Everyone suspects Everything Everywhere All at Once will be taking home the Oscar for Best Picture this Sunday at the 95th Academy Awards. However, I wouldn’t be too sure. Only a few genre movies have ever managed the achievement; it’s much more common for Hollywood to congratulate itself for recognizing them with a nomination, then ignoring them for something more “mature.” Here are 35 Oscar runners-ups from the last 90 years that prove that even if Everything Everywhere loses, it’ll at least be in good company.
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This production of William Shakespeare’s most fantastical play was praised for its lavishness back in the day, as well as some of the performances, notable the film debut of Olivia de Haviland (of eventual Gone With the Wind fame) and the child actor Mickey Rooney as Puck. But Shakespeare’s tale of lovers, actors, and faeries couldn’t compete with the historical drama Mutiny on the Bounty.
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No need to describe this movie, which the U.S. Library of Congress believes is the most-seen movie of all time. The Wizard of Oz was a critical and commercial success upon its release. It was also so expensive to make—at the astronomical price of $3 million—it only made a profit when it was rereleased a decade later. Dorothy, Toto, and the rest had the misfortunate to compete against Gone With the Wind, which swept the Oscars like a Kansas tornado.
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This Christmas classic is hard to summarize: “A man loses a great deal of money that could have saved his family’s bank and becomes so suicidal his guardian angel intervenes…. by showing him how much worse the world would be without him.” And yet it’s justly considered one of the heartwarming, beloved holiday films ever. At the time, however, the post-wartime drama The Best Years of Our Lives was the movie of the year.
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Stanley Kubrick’s dark, darkly funny, and absolutely savage examination of the Cold War and the deeply flawed humans who waged it is an all-time classic, starring Peter Sellers in three roles, a general worried about his “precious bodily fluids,” and a cowboy riding a nuclear bomb. It’s impressive that Dr. Strangelove was nominated at all, as acerbic as it was, so it was likely never in any danger of beating Audrey Hepburn’s beloved musical My Fair Lady.
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This Disney classic likely stood a better chance with the Academy, given that it was also a musical starring an effortless charming British actress (in this case Julie Andrews). Perhaps the fact it was a Disney film based on a children’s book, about a governess who brings magic into the lives (literally and figuratively) of a troubled family, was held against it, because Ms. Poppins actually grossed more money than My Fair Lady that year.
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The Academy loved musical-comedy movies in the ‘60s, which means this adventure starring My Fair Lady’s Rex Harrison as the titular doctor who can communicate with animals, was probably a lock for a nomination. As for the winner, however, the award went to In the Heat of the Night, starring Sidney Poitier as an NYC cop who gets caught up in a murder investigation in small-town Mississippi.
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Stanley Kubrick’s most controversial movie is unquestionably a cinematic achievement. But its story of a young gang, led by Malcolm McDowell’s Alex, who brutalize their way through London far out-shadowed Kubrick’s mastery of filmmaking. The gritty crime thriller The French Connection, starring Gene Hackman at his finest, was an easy choice for Best Picture instead.
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Considered by many to be the scariest movie of all time, The Exorcist reportedly gave some viewers heart attacks. Even now, a priest’s attempt to save the soul of young Reagan from demonic possession can be a powerful and powerfully uncomfortable experience, which speaks to the film’s greatness. Paul Newman and Robert Redford’s charming, crowd-