THE BIGGEST OSCAR SNUBS: BEST ACTOR/ACTRESS
A Look At Who Should Have Won The Academy Award For...
See my first installment for Best Supporting Actor and Actress here.
BEST ACTOR
5.) 2021
WHO WON? Anthony Hopkins - The Father
WHO SHOULD HAVE WON? Chadwick Boseman - Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
This was one of the Academy’s most amusing screw-ups.
Chadwick Boseman, who had died six months earlier, was considered a lock to win for his role in the film adaptation of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Because of this, the Academy decided to forgo tradition and announce the Best Actor last, rather than Best Picture. It was thought that this was to end the show with a tribute to Boseman, who was only 43 when he died of cancer.
To everyone’s shock, Hopkins was announced as the winner. The actor was not even at the ceremony. Expecting to lose, Hopkins stayed home in Wales rather than travel to California during the COVID-19 Pandemic.
The decision to award the Oscar to Hopkins, whose role as an elderly father struggling with dementia, was peculiar. It wasn’t that his performance wasn’t great, it’s that it didn’t seem the kind of performance that would preclude the Academy from awarding an equally fantastic one by a recently-deceased-before-his-time actor in the typical dramatic fashion the Oscars love to do.
Further, the fact that Boseman was black and the Academy had been getting buried in criticism during the previous decade for shunning black winners in lead categories made the optics even worse.
4.) 1974
WHO WON? Art Carney - Harry And Tonto
WHO SHOULD HAVE WON? Al Pacino - The Godfather Part II
Ok I get it, Art Carney’s Harry, widowed and homeless traveling across the country with his cat, is a moving story about grief and aging, but Carney’s win felt more like the Academy rewarding a longtime B-list star who made his name decades earlier in a comedy role – Edward Norton in The Honeymooners – and finally scored a good role.
Honestly, the fact that it won over Pacino’s dominating role as the lead in The Godfather Part II still doesn’t make sense. Marlon Brandon won the Best Actor Oscar for the first film as Vito, the father of Pacino’s character, but Pacino unquestionably carried the second movie and the franchise on his shoulders. He made Michael Corleone one of the most memorable roles in cinema history, and the second film is widely considered the best of the franchise largely due to his performance. This was the second time Pacino was snubbed for playing Michael, having lost the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the first Godfather movie. He had also lost the year before in this category for Serpico.
For nearly two decades after Pacino became almost synonymous with Oscar snubs. He was nominated several more times for films like Dog Day Afternoon, …And Justice For All, and Dick Tracy before he finally picked up a golden statue in 1993 for Scent Of A Woman, widely seen as an apology for the 1974 snub.
3.) 1946
WHO WON? Frederic March - The Best Years Of Our Lives
WHO SHOULD HAVE WON? James Stewart - It’s A Wonderful Life
Now and then there’s a performance that you see and you are so compelled by it that when you find out it did not win an Oscar, you want to burn Hollywood to the ground. That’s how I felt when I first discovered Jimmy Stewart didn’t win a Best Actor Oscar for his role as George Bailey in It’s A Wonderful Life.
When you know the history of the 19th Academy Awards, you get why. Held only about 18 months after the end of World War II, the awards were dominated by William Wyler’s post-war epic The Best Years Of Our Lives. The film won seven awards including Best Picture and Best Director. Harold Russell, a World War II veteran who lost both his hands during the war played a soldier readjusting to civilian life after suffering the same disability. Despite being a supporting one, his performance stole the show and won him perhaps the most deserved Best Supporting Actor Oscar.
Russell, and the film’s producers, were widely celebrated in Hollywood for bringing the cause of veterans to the forefront. The praise The Best Years Of Our Lives received built momentum for an Oscar sweep, helping lift the film’s lead actor, Frederic March, to walk away with the Best Actor Award, even though Stewart had a stronger and more memorable performance.
2.) 1999
WHO WON? Kevin Spacey - American Beauty
WHO SHOULD HAVE WON? Denzel Washington - The Hurricane
There was no reason for this injustice.
Denzel Washington probably deserved an Oscar for paying Malcolm X in the 1992 film of the same name, but up against Al Pacino that year, himself robbed, as we already established, of previous deserving Oscars, it made sense that he would have to defer to him.
