The Oscars are tricky business. The most prestigious and respected awards in all of cinema, the Academy Awards are a storied institution that continues to garner great respect within the industry and with the general public to this day. However, the Oscars are certainly not without their faults.
From inexplicably giving Best Picture to “Green Book” a few years back to neglecting to even nominate cinematic legends like Stephen Spielberg or Martin Scorsese until several decades into their careers to the recent headline-grabbing act of not nominating either Margot Robbie or Greta Gerwig in their primary categories for “Barbie,” the Oscars tend to miss out on some of the most crucial and long-lasting filmic works, in one way or another.
So here, let’s look at some films and filmmakers who, quite frankly, were embarrassingly not nominated and retroactively serve to cheapen the entire scope of the Oscars. For Christ’s sake, “Citizen Kane” only won one Oscar, and it’s still considered one of the greatest films in history. Here are some other flubs and snubs that the Academy should be ashamed of.
5. Greta Gerwig for “Little Women”
Gerwig’s name has been in the trades a lot lately, with her missing out on a Best Director nomination for “Barbie.” Still, if we’re being honest, her most egregious snub came in 2019, when she went un-nominated for her modern masterpiece, “Little Women.”
In “Little Women,” Gerwig fundamentally altered the bones of the iconic source material and delivered something genuinely awe-inspiring. The result is an enrapturing work of cinema that resonated profoundly with audiences. However, while other elements of the film were nominated, Gerwig’s miraculous direction was not.
That year did have some truly great films and filmmakers nominated (Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood,” and eventual and well-deserved winner Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite”), but do you know what other director was nominated that year? Todd Phillips.
Anyone who honestly thinks Todd Phillips deserved the nom more for his self-serious and entirely vapid work in “Joker” than Gerwig did for “Little Women” is delusional.
4. Alfred Hitchcock
The master of suspense himself never won an Oscar. How is that even fucking possible?
Hitchcock spent several decades making some of the greatest and most groundbreaking films of all time, with an absolute litany of classics under his belt. All of them were wildly successful with critics and audiences, and all were wildly influential due to Hitchcock’s pushing of the cinematic form.
The filmmaker behind “Shadow of a Doubt,” “Notorious,” “Rope,” “Rear Window,” “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” and “Psycho” was apparently never deemed worthy enough to receive an actual Oscar.
Given the sheer amount of filmmakers who Hitchcock’s work directly inspired who *have* gone on to win Oscars, this is one of the Academy’s most glaring blind spots.
3. Samuel L. Jackson
One of the most iconic, versatile, and definitive performers of the last 50 years, Samuel L. Jackson, has somehow never won an Academy Award. He was gifted an honorary statue recently, but honestly, that’s more an admission of failure on the Academy’s part.
Jackson hasn’t even been nominated for an Oscar since his performance in “Pulp Fiction” in 1994, 30 years ago. That is insane. Jackson delivers routinely fascinating work and is fantastic in all that he does.
If I were to cherry-pick a single performance for which Jackson most deserved the award, it would be his subversive and simmeringly rageful performance in “Django Unchained,” which he wasn’t even nominated for.
2. “Singin” in the Rain“
This one’s pretty straightforward: Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s big, bold, and relentlessly entertaining musical is one of the greatest cinematic achievements ever committed to celluloid. And yet, it went home entirely empty-handed from the Oscars.
This snub is even more ridiculous when you consider that “Singin’ in the Rain” is everything the Oscars claim to love: an adoring ode to cinema’s past while ruthlessly pushing the medium forward.
Look, if by some oversight you have not seen “Singin’ in the Rain,” go watch it immediately. It isn’t what you think, it’s so much fucking more. “Singin’ in the Rain” is a masterpiece, a film that fires on every conceivable cylinder and has stood the test of time.
1. Stanley Kubrick
The most egregious snub, in this writer’s opinion, is the fact that Stanley Kubrick, one of the greatest minds to ever contribute to the legacy of film, never won an Oscar.
In fact, despite his timeless classics that fundamentally altered the way movies are made, the only Oscar a Kubrick film ever won was in the Best Visual Special Effects category for “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Kubrick created some of the most singular and impactful films of all time, and not having him as an actual Oscar winner is something the Academy is, no doubt, ashamed of.
