15 Actresses Most Overdue for Oscar

Looking at Hollywood’s Most Underappreciated Actresses When It Comes to the Grand Prize

Photo by Samuel Ramos on Unsplash

1. Glenn Close-To have that kind of streak in the 80s is something few actresses can manage, and she has followed it up with the kind of good female roles that rarely get recognized in old age

2. Annette Bening-She’s been in prestige films A LOT, and had a well-deserved 5th nomination in Nyad. Close and Bening are almost like Bradley Cooper/Leo DiCaprio and that they might give off the illusion of trying too hard to choose films based on Oscar potential at this phase.

3. Naomi Watts-I view her as on part of the Nicole Kidman/Rene Zellweger/Reese Witherspoon generation that just never got her due despite consistently being in great films

3. Sigourney Weaver-Maybe, it’s the ghettoization of her action or comedy roles, but she’s still been around for a long time

4. Amy Adams-Yes, to have 6 nominations without winning puts you at the upper echelon, but I do feel like it’s competitive at the top and while I adore her from an underdog perspective in years like Doubt or Juneburg, I do feel that Goliath Amy Adams is less appealling (like the due narrative that accompanied Vice).

5. Carey Mulligan-Saoisre Ronan was a child star who lucked into her first nomination (so I’d give her 3 noms rather than 4) which is the same as Mulligan who had a little more agency as the lead in education. The Dig and Promising Young Women are complete opposite ends of the spectrum and she can do period pieces

6. Margo Robbie-I don’t love her, but she’s creeping closer to due territory.

7. Scarlett Johansson-She’s never gone a few years without making something noteworthy. Even something minor like Joseph Gordon Levitt’s Don John or The Man Who Wasn’t There, she brings something to.

8. Saoisre Ronan-She keeps making her way into fantastic films. Counting the one she wasn’t nominated for (Grand Budapest Hotel), all her nominations have been in 5 Best Picture nominees, which bodes well for her.

9.Keira Knightley-Personally, I would have had her winning 2 Oscars already for A Dangerous Method . She can do period and she can do comedy, and is ideal for rom-com (Begin Again, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World)

10. Isabelle Hupert-The Oscars show also include international diversity as well as racial diversity, and this French star has had some major hits

11. Angela Bassett-They probably shouldn’t have given her the honorary Oscar so young (she was around 62–63 by my calculations when the Academy announced the award) and I suspect it was wanting to hedge their bets by awarding a Black actor in case the Academy didn’t nominate any. She’s a personal favorite and honorary usually doesn’t affect in-competition voting but I think she’s worth a lead statue

12. Rosamund Pike-Gone Girl was one of the most epic parts ever to lose an Oscar (or at least in the 2010s) and she is always taking prestige roles. You can see her trying to spin Oscar bait out of subpar material like Beirut.

13. Toni Collette-I get the sense she’s more likely in supporting, but she rarely goes a few years without something experimental and wild like Midsomar or I’m Thinking of Ending Things and she’s prolific

14. Michelle Pfeiffer-Here’s the thing: With women, they sometimes drop off in noticeable roles as they age. I don’t like it any more than anyone, and with Stardust, White Oleander, and Hairspray, Pfeiffer fought strong, but it just might be difficult for her to find a good script today

15. Lily Tomlin-I’m not sure how much of a glass cielling voters would consider to have a lesbian win lead actress, but she’d be that and a rare comic actress to win the Award. When she acts in Grace and Frankie or 80 For Brady, it’s kind of sad thinking she’s the only star on screen not to have won an Oscar and only got nominated once.

Personal Wish List: Elizabeth Shue, Charlotte Rampling, Kerry Washington, Keri Russell, Jenny Slate (she has headlined the films before, but her films have been lower visibility, Marcell the Shell might have broken that), Olivia Williams (AKA the other Olivia), Christina Ricci, Kelsey Asbille, Kelly Reilly, Riley Keogh

Has the Five Picture Best System Always Been a Mistake? Yes

Between 1944 and 2008, the Oscars were reduced to a paltry five Best Picture nominees per year and the competition for those slots was intense. 

In the "races" leading up to Oscar Nomination Day, two or three films would establish themselves as clearly belonging:
2000: Gladiator-Traffic-Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
2001: Lord of the Rings
2002: Gangs of New York, Chicago
2003: Mystic River, Lord of the Rings, Lost in Translation
2004: Aviator, Sideways, Million Dollar Baby
2005: Crash, Brokeback Mountain
2006: Departed, Babel
2007: No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood
2008: Slumdog Millionaire, Milk. Curious Case of Benjamin Button

After those two or three, it was a disaster. The list of films nominated for BP in the 90s included Awakenings (about as dramatic as an episode of ER), Godfather III (considered to be a disappointment), Four Weddings and a Funeral (80% of Jon Cusack romantic comedies have more to say than that film), Il Postino (clearly has been forgotten: I just asked eight of my facebook friends if they've heard of that film: ZERO said yes), Secrets and Lies (I got one of eight on that one), Babe (how many films were influenced by that? I think Homeward Bound 2 and Zookeeper was the only other film ever to use the formula of talking animals), and The Fugitive (decent for an action film, but even a good action film today like "Source Code" or "Adjustment Bureau" is not going to make the Oscars). 