At the 72nd Academy Awards though, it was Denzel’s time. His incredible performance as boxer Rubin “The Hurricane” Carter, who spent decades in prison for a crime he did not commit, in The Hurricane was more than worthy of an Academy Award. He lost it to Kevin Spacey, who won for a frankly undeserving performance as the pathetic suburban husband and father Lester Burnham in American Beauty. There was very little compelling about his character, especially compared to the more sympathetic and complex characters around him. The fact that Spacey won, but Annette Benning did not for her performance as Lester’s suffering wife, Carolyn, was an even bigger letdown.
The Academy made it up to Denzel by awarding him a Best Actor Oscar three years later for his role as the villainous Alonzo in Training Day, but that felt like a “cover your ass” move. Alonzo was nowhere near as good a Denzel performance as Malcolm X or Rubin Carter.
1.) 1997
WHO WON? Jack Nicholson - As Good As It Gets
WHO SHOULD HAVE WON? Matt Damon - Good Will Hunting
There are probably ten other roles that were more worthy of Jack Nicholson’s third Oscar besides As Good As It Gets. His performance as the crotchety, unpleasant, OCD-suffering neighbor Melvin Udall is nowhere near the caliber of Nicholson’s performances in Chinatown or Reds or even About Schmidt, and yet this role won him a third Oscar, not any of those.
It’s even more confusing when you consider he was up against Matt Damon, who all but became Will Hunting, the working-class savant from East Boston in Good Will Hunting, which he wrote with best friend Ben Affleck. Damon played Will as if he was Will, and he gave us such a layered and genuine portrayal it’s hard to believe it isn’t biographical. So why didn’t he win?
The obvious guesses are that Damon was 27 years old at the time, and the youngest Best Actor winner up to that point was Richard Dreyfuss, who was 30 when he won for his role in The Goodbye Girl in 1977. He was just too juvenile for the Academy. The other theory is that because Damon and Affleck won the Best Screenplay Oscar that night, the Academy wasn’t also awarding him Best Actor. It was an absolute travesty because if there was ever a moment where you do that, this was undoubtedly it.
It will happen one day and when it does, you’ll find me screaming JUSTICE FOR MATT DAMON!
BEST ACTRESS
5.) 1998
WHO WON? Gwenyth Paltrow - Shakespeare In Love
WHO SHOULD HAVE WON? Cate Blanchett - Elizabeth
There was something wrong with the Academy in the late 1990s. The dark cloud of Harvey Weinstein’s corruption hovers over that era.
Shakespeare In Love was a cute movie, but worthy of the number of Oscars it won? No way. Gwenyth Paltrow’s performance as Viola, Shakespeare’s muse and lover and sometimes feminist icon, may have been a turning point in her career, but it’s a joke to think she deserved the Best Actress Oscar over Cate Blanchett’s harrowing take on Queen Elizabeth I in the tumultuous years before and during her early reign in Elizabeth. The role catapulted the Australian actress into superstardom and is widely considered to be the gold standard of portrayals of the iconic 16th-century queen (sorry Glenda Jackson). Blanchett reprised the role in a 2007 film covering her later reign and got another Oscar nomination for it.
I always assumed the only reason why Blanchett didn’t win that year was because Judi Dench won in the Supporting category for playing the same role in Shakespeare In Love and the Academy didn’t want to give both actress nominees the award for playing the same role. That’s a bunch of malarkey as the President would say. The Academy leaned heavily into the character being in multiple nominated movies that year. Remember Whoopi Goldberg’s opening monologue?
4.) 2017
WHO WON? Frances McDormand - Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
WHO SHOULD HAVE WON? Margot Robbie - I, Tonya
Frances McDormand stop hogging all the Oscars!
For me, McDormand’s second of three Best Actress-winning roles was her weakest. She deserved lauds for her portrayal as a grief-stricken, vengeful mother of a murdered daughter in a rural Missouri town who takes drastic action to get justice. She rarely misses. It just didn’t feel like anything special; not in the same way her Oscar-winning roles as Marge Gunderson in Fargo and Fern in Nomadland felt. Those were dynamic, unique, and authentically real.
