7 Oscar Snubs That Prove the Academy Awards Are a Farce
Now that the 2013 Oscars are behind us, it's time to take a critical look at the actors and films that didn't win whilst undeserving hacks got golden statues instead. I could go on and on, convincingly about how Philip Seymour Hoffman truly deserved the award for Best Supporting Actor, or how Django Unchained should never have been nominated for Best Picture or be held in the same esteem as movies like Lincoln.
Or I can rant for pages on how ridiculous it is that Cloud Atlas did not get nominated for ANYTHING! Seriously. .. Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Tom Hanks and directed by the Wachowski Brothers ... and not even a technical Oscar for a movie that CGI'ed the crap out of Life of Pi. For that matter, since we're talking about real art (not Tarantino wet dreams and rom-coms with a touch of mental illness for Oscar Bait)... how did The Master not win anything?
We can also note the history of Oscar predictability. For instance, Anna Karenina, the main "puffy dress movie" winning Best Costume Design with essentially the same outfits worn in every late 1800s period piece, despite the extraordinary costuming in both Les Miserables and Snow White and the Huntsman.
Suffice to say the Academy gets it wrong quite often, and an accumulation of awards is often more telling of a studio's devotion to promoting the actors and movies rather than actual talent.
Without further ado, here are the seven most glaring examples of constant Oscar snubbery:
1. Leonardo DiCaprio
Christoph Waltz won the award for Supporting Actor this year, but the joke is, he wasn't a supporting actor. As one Academy member noted in an interview, he was a co-lead. Not only that, but he played a character strikingly similar to one he played in Inglorious Basterds, for which he also won this very same award.
Meanwhile, Leonardo DiCaprio kills it as the vicious slaveowner, even cutting his hand for real and rolling with it, never breaking character. Not only was his performance in Django Unchained fantastic, but as PolicyMic writer KJ Jackson notes, DiCaprio delivers solid, consistent, and exceptional performances in movie after movie, getting nominated for some, not for others, but never winning.
2. Joaquin Phoenix
He is one of the best actors in Hollywood today, and certainly one who will be remembered by us in our old age the way our parents still prattle on about how great Dustin Hoffman was. Phoenix did get two nominations for his parts in Walk the Line and Gladiator, but never won. Perhaps he should stick to music, as he did get a Grammy for Walk the Line (yeah, the movie in which he not only played Johnny Cash perfectly, but sang as Johnny Cash so convincingly, some people didn't realize it was actually Phoenix, he didn't win the Oscar.) This year, Phoenix was again nominated, but did not win for his brilliant performance in critically acclaimed The Master. To be fair, no one was taking that award away from Daniel Day-Lewis.
3. Gary Oldman
If you think Phoenix and DiCaprio have a lot to be annoyed about. There is no one in movie history more snubbed than Gary Oldman. Not only has he never won, he's never even been nominated. Yet Oldman is one of the least type-casted actors, ever. Check out these images compiled by Reddit users disgruntled on Oldman's behalf. id you even know half of these guys were played by Oldman? He is such a convincing actor, you don't even know its him 90% of the time. Seriously... he was the villain from Hannibal AND the villain from The Fifth Element AND Commissioner Gordan too.
He better get a Lifetime Achievement award from the Screen Actor's Guild at least.
For further reading, Five Appalling Gary Oldman Snubs
4. Snubbed Movies
What do Resevoir Dogs, Psycho, and The Shining have in common?
Forget winning an Oscar, these incredible movies were never even nominated. How do movies like Django and Amour get nominated, but the tag team of Stanley Kubrick (quite possibly one of the greatest directors of all time) and Jack Nicholson can't even snag a nomination for this exceptional movie?
5. Alfred Hitchcock
Yeah, the master of horror movies. A man who single-handedly changed Hollywood forever. Alfred Hitchcock never won an Oscar for directing. Not for Vertigo, not for Psycho, nor The Birds, or North by Northwest, or Rear Window. Nothing. He's got one Oscar: Rebecca got Best Picture in 1940, incidentally one of his first movies in America, and was bolstered by Lawrence Olivier in the lead roll (incidentally Olivier himself got snubbed for Best Actor in this movie).
6. The greatest snub of them all - Stanley Kubrick
If you've been reading this article and rolling your eyes at a sour grape griping about how the Academy is "unfair" because they merely disagree ... there is one irrefutable fact about the Academy. Despite being one of the greatest directors of all time, arguably THE greatest director of all time, Stanley Kubrick has only ONE Oscar, and guess what it's for? Best Visuals for 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Academy's way of giving awards to science fiction and fantasy movies without having to get their hands dirty.
7. Bonus travesty - Martin Scorsese
Guess who else only has one Oscar? Yeah, one of the only people on Earth who could be considered a better director than Stanley Kubrick ... Martin Scorsese has exactly one award, Best Picture - The Departed. A career spanning decades and he gets his first and only Oscar in 2007.
The Academy Awards, for an actor are 50% script selection (the more mental illnesses, racism, down-trodden women, and other assorted Liberal memes, the better!) and 50% the production company lobbying for you. Jennifer Lawrence owes her Oscar as much to Harvey Weinstein and his expert exploitation of Michelle Obama as she does to her own exceptional talent.
In any normal circumstance, one would expect the conclusion to be that the Academy Awards aren't worth the time and energy, they are meaningless, etc. But this time next year, we will all be inexplicably back here complaining about the newest round of snubs.