The biggest danger to the credibility of the Oscars is films looking like TERRIBLE in retrospect. For example, if  I learn that classics like "Easy Rider" and "Wild Bunch" weren't nominated for Best Picture at the 1969 Oscars, I'll be disappointed but I'll usually assume they were too radical for their time and legitimately good entries took their place. However, if I look it up and find that "Hello Dolly" and "Anne of the Thousand Days" took those slots instead, well, Academy, you've got some 'splaining to do!

When a bunch of films are going for that final spot, the Oscars are very prone to making the wrong choice. As seen in "The Reader", "Atonement", and "Chocolat", genre bias will always kick in: Period pieces, biopics, and pieces set in Britain will often win out over a variety of other genres (explaining why James Ivory, Stephen Daldry, Stephen Frears each have directed three BP nominees). The low point was probably "The Queen" which was an entire film devoted to whether someone should read a press release.

Ten years in, we've seen such tremendous genre diversity, that the number of films that the ambitions of film makers from a wider range of genres now has a chance of being able to be rewarded prestige. These films include:
Serious Man-A grim black-comedy rooted in deep philosophical underpinnings or none at all (depending on who you ask)
Martian, District 9, Gravity, Her, Arrival-Science-fiction ranging from adventure-oriented (Martian) to hard-core (Arrival) 
Beasts of the Southern Wild-A cross between fantasy and science fiction
Amour-A foreign-language love story
Django Unchained-A spaghetti western set in the South (genre film maker Quentin Tarantino's stats have fared much better in the 10-picture era statistically)
Call Me By Your Name-A queer love story stylistically in the mold of a European indie film
Black Panther-Alas, a comic-book film!
Up, Toy Story 3-Cartoons. The only other time an animated film made the short list was "Beauty and the Beast" in 1991
Shape of Water, Boyhood, Black Swan, Inception, Grand Budapest Hotel, Black Klansmen-Auteurs like Guillermo del Toro, Darren Aronofsky, Spike Lee, Richard Linklater, Spike Lee, and Guillermo del Toro who wouldn't have broken through in the past have benefited and often won big at the Oscars with an expanded field. 
Room-Somewhat of a horror film in the first half with an experimental structure by auteur Lenny Abrahamson


In the years before the Academy expanded its field:
 
Almost Famous, Mullholland Drive, Memento, Royal Tenenbaums, Far From Heaven, Adaptation, About Schmidt, Road to Perdition, Eternal Sunshine, History of Violence, Children of Men, Pan's Labyrinth, Dream Girls, United 93, Into the Wild, Sweeney Todd, Wall-E, Dark Knight, and Wrestler all had a good chance of being included if they expanded the nominee slate.

Would it have made up for questionable choices like Chocolat? Most definitely. I think more movie fans were happier with 2011's choices than 2000 because all the good nominees were included and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (according to RottenTomatoes.com, it was the lowest rated 21st Century BP nominee at the time) will just be seen as a quirky anomaly in retrospect.

Is #OscarsSoWhite going to open up a new can of worms in 2016's award season?

How can you not be for more diversity?" a friend recently asked me on a message board when I was explaining my opposition to the #OscarsSoWhite movement that has exploded over the last two awards season cycles.

Perhaps I am no longer on the side of liberal progress and no longer care about racial representation in film. Or perhaps, it's not an either-or dichotomy. I recognize the value of racial representation AND I thought the #Oscarssowhite movement the past two years has been counterproductive to that cause.

Why? Because the twitter movement was simply counterfactual. In the 21st century, roughly 12% of acting nominees were Black and the proportion of African-Americans to the rest of the population according to the census is also 12%. If discrimination exists in Hollywood, I agree with Oscar winner Spike Lee (who got an honorary Oscar last year by a supposedly racist organization) who said it happens in casting rooms and at studios and to blame the Oscars is a misdirect. The #oscarssowhite movement has largely damaged its credibility by being proudly counterfactual, by lacking nuance in its analysis (if you want to see such a nuanced article, click here for an extremely thorough and reasonable explanation for why no black films were nominated in 2015), by having no definition of its goals, by going after the wrong targets, and by a lack of appreciation for the progress that has been made.

