“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).
“The Day The Earth Stood Still” (1951)
“Interstellar” fans complaining that the Academy has overlooked Christopher Nolan’s film in most of the major categories should take comfort that the Oscars have never been kind to science-fiction: Robert Wise’s 1951 classic about an alien visitor, reactionary humans, and a giant robot is universally acknowledged as a towering classic of the genre, but was ignored completely at awards time, bar a special Golden Globe for “promoting international understanding.”
“Don’t Look Now” (1973)
The 1970s were the most open-minded period in Academy history, but only up to a point. Nicolas Roeg’s wrenching, terrifying, sexually-charged thriller about two grieving parents (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) in Venice after the death of their child, didn’t receive a single nomination, in a year when “The Exorcist” and “Cries And Whispers” were up for Best Picture, and “Last Tango In Paris” for Best Director — despite the film picking up seven BAFTA nominations at the same time. To this day, Nicolas Roeg has never been Oscar-nominated.
“Duck Soup” (1933)
Obviously complaining that a Marx Brothers film was overlooked by awards bodies is a bit like getting in a huff because “Zoolander” or “Anchorman” suffered the same fate, but even so, eighty years on, the total snubbing of the comedy legends’ masterpiece “Duck Soup,” a hilarious geo-political satire, still stings. The Academy probably felt so too, eventually: Groucho Marx was final given an honorary award in 1974.
“Frankenstein” (1931)
Sixty years on, Ian McKellen would pick up an Oscar nomination for playing “Frankenstein,” director James Whale in Bill Condon’s “Gods & Monsters,” but the real Whale wasn’t as lucky: his still-definitive take on Mary Shelley’s horror classic was completely ignored at the 5th ever Academy Awards. One might point to the Academy’s anti-genre bias, but this was also the year that Fredric March won Best Actor for “Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.” Whale’s superior sequel “Bride of Frankenstein” did slightly better four years later, with a single sound nod.
“A Face In The Crowd” (1957)
Though he’d become more divisive in later years (notable names like Nick Nolte and Ian McKellen refused to applaud when he was awarded an Honorary Oscar in 1999), Elia Kazan naming names to McCarthy didn’t prevent him from remaining an awards juggernaut even after his testimony. But one of Kazan’s best, 1957’s winningly sour media fable “A Face In The Crowd,” starring Andy Griffith, was a notable exception. Middlingly reviewed on release, it made no impact with the Academy, despite coming off the back of “On The Waterfront,” “East Of Eden” and “Baby Doll.”
“Freaks” (1932)
As we’ve already seen with “Frankenstein,” it’s very, very rare that the Academy go for horror fare, unless it’s on the classier side of the spectrum (see “The Exorcist,” “Silence Of The Lambs,” “Black Swan”). So, given that Tod Browning’s carnival-set chiller “Freaks” is one of the most terrifying films ever made, it’s not surprising it was passed over. And even less so when you consider that the film, heavily cut in order to be released, was mostly poisonously received, and a major flop on release, until it was reclaimed in the 1960s.