Every Academy Awards season the airwaves and chat rooms are abuzz with movie fans complaining about the Oscar winners—especially for Best Picture. When the envelope is ripped open and the Best Picture winner is announced there is bound to be an outcry. That’s part of the fun: After every Oscar ceremony there is always room for argument, discussion, even controversy.
In the past 40 years of the Oscars, however, there have been a number of occasions when the outcry and controversy have been totally justified, when the most deserving movie of the year was left on the sidelines.
MM would like to remember and honor six movies that should have won the Best Picture Oscar but lost (five of these pictures at least received a nomination; one—Do the Right Thing—didn’t even receive that honor). These are bold, original, challenging movies that have stood the test of time; they are still enjoyed, studied, discussed and cared about. The actual Best Picture winners? Not so much. The moviemakers behind these overlooked gems should have demanded a recount.
Year: 1977
Won: Rocky
Shoulda Won: Taxi Driver
1976 was a great year for movies. All the Best Pic nominees, which included All The President’s Men, Bound for Glory and Network
Year: 1981
Won: Ordinary People
Shoulda Won: Raging Bull
Scorsese
Year: 1990
Won: Driving Miss Daisy
Shoulda Won: Do The Right Thing
1990 was an odd year at the Oscars. Driving Miss Daisy, an old-fashioned tale about the growing friendship between an elderly Southern woman (Jessica Tandy) and her African-American chauffeur (Morgan Freeman), was an entirely predictable win for Best Picture. The movie’s genteel handling of the relationship between a white character and her black servant stands in glaring contrast to Spike Lee
Year: 1991
Won: Dances with Wolves
Shoulda Won: GoodFellas
There is no dispute that Goodfellas is one of the greatest movies of all time, and how it did not win Best Picture is still a mystery to movie fans. Martin Scorsese
Year: 1995
Won: Forrest Gump
Should Won: Pulp Fiction
In the late 1990s, it was hard to walk into a movie theater without an uber-violent, non-chronological, multi-character, crime-comedy playing. And for that, we have lifelong movie geek Quentin Tarantino to thank. When Pulp Fiction, his ground-breaking, off-center take on genre conventions, was released in 1994, it set off an almost immediate wave of second-rate imitations. While these movies might have been entertaining in their own right, none featured characters as lively, insightful or three-dimensional as those populating the stylized world of Pulp Fiction. Tarantino’s masterwork is still being discussed in film classes and being ripped off (er, paid homage to) by moviemakers today, while the only person attempting to repeat the success of Robert Zemeckis’ pandering, schmaltzy Forrest Gump is Eric Roth, who wrote the 1994 Oscar-winner as well as the suspiciously similar The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (currently nominated for Best Picture).
Year: 1997
Won: The English Patient
Shoulda Won: Fargo
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