In the midst of one of these conversations, an activist asked me: "Do you expect us to be happy with the crumbs you get?" If you're going to accuse a person or organization of racist behavior, I expect an honest and thorough assessment of whether those are indeed crumbs. If these activists can't recognize intermediate steps of progress, what incentive is there to placate them? This is an awards body that has helped jump-start the careers of such minorities as Taraji P Henson, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Keisha Castle-Hughes, Terrence Howard, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Demian Bichir, Sophie Okonedo and Jennifer Hudson by awarding them with honors when box office receipts and other awards bodies weren't. If you look at the BAFTAs, for example, none of these people (except Jennifer Hudson) were nominated. Fun fact: Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman have been nominated 11 times by the Oscars and neither of them were nominated once by the BAFTAs.

This year, the Oscars will likely be far more inclusive of films with black narratives and many people of color look to make their way into the nominations. I am legitimately happy. I saw "Hidden Figures" and loved it and this week I eagerly plan on seeing "Fences." However, if you think that's not going to open up a whole new can of worms, think again:

1. Is the directorial race this year going to be framed as some be-all account of racial politics? Are Kenneth Lonergan and Damien Chazelle going to have a chance to compete freely against Barry Jenkins or will the social justice movement try to reframe it as a case of justice instead of artistic choice, insisting that votes for Lonergan and Chazelle are simply votes for an oppressive patriarchy. Last year, the movement was upset by the lack of black directors. I fear that even one or two directors won't be seen as an improvement but a further cause for protest if they don't win.

2. Similarly, Jeff Nichols made a well-crafted tale but if his film ends up performing better in the Oscar race than the other black-themed films -- Hidden Figures, Fences, and Loving -- then will activists cry foul at the fact that Nichols has no right to tell a story of people whose race he isn't a member of? Has there even been much discussion of the theory that art and cross-cultural learning is mostly predicated on stepping outside your own experiences and exploring someone else's story?

2b. Or maybe the backlash will try to resurrect the narrative that black stories are only told by white film makers ignoring the recent BP nominations of Lee Daniels, Ana Duverney and Steve McQueen. This is more of a hypothetical because because the acting and directing for Loving didn't rate as highly among critics anyway, so it looks like that minefield will be avoided.

3. However, the flipside of this is that Loving's lead Ruth Negga is far from a lock in her category and could be bumped out while three out of five Oscar nominated best supporting actresses will be black if projections hold up. This really has more to do with variable definitions of lead (and category fraud) than anything substantial, but are we going to be subjected to another barrage of essays about how Hollywood hates black as lead women?

4. Likewise in the acting races, between four and seven of the twenty acting nominations are projected go to black actors with South Asian actor Dev Patel a near lock to add to the diversity mix as well in the supporting category. That is an impressive number and I am nothing but happy for many of these actors that I love. Octavia Spencer and Taraji P. Henson are actresses who I have waited quite a while to see them get a second nomination. However, the ethnic mix of acting performances is random, combined with a lot of other factors (like, for example, who gave the best performance, didn't that used to count for something?) and most importantly cyclical. If the number dips down to one or two again next year, are we setting ourselves up for another cycle of twitter slacktivism next year? The problem with Oscars So White's undefined goals manifests itself in situations like this.

5. Did #OscarsSoWhite really make this happen? (this is an open-ended question because I do not know the answer)Suppose #oscarssowhite made a lot of noise last year, did that specifically lead to these films being greenlit? I would assume that they were made before the protests happened last year anyway.

Are the Oscar Best Picture Picks Duds? Defending the Academy

As long as there are movie fans and those movie fans have access to the internet, you will always hear complaining that the Oscars get it wrong. I'm not sure if it's a non-conformist streak in my character or a love for playing devil's advocate, but I often like to take the opposite point of view that by golly, those Oscars often get it right like no one else!

One thing people need to acknowledge by the very nature of its large membership, a voting  body like AMPAS will naturally veer more towards some kind of consensus with few extremes. If you put the 1,000 most vocal critics of the Oscars in a room and asked them to vote for their Best Pictures of the year, I would bet money that their most idiosyncratic choices would cancel each other out and you would be left with the commonalities like The Martian, The Revenant, and Spotlight. 

When we look at the main criticisms leveled at the Academy, the same contradictory criticisms often pop up: They either don't reflect the views of the public, or they don't acknowledge the more experimental fare below-the-radar. Otherwise, everyone points to a few bad choices over the years and just uses that as proof that the Academy is terrible.

Personally, I think the Best Picture nominees in the past few years do a good job of balancing populist picks, artier films, ambitious experimental stuff, and straight genre stuff that's done well. I wouldn't want them to go too indie because I feel like films should resonate with the public and even if the best film by critics' views was something that screened for two weeks in Toronto and Tribeca, it's not something the public will enjoy being a part of on Oscar night.

