kubrick
This director was nominated for Oscar four times as Best Director. However, aerophobia - fear of flying in air transport - prevented Kubrick, who lives in England, from attending the awards 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 Oscar. The great Alfred Hitchcock never won a Best Director award. In the end, he was presented with the Irving Thalberg Award for Outstanding Producer Contribution to the Development of Filmmaking. “Thank you,” was all Hitchcock said before leaving the stage.