In 2017, McDormand was up against my favorite kind of Oscar-winning role; biopics. In I, Tonya, Margot Robbie brought us back to the messy and salacious Tonya Harding scandal of the early 1990s and showed us a side of the notorious figure skater we never saw. Robbie went deep into Harding’s frustration at being overlooked and maligned as a figure skater because she came from a working-class background, and made one of that generation’s greatest villains into a relatable character. Presented as an outstanding talent driven by the scorn of those around her, even her own mother (played by Allison Janney, who did win an Oscar), Robbie’s Tonya Harding is a career-defining performance that was frankly more deserving of the Oscar that year.
It’s especially galling considering Robbie was robbed of even a nomination for playing Barbie this year. She deserves better.
3.) 1997
WHO WON? Helen Hunt - As Good As It Gets
WHO SHOULD HAVE WON? Judi Dench - Mrs. Brown
The Academy Awards did everyone dirty in 1997.
First, let me say that I adore Helen Hunt. She was one of my favorite actresses growing up and her television role as Jamie Buchman in Mad About You is one of my favorite characters of all time.
Her role as the lonely, burnt-out Carol in As Good As It Gets though was not Jamie Buchman. I admit I was shocked when Hunt won a Best Actress Oscar for the role and I think she was too. In her acceptable speech, she noted that when she saw Judi Dench as a grieving Queen Victoria in Mrs. Brown, she told her date that Dench would win the Oscar. She should have.
Dench was so convincing as the 19th Century British queen that she played her again, this time at the end of life, in 2017’s Victoria & Abdul. If that isn’t a sign that the Oscars missed the mark 20 years earlier, I don’t know what is.
Dench did win an Oscar the next year for Best Supporting Actress for playing a different queen: Elizabeth I, in Shakespeare in Love; a role that gave her a whole eight minutes of screentime. (A pretty excellent eight minutes though)
2.) 1960
WHO WON? Elizabeth Taylor - BUtterfield 8
WHO SHOULD HAVE WON? Shirley MacLaine - The Apartment
Nobody honestly expected Elizabeth Taylor to win her first Academy Award in 1960 for her turn as the hot mess prostitute Gloria Wandrous in BUtterfield 8. The movie wasn’t good and she’s had better performances, such as Catherine Holly in Suddenly, Last Summer for which she was nominated in this category a year earlier. But Taylor was young, only 29, and popular and she nearly died of pneumonia only a few months before the Academy Awards. Her health scare is believed to have sparked sympathy in the Academy which led to her win. The Oscar was Taylor’s first. She would win another a few years later for Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Wolfe?
The nominee who got screwed in that deal with the frontrunner, Shirley MacLaine, who was favored to win for her role as adultress elevator operator Fran in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. The film won five other Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and her performance is widely considered the best in the film, which also stars Jack Lemmon and Fred MacMurray.
It would be another 23 years before MacLaine would finally score an Academy Award – in 1983 for her role in Terms of Endearment. Upon winning, MacLaine stood on stage and announced “I deserve this.” No one can argue.
1.) 1950
WHO WON? Judy Holliday- Born Yesterday
WHO SHOULD HAVE WON? Gloria Swanson- Sunset Boulevard
The Best Actress category at the 23rd Academy Awards in 1951 might have been the greatest batch of performances in Hollywood history. They included the lead performances by Bette Davis and Ann Baxter in All About Eve, Eleanor Parker’s haunting performance as a woman struggling with life in prison in Caged; Judy Holliday’s career-defining stage-to-screen performance as a quirky Washington call girl in Born Yesterday, and Gloria Swanson’s iconic delusional and demented Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. If ever there was a time for a five-way tie, this was it. Holliday won the Oscar, but if I had to pick one of the five, it would’ve been Swanson. Her performance is perhaps one of the best in film history and certainly the best lead actress performance to never be awarded an Oscar. The last five minutes of the movie alone is peak Hollywood history, and honestly, a pretty sympathetic portrayal of mental illness considering its time.
In a scene in Ryan Murphy’s Feud: Bette and Joan, this matchup is mentioned when Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon) and Joan Crawford (Jessica Lange) are arguing over what Oscar categories they will submit for Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? Davis said she should’ve won a third Oscar in 1950, but Anne Baxter split the vote denying her the win. Crawford responds that Davis was being disrespectful of Holliday before telling Davis “It was Gloria Swanson who was robbed in 1950, not you bitch!”
Joan’s correct.