So here's my expanded case:

For the Populists:

• Avatar is the highest grossing film ever and it got nominated, and ET, Exorcist, Sound of Music, Godfather, and Titanic were all box office record breakers of some sort.
• Nominees Rain Man, Forrest Gump, ET, Saving Private Ryan, Avatar, Toy Story 3 and American Sniper were all the top grossing film of their year
• Nominees Martian, American Sniper, Gravity, Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, The Help, True Grit, Social Network, Toy Story 3, True Grit, Inception, District 9, Up, Blind Side, Avatar, and Ingloruious Basterds all won their opening weekends in the 10-picture era
• Among others that haven't made any of those lists list Mad Max: Fury Road, Spielberg's films (War Horse, Lincoln and Bridge of Spies), Wolf of Wall Street, The Artist, and The Fighter have all been crowd-pleasers

For the art house crowd:

• Films like Beasts of the Southern Wild, Amor, District 9, Brooklyn, Winter's Bone and Room were all films that had very, very little chance at finding a widespread audience before Awards Season boosted them.
• Nearly every popular visionary film director out there: Michelle Haneke, Wes Anderson, Thomas McCarthy, Richard Linklater, Steve McQueen, Kathryn Bigelow, Lisa Cholodenko, Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, Darren Aronofsky, the Coen brothers (4 times) and Neil Blokamp have all gotten a turn at the bat with Best Picture nominations. A few years ago, you could have said, some of the more interesting film directors like Wes Anderson or Alfonso Cuaron or Richard Linklater have never been nominated. But no longer.
• Last year, you two films that had never been done before stylistically in Boyhood and Birdman and this year Revenant and Room were both stylistically very original.

For the socially-conscious crowd:

• Six films in the expanded BP era-Selma, Precious, Help, 12 Years a Slave, Beasts of the Southern Wild, and Blind Side- have had black narratives and black casts and the majority of those have had a black director. Each of those black directors got a major boost that allowed them greater creative freedom on their next projects.  While one can conceded that  Blind Side might be geared toward glorification of the white protagonist in the story at expense of the black protagonist, that is not the case with the other five films. I would also argue that Blind Side does teach us  something about the black experience. After all, Michael Oher (the film's subject) is a real person.
• Another nominee, Life of Pi, tells a story set in another 3rd world region: South Asia.
• Three of this year's eight films feature a woman protagonist
• Spotlight is about a struggle against the ultimate patriarchal society. Big Short is about the uneven distribution of wealth and economically disadvantaged.
• Last year, we had a film about a physically disabled person, a film about a gay person, a film with a black theme, and a film about a broken family
• The year before, we had a feminist film (Philomena), a film about transgender righs (DBC), a film with a black narrative, an action film with a female protagonist (Gravity), a film taking place in the 3rd world with an illuminating look of the struggles of people in the Global South (Captain Phillips), and another film about the effects of the rich on the financially disadvantaged (Wolf of Wall Street)
• Of the last six Oscar-winning directors, one has been a woman, four have come from a non-English speaking country, one has been East Asian, two have been Mexican

Why the 5 picture system has always been a mistake

I'm looking this up and I think the 5-picture system was always a mistake.

My reasoning is that in every decade the Academy has always picked films that don't hold up to history and look ridiculous years later. Throughout the 5-picture years, the academy has a fairly good track record of selecting 1-2 or 1-3 (most people agree that Social Network-Kings Speech-True Grit were all good choices as was No County-There Will Be Blood, Avatar-Hurt Locker, Argo-Lincoln, Crash-Brokeback, Little Miss Sunshine-Departed, Aviator-Million Dollar Baby-Sideways, Mystic River-LOTR) but in slots 3-5, the academy makes arbitrary decisions that could often look stupid down the line.

For example, let's look at 1960. The best picture nominees were Elmer Gantry (worthy), the Apartment (worthy), Sundowners, Sons and Lovers, and Alamo. I'm almost entirely unfamiliar with those films, except I know that the Alamo was heavily campaigned for and yes, ignorance is no excuse for whether a film is good, but there are definitely four unnominated films from that year I've heard of and I'd consider them classics  (as with everything on this post, YMMV): Exodus, Inherit the Wind (although some find Stanley Kramer preachy and he never makes a short list of the best directors in comparison to contemporaries like Kazan, Lumet or Nichols, this is among his best films), Psycho, and Spartacus.

Decisions that are stupid in retrospect at the 3-5 slots have happened in every decade.

The 90's, for example, had Awakenings (about as dramatic as an episode of ER), Godfather III (considered to be a disappointment), Four Weddings and a Funeral (80% of Jon Cusack romantic comedies have more to say than that film), Il Postino (clearly has been forgotten: I just asked eight of my facebook friends if they've heard of that, I got ZERO yeses), Secrets and Lies (I got one of eight on that one), Babe (how many films were influenced by that? I think Homeward Bound 2 and Zookeeper was the only other film ever to use the formula of talking animals), the Fugitive (decent for an action film, but even a good action film today like Source Code or Adjustment Bureau is not going to make the Oscars).

