The Top 10 Oscar-Nomination Snubs

The 2010 Academy Awards take place next month but Time Magazine have gone ahead and put up a list of the biggest 10 Oscar nomination snubs.

Best Actor: Fred Astaire, Top Hat (1935)

The Academy has traditionally thought of movie acting as dramatic acting: tearing a passion to tatters, preferably while speaking in an accent and wearing eccentric makeup. That excluded the swellegant, elegant Mr. Fred Astaire; all he did was sing and dance with greater craft and feeling than anybody in movie history. His duets with Ginger Rogers â€” “Isn’t This a Lovely Day” and “Cheek to Cheek” in Top Hat and “Never Gonna Dance” in Swing Time â€” are not just superb examples of Terpsichore’s art but among the most powerful expressions of courtship, love and loss in screen history. Astaire was never nominated for these musicals, or for any other â€” though the Academy did insult his dance legacy by nominating him for Best Supporting Actor for a nothing role, played long past his prime, in the 1974 disaster pic The Towering Inferno.

Best Actor: Cary Grant, His Girl Friday (1940)

Golden-age Hollywood promoted glamour all year long and then, when it came to the Oscars, rewarded anti-glamour. To understand the Academy’s prejudice against its richest resource, consider that by 1941 Walter Brennan â€” who specialized in playing cunning, toothless galoots â€” had won three Oscars, while Cary Grant had not even been nominated. By then Grant had starred in The Awful Truth, Topper, Holiday, Bringing Up Baby, Gunga Din, Only Angels Have Wings and The Philadelphia Story â€” fashioning the indelible template of the attractive, self-deprecating movie male, and doing it with superb comic timing or action-adventure gruffness, as the role demanded. In His Girl Friday he’s a ruthless newspaper editor who browbeats his writer-wife (Rosalind Russell), all other journalists, the city’s mayor and cops and a condemned killer, just because … he’s Cary Grant. It’s a fast, gorgeous comic turn, for which Grant got no nomination. He would be cited for two dramatic performances, in Penny Serenade and None but the Lonely Heart, yet Hollywood’s greatest comic actor was never nominated for a comedy role.

Best Actor: Bill Murray, Groundhog Day (1993)

Selfish and snarky, Bill Murray’s Phil Connors is a Pittsburgh weatherman who plans to be in Punxsutawney, Pa., for just one day: Feb. 2, Groundhog Day. Except that the day repeats itself, with infinitely minute variations, until Phil gets it right. In a minor scandal, the film got no nominations. An Oscar should have gone to Harold Ramis and Danny Rubin for the script, which deftly balances comedy and philosophy (Is God a groundhog? Discuss), and another to Bill Murray for acting. From Caddyshack to What About Bob?, Murray had refined his amiable doofus into the minimalist modern man: his posture a question mark, his face a concrete poem of anticipated disappointment. In Groundhog Day he rises to romance and sinks to despair â€” and is wonderfully funny â€” all in the same day after day after day.

Best Actress: Barbara Stanwyck, The Lady Eve (1941)

The Hollywood screen’s all-time toughest, smartest dame, Barbara Stanwyck played comedy and pathos with equal agility, yet she never won a competitive Oscar. Her scheming adulteress-murderess in Double Indemnity, for example, lost out to the harried wife played by Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight, as Hollywood chose to reward the noble victim rather than the brilliant predator. Some of her tangiest roles flew right under the Academy’s radar, like the career gal who literally screws her way up the corporate ladder in Baby Face. Her sharpest comedy performance, no question, was playing the cruise-ship con artist who seduces a hapless Henry Fonda in Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve, probably the all-time top screwball comedy. She is the devil every man would gladly play the sucker for; but neither she nor Sturges got a nomination. The movie’s only reward was immortality.

Best Director: John Ford, The Searchers (1956)

It is now widely regarded as the greatest western of the 1950s, the genre’s greatest decade. The tale of a loner searching for a missing daughter has been remade scores of times (most recently in Mel Gibson’s Edge of Darkness). But John Ford’s darkly profound study of obsession, racism and heroic solitude was shrugged off when it first appeared. Though Ford was Hollywood’s most honored auteur, with four Oscars as Best Director, he got nothing when he made his masterpiece. The Academy also ignored the towering performance of John Wayne as the scarred Civil War veteran Ethan Edwards, who either exorcises his demons or surrenders to them in violent revenge. Wayne would finally get an Oscar for his assured but much less complex performance as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit. But reward his most powerful role? That’ll be the day.

Best Director: Martin Scorsese, Taxi Driver (1976)

The movie got a Best Picture nomination (losing to Rocky) â€” as well as nominations for Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster (Best Actor and Supporting Actress) and for Bernard Herrmann’s creepy score â€” but its gifted director was ignored. Like Hieronymus Bosch working with spray paint, Martin Scorsese visualized a Manhattan hellscape with steam, blood and vomit everywhere, and in the center a crazed cabbie who literally gets away with murder. By rights, Scorsese could have been nominated three times in the ’70s: for Mean Streets and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore as well as Taxi Driver. But America’s most astute and passionate picture maker had to wait until 2007, and The Departed, to get a Best Director statuette. By then it might as well have been a lifetime achievement award â€” or the Academy’s public apology for more than 30 years of myopic calls against him.

Best Director: Steven Spielberg, Jaws (1975)

The opposite of Sally Field’s gushing “You like me, you really like me” upon winning an Oscar was Steven Spielberg’s response when his first big movie, Jaws, was nominated for Best Picture but stiffed in the Best Director category. Jaws had only become the top-grossing film since The Sound of Music a decade before, and Spielberg had managed to wrangle Bruce â€” the production’s balky mechanical shark â€” into a creature of demonic intent and satanic power. The tarring of Spielberg as a maker of “just movies” would continue through Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, for which he was nominated but lost. The year of E.T., the Academy gave the Best Picture and Director prizes to Richard Attenborough’s worthy but plodding Gandhi. Spielberg had to make his only true-life epic, Schindler’s List, before he finally won an Oscar.

Best Picture: King Kong (1933)

In 1934, for the first time, the Academy allowed 10 Best Picture nominations. All those slots, and not one of them could be filled by the greatest fantasy in Hollywood history? Cavalcade, the stately, starchy filming of a Noel Coward play, took the Best Picture award, and King Kong received no nominations at all, not even in the technical and engineering categories. So much for Willis O’Brien’s construction and stop-motion animation of the 18-in.-tall ape, which gave Kong gravitas as he battled dinosaurs on a jungle island and soul as he wooed Fay Wray and took her to the top of the Empire State Building. King Kong inspired generations of boy geniuses, from Steven Spielberg to Peter Jackson (who did a loving though oversize remake in 2005), while Cavalcade slipped into oblivion.

Best Picture: Some Like It Hot (1959)

Voted the best American comedy of all time in an American Film Institute survey 10 years ago, Billy Wilder’s fizzy farce earned nominations for screenplay, direction and Jack Lemmon’s performance as a Prohibition musician who goes on the lam disguised as a woman. (Tony Curtis, Lemmon’s partner in drag, deserved a nod too.) But the movie was denied one of the Best Picture slots, which were filled by two religious epics (Ben-Hur and The Nun’s Story), two “daring” melodramas (Anatomy of a Murder and Room at the Top) and The Diary of Anne Frank. Back then, elevated sentiments and hot-button social issues seemed so much more important than an ephemeral comedy starring Marilyn Monroe and two guys in dresses. Today, it’s the ephemeral that has lasted.

Best Picture: The Dark Knight (2008)

Why did the Academy decide to reinstate the 10-film field for Best Picture in 2010? Because the year before, The Dark Knight wasn’t voted into the top five. At the time the second biggest dollar earner in movie history (now passed by Avatar), Christopher Nolan’s saturnine fantasy was a film that kids and critics alike appreciated, less as a live-action comic book than as a triangular battle of stern Good, giggling Evil and two faces in between. The Academy members didn’t go bats for this Batman; instead, they filled out their Best Picture cards with their favorite fallen President (Frost/Nixon), a Nazi warden (The Reader), a civil rights martyr (Milk), an old guy who gets younger (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and the eventual winner, Slumdog Millionaire. Except for a Heath Ledger memorial citation (Best Supporting Actor), The Dark Knight was ignored in all major award categories, earning only doorstop prizes like Best Sound Editing and Sound Mixing. Safe to say that the Academy won’t shut out the big action-adventure movie of 2009. Avatar is a sure nominee for Best Picture, and a likely winner.

I agree with the majority of these, I enjoyed The Dark Knight but I really don’t the movie should have gotten a nomination so I would take that off the list. Instead I would put on Alfred Hitchcock, it’s a disgrace he never got an Oscar. What do you think? Any movies or people who should have received nominations?

source: Top 10 Oscar-Nomination Snubs [Time]

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The Top 10 Oscar-Nomination Snubs

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