Thu Feb 19 14:40:50 EST 2015
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“Tron: Legacy.” “Salt.” “Real Steel.” “Rio.” “Transformers: Dark Of The Moon.” “Ted.” “Prometheus.” “Star Trek Into Darkness.” “Despicable Me 2.” These are just some of the movies that have received Oscar nominations in various categories in the last few years (mostly thanks to technical prizes), perhaps starting to suggest to the layman that all you have to do is release a movie and you’ll get nominated for an Academy Award.
Of course, many of the films above were deserving: few would argue that the sound editing in “Transformers, ” or the visual effects in “Star Trek” weren’t world class. But while the awards are spread, rightly, wider and wider, it still leaves a lot of movies out in the cold, and it always has.
Many of the greatest movies of all time were nominated for, or won, Oscars, but not all of them. And so, with this Sunday’s ceremony fast approaching, we’ve looked back over history and picked out fifty of the greatest movies that weren’t just denied winning an Oscar or failed to get a Best Picture nomination, they were left out in the cold altogether and failed to pick up a single nod.
We’ve mostly eschewed movies that were purely genre pictures, or particularly obscure arthouse fare, but still found a wealth to choose from (though this is far from a definitive list). Take a look below, and let us know what you’re most outraged by, or your own favorites that were Oscar-snubbed, in the comments. And click here for more awards-season coverage.
“The Big Lebowski” (1998)
Perhaps it’s because the dust hadn’t settled on Joel and Ethan Coen’s Original Screenplay Oscar statues for “Fargo.” Or, maybe “The Big Lebowski” was too quirky and niche for voters (though even this year "Inherent Vice" had a couple of nods). In hindsight, though, nothing can really explain why the only award this comic masterpiece ended up with is Best Foreign Film from a Russian guild of film critics. And who was the Academy busy awarding as the best picture of 1998? "Shakespeare in friggin' Love."
"Breathless" (1960)
One of the single most important movies in cinema history, Jean-Luc Godard’s ultra-cool Nouveau Vague crime flick may have been too ahead of its time for the Academy. Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” got a screenplay nod the year before, but “Breathless, ” about Bogart-loving criminal Jean-Paul Belmondo and his American amour Jean Seberg, didn’t even manage a Foreign Language nomination.
"Bringing Up Baby" (1938)
One of the very greatest, if not the greatest, of the screwball comedies, Howard Hawks’ perfectly constructed picture, teaming Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant with, among other things, a leopard and a dinosaur skeleton, was a flop on release, evidently causing the Academy to overlook it: the film went un-nominated in the year that Frank Capra’s so-so “You Can’t Take It With You” won Best Picture.
"Chimes At Midnight" (1966)
Now acknowledged as one of Orson Welles’ greatest masterpieces, the director-star’s Falstaffian Shakespeare adaptation won two awards when it premiered at Cannes, but a stinking review by the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther and other American critics led to U.S. distributor Harry Saltzman essentially burying the movie, and it failed to make any Oscar impact at all (though Welles did pick up a Best Foreign Actor BAFTA nod).