It's pretty reasonable to assume that great films like Ed Wood, Misery, The Player, Leaving Las Vegas, Heat, Usual Suspects or Dead Man Walking would have gotten a nomination considering the other awards they were getting that season.

In the 00's: Almost Famous, Mullholland Drive, Memento, Royal Tenenbaums, Far From Heaven, Adaptation, About Schmidt, Road to Perdition, Eternal Sunshine, History of Violence, Children of Men, Pan's Labyrinth, Dream Girls, United 93, Into the Wild, Sweeney Todd, Wall-E, Dark Knight, and Wrestler, all had a good chance of being included if they expanded the nominee slate.

Would it have made up for questionable choices like Chocolat? Most definitely. I think more movie fans were happy with 2011's choices than 2000 because all the good nominees were included and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (according to RottenTomatoes.com, it was the most unpopular choice of Best Picture nominees in the 21st century with Chocolat) will just be seen as a quirky anomaly in retrospect

Why do honorary Oscars count as less?

Please click on this link

Something that bothers me more than anything else about Oscar Season is the rarely questioned assumption that Honorary Oscars don't count as much as Oscars in competition.

I'll look at one of USA Today's (or one of many other publications) 10,000 pre-Oscar articles (the newspaper's arts section has a policy of milking every major event in the entertainment cycle to death to compensate for lack of original ideas) and their umpteenth event preview will read something along the lines of "Will director Mary Scorsese win an Oscar in competition or will they be relegated to the less prestigious honorary award?"

And this brings me to the troubling question: Who decided that the honorary awards were worth less than the regular Oscars?

The actors who have won honorary awards (except Peter O'Toole), by and large, are happy to have won Oscars and don't really care whether it was in competition or not. In fact, many of the people who won Academy awards (i.e. George C. Scott, Dustin Hoffman, Marlon Brando, Alexander Payne) detest competition to begin with.

It's even a better experience to win an honorary award because you don't have to go through the trouble of competing. Wouldn't you feel much more esteemed to be acknowledged for an entire lifetime of work then have one good performance?

It strikes me that winning an honorary award is a much greater compliment because they determined that it's not just one role but a person's entire body of work to be of the highest standard.
 Besides, Some of the people who won Oscars in competition were only on screen for less than 10 minutes, and some of the people who won an Academy Award for acting weren't even actors to begin with. Haing Ngor was a doctor who was recreating his life experiences in the Cambodian genocie, Jennifer Hudson was an aspiring gospel singer and Jon Houseman was an acting teacher who filled in for one of his former student's when the original guy cast in the role backed out.
If Sidney Lumet, Blake Edwards, Gene Kelley, Lillian Gish and Charlie Chaplin all treasured there awards, who are we to say that there award is worth less?

I think it's part of our obsession with competition and the athletic aspect of it that informs this view of ours.

Oscar buzz: Is the tail wagging the dog at this point?

I just bought an issue of Entertainment Weekly when I was was on a trip and stressed out and needed to get my mind off things, and it was comfort food to read it.

When I skipped straight to the prediction section, I started to realize a problem.
What I was reading was information I already knew with just minor alterations (i.e. now Steven Spielberg is in the best director category instead of Terrence Malick and Money isn't one of the BP frontrunners).

And then it struck me as ridiculous. I was eagerly wanting to consume information telling me most of what I already know. Then I'll eagerly watch the Oscar ceremony where 70% of the content is what I've already seen before.

The Oscar speeches will be mostly identical to the Golden Globe and SAG speeches and the results will almost be pre-ordained.

Oscar buzz likely started out as a few people wanting to be the guy in their office who says "I know who will win the Oscars," but 80% of the time, we all know who will win the Oscars and 80% of the time, the participants know who will win. How awful is it to invite Jacki Weaver (nominated last year for "Animal Kingdom") or Mark Ruffalo (nominated for "The Kids Are All Right) to the Oscars when they both know it's a practical certainty that they're going to lose. For all, we know the precursor gluttony decides the voting. Someone might have asked themselves in the 2010/2011 race: "Why should I vote for Jacki Weaver when all of the precursor awards show that it's either gonna be Hailee, Amy Adams or Melissa Leo?"

More disturbing is that when we discuss Oscar buzz, we're not actually talking about movies anymore for the most part. We're simply trying to use statistics and such to predict human behavior. Some of the most prominent people in the film criticism community are nothing more than glorified statisticians. Go to Awards Daily and you'll see that most of their articles consist of announcing press releases by various groups giving their awards of the films of the year. Commentary by the webmasters of the commenters will use this information to slightly recalibrate their attitudes about who will be selected as Oscar winners.

Just the other day, we had the Central Ohio Film Critics Awards announcing their picks. Are we now dividing states into latitudinal thirds for the sole purpose of disseminating a list of best films of the year that closely mirrors 200 other such lists?

I've previously written that the winners of the Oscars were originally publicized before the big night. Now, the stated goal of the Academy is to keep the results sealed. Technically, those awards are still sealed but when we have 8 million awards precursors; when they allow directors, actors, writers and producers of the academy to vote in other awards ceremonies; when sites on the internet are dedicated to using every algorithm they have to predict the results, what's the difference?

Oscar win for Milk's Screenplay- Deserved?

Good News: I've been published at TopTenz.net again.
Also check out this article on Movie Remakes

The Oscar for best original screenplay is a measure of pure creativity. Ideally, the director's vision, the special effects, or whether the actors can elevate the material has nothing to do with the award. Or, sometimes, politics.

This brings me to a particular Academy Award choice I feel like nitpicking on today.

Milk won an Oscar for best original screenplay in 2009. It was written by Dustin Lance Black. Black, a former Mormon, has become a well-respected artistic figure and activist in the gay and lesbian community since his win.

I wondered out loud the last time I saw Milk if there was anything particularly notable about Milk's screenplay that endeared it towards a best screenplay win. It seems equally as likely to me that the screenplay win for Milk was just a reaction to proposition 8 (controvoursey took place earlier that year) and a way for the Academy to voice their support of gay rights.

I like to think of the screenplay winners as something that film students would be assigned to read in class as examples of great running. I see that with most of the other recent winners. Almost Famous is a humorous story with such a strong personal touch that it doesn't feel like it could be written by anyone but its author (Cameron Crowe). Gosford Park demonstrates intricacy in tying together the arcs of various characters and veers away from cheap imitation. Lost in Translation has a very strong grasp of mundane human behavior. A meaningful relationship is weaved together from suddle moments and silences. Eternal Sunshine , like Kaufman's other films, navigates narrative in a new mobius loop of a story. Little Miss Sunshine creates a very quirky atmosphere for its main troupe of six characters while providing a contrast to a world that's unforgiving of tardiness or other forms of eccentricity.

I'm not sure where Milk falls into anything notable. It just seems like a run-of-the-mill biopic elevated by good performances. It also came along at the right place and time to be notable.

There's hardly anything in the story that isn't predictable. The fact that he fails in his personal relationships as he becomes famous is pretty much what you'd expect of nearly every movie character or famous person who simply has larger and larger chunks of his time being taken by the masses he serves.

Just ask yourself: If you could only get your hands on one original screenplay, would it be? I think there's little doubt in my mind that Wall-E
is the remarkable feat in creativity. To be able to convey romance in the bleeps and bloops of robots in a post-apocolyptic landscape and to write a first act almost entirely devoid of dialogue, that's something. The debate over the best Pixar film is usually a long one, but consider that Wall-E was the Pixar film that made fans call for an end to ghettoization of animated films at the Oscars. It is also the primary reason (along with Dark Knight) that we have 10 films for Best Picture (a number that has since been reduced).

I also think In Bruges had a stylized language and a strong sense of identity that would have also made it a worthy choice.

Related Article: My picks for best films of 2008

10 biggest oscar injustices of the decade

Biggest Oscar Mistakes of the Decade so far:

1. Denzel Washington winning over Russell Crowe in Training Day for best actor, 2001
Crowe gave an amazing performance as mathematician John Nash and was considered one of the two front-runners for the best actor award along with Washington . To some extent, Russell was hurting himself. He apparently got really angry and barked at the orchestra conductor for cutting him off at the BAFTA awards when he was giving his Oscar Award Acceptance Speech and his reputation as a jerk was starting to catch up to him. What was truly ridiculous, though, was that Queen-of-Hollywood Julia Roberts said she couldn’t imagine a world in which Denzel Washington didn’t have an oscar. Uh, did she forget about his best supporting actor oscar for Glory? If best supporting doesn’t count in Julia’s mind, I’d like to see her break the news to Sean Connery, Anjelica Huston, Shelley Winters, Joe Pesci, Michael Caine, Judi Dench and the like. Plus, the Oscars had Sidney Poitier as the Honorary Award Winner, so the votes were transparently an effort to make it African-American appreciation night. If the academy was a little more patient in crowning a worthy successor to Sidney Poitier as lead actor winner, it could have waited 3 more years for Jamie Foxx or another possibly another 2 after that when Forest Whitaker takes the lead oscar award this February.

2. Cold Mountain losing best songs and score to Lord of the Rings, 2003
I can’t imagine an Annie Lennox song would ever beat a song written by Sting in a music competition, EXCEPT when a song written by Annie Lennox appears on the end credits of a steamrolling juggernaut like Lord of the Rings while Sting’s beautifully haunting song appears in the film A Cold Mountain which didn’t have as good of a run at the Oscars. In addition, Lennox’s song was just a bland ballot while Sting and Krauss’ song You Will be my Ain True Love as well as the song The Scarlett Tide cowritten by Krauss and T-Bone Burnett, both organically blended into Civil War North Carolina ’s bluegrass setting, which is what a good movie song should do. The artists who contributed music to the film went on a hit national tour that summer “The Cold Mountain Music Tour.” Was there a “Lord of the Rings” soundtrack tour?
My problem with this win was twofold. First, Lord of the Rings’ steamrolling through ever oscar category made for the most boring ceremony I’ve ever seen and nowhere more than the best song (and best score category) was it evident that voters were just penciling in Lord of the Rings for everything rather than thinking about it on a category-by-category basis. Second, movie songs have the potential to be the next biggest category after picture, acting, and directing due to their crossover appeal but not when their credibility is ruined with wins like this. I’m not a rap fan, but even I admit that Eminem’s win in 2002 for 8 Mile and Three Six Mafia’s win for Hustle and Flow were necessary to keep the category relevant for contemporary times.

3. Bennett Miller’s best director nomination and Capote’s best picture nomination, 2005
I have to admit that I am in the extreme minority of film critics (the exact figure from rottentomatoes.com is an incredibly low 9%) in disliking Capote, but I disliked the film for resting too heavily on Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance (which failed in my eyes, because it didn’t convince us that he was as exciting of a figure to be around as much as his biographer and the movie needed us to believe). Although Two Towers is a close second, Capote would have to be the least worthy picture of the decade so far. If you take Hoffman’s performance out of the equation, it’s slow and circuitous.
This is made all the worse by considering the competition that year. 2005 seemed to me to be the deepest year of oscar contending films I’ve ever witnessed. Normally, there are about 10 or 11 pictures that have lofty enough ambitions, excellent enough critical praise and sufficient public enthusiasm to vie for nomination honors (i.e roughly 11 for 2003: Lord of the Rings, Big Fish, Lost in Translation, In America, House of Sand and Fog, Seabiscuit, 21 Grams, Last Samurai, Master and Commander, Mystic River, Cold Mountain and 11 for 2004: Hotel Rwanda, Aviator, Closer, Kinsey, Eternal Sunshine, Phantom of the Opera, The Incredibles, Finding Neverland, Ray, Sideways), but 2005 had over 15: Brokeback Mountain, Munich, Crash, Good Night and Good Luck, Capote, Walk the Line, The Constant Gardener, A History of Violence, Match Point, New World, King Kong, Syrianna, Cinderella Man, Cache, Squid and the Whale, Rent and Pride and Prejudice.
Even worse than a failure to get the best picture nod is that for the first time in 24 years, this just happened to be the year when all five pictures aligned with all 5 directing nominations. If there was a better time to spread the wealth around, I can’t think of a better year. Peter Jackson proved he could do more than nerdy stories about middle-earth and took King Kong and transcended the blockbuster by getting many 4-star reviews and taking it up to 5th on critical top ten appearances for the year. Fernando Meirelles crossed over to the English language and explored a new continent with career-best performances for Ralph Feinnes and Rachel Weicz and a solid adaptation of a John La Carrerre novel in The Constant Gardener. Woody Allen turned in his best work in decades and changed his tone completely in Matchpoint. Terrence Malick had a brilliant return-to-form in The New World and David Cronenberg pleased audiences and critics alike with A History of Violence. Even if you liked the movie Capote, you’d have to be a little worried about the integrity of your category if you’re going to invite someone who’s only previous credit was the ’98 documentary The Cruise and probably just lucked out with a good slate of actors, into that prestigious group of Oscar-nomination directors.

4. Big Fish’s snub in pretty much everything, 2003
Big Fish was the first victim in what perhaps could be a very long line of victims from the movement of the Oscar ceremony back a month early. It was a rare Oscar contender that scored big numbers in the box office and nearly beat out Lord of the Rings: Return of the King during its January opening (initial box office reports deemed it 1st for the weekend) aside from being considered a high-water mark in Tim Burton’s career. But with Oscar season ballots being due a month or two sooner, it had little chance to be viewed by anyone and only earned one nomination: best score. The same thing happened to Terrence Malick’s brilliant The New World (only shown in an uncut version in 2 theaters nationwide on December 29th and 30th before opening in wide release in mid-January and similarly only earned a single nomination in the cinametography category) a month later and it could easily happen this year with late entries this year such as Letters of Iwo Jima or Pan’s Labrynth, although the extreme build-up of films in the last two weeks of the year isn’t a good thing.

5. Lord of the Ring: Two Towers ’ Nomination for best picture over Far From Heaven, 2002
Even though I liked A Beautiful Mind and felt it worthy of the best picture award, I kind of wish that Lord of the Rings won, or at least it won a few awards that year, just so it wouldn’t dominate the Oscars the next two years and take so many worthy awards away from other films. Considering this was the second in a trilogy and voters could’ve easily waited for Return of the King to atone for Fellowship’s loss, which they were planning on doing anyway, this was a complete waste of a perfectly useful best picture nomination on another worthy film. Far From Heaven, widely considered to have been sixth in line for the nomination, was a well-crafted homage to the Douglas Sirk movies of the 1950s and would have been far more widely remembered today if it had a best picture nomination to give it a longer shelf life.

6. The Aviator’s supporting acting snubs: Alan Alda over Alec Baldwin and Cate Blanchett over Kate Beckinsdale in the Aviator, 2004
Alec Baldwin’s part was a meatier one than fellow nominee Alan Alda and required far more range. He displayed a little bit of a different tone as the standard tough guy role that he usually plays and that he was nominated for the previous year in The Cooler. An astute observer might have seen that it was an equally worthy performance as The Cooler and possibly more worthy. His character in The Aviator wasn’t completely ruthless, it was more shades of gray. He was ruthless underneath a veneer of diplomacy.
In chosing between the love interests of Leo DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes for an oscar nomination, the academy also got it wrong. Kate Beckinsdale was more deserving of a nomination than Cate Blanchett, in my opinion. Blanchett probably got the nomination because of her higher profile and because she played perennial Oscar winner Katherine Hepburn, while Beckinsdale played Ava Gardner, who had never won one. If you take out the factor of who the two were portraying, you’ll find that Beckinsdale played the more interesting character and had more meaningful moments in her scenes with DiCaprio. Blanchett’s win in a crowded category that included National Board of Review winner Virginia Madsen for “Sideways” and Laura Linney for “Kinsey” was an even greater injustice.

7. Catherine Zeta-Jones’ win over Meryl Streep in the best supporting actress category in 2002
Aside from the fact that Streep had the best performance in the category and one of her best in years, Zeta-Jones’ win was flat-out illogical for the fact that she didn’t really resonate past the singing and dancing of the performance. It was clear the Oscar committee felt the need to reward the ensemble effort of Chicago with an acting oscar of some sort. Aside from creating an ensemble category which would really make sense in these situations, if they felt a need to award an oscar to someone, I would have gone for Rene Zellweger, who, for my money, was deserving of an oscar in her category anyway. While Kidman in “The Hours” and Moore in “Far From Heaven” were both carefully studied portraits that were deserving as well, Zellweger was the heart and soul of Chicago and infused a surface that was all about glitz and glamour with emotional vulnerability.

8. Chocolat’s best picture nomination, 2000
I read the book Inside Oscar 2 which had the backstory on the oscar race and apparently it did test very well with audiences and critics nationwide. I saw about a third of this picture so I’m not really in a position to comment on it but it seemed incredibly lightweight and its incredibly transparent theme of chocolate as a metaphor for joy and freedom from class-mandate oppression almost seemed like a parody of the heavier themes that Oscar films usually contain.

9. Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s extreme front-runner status for Capote, 2005
I don’t think Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s win for Capote was a ridiculous choice, so much as I thought it was ridiculous how much of a leg up Hoffman had over the competition. Hoffman did a spot-on impression of iconic author Truman Capote, but so did co-nominees Joaquin Pheonix and David Strathain. Pheonix’s channeling of Cash’s repressed anger in “Walk the Line” was downright disturbing and should have given him serious consideration for an oscar in any given year, and Strathain’s ice-cold subtleties as Edward R. Murrow in “Good Night and Good Luck” was very affecting. While Strathain didn’t have the opportunities for the intense moments that Hoffman or Pheonix’s parts came with, you appreciate the magnitude of Murrow’s presence when he’s debating the real-life Senator McCarthy (taken through archival footage) and looks convincing doing it. It seemed throughout the oscar race, that Hoffman was a certain winner from the start, and I just found it disappointing that not even a few of the critics’ awards went Strathain or Pheonix’s way and that there wasn’t much debate about it.
As opposed to Joaquin Pheonix who managed to find his place in top billing roles pretty early in his career, Hoffman has gotten a lot of love from his peers and hard-core fans for doing good work in small roles in films such as Scent of a Woman, Talented Mr. Ripley, Big Lebowski and Boogie Nights which might be part of the love that Hoffman is always receiving.

10. Paul Newman’s loss to Chris Cooper for best supporting actor, 2002
It was a hard decision with five worthy candidates, simply put, so I don’t think it was a great Oscar injustice. In this case, I just disagreed with who was best, although Chris Cooper’s win could have been compensation for co-stars Meryl Streep and Nicholas Cage not being able to win their respective categories. Newman was sublimely delightful and out of his element in the film. Like Denzel Washington in Training Day, it was a riveting transformation to the dark side for Newman, whose screen persona has never stretched that far over to the evil side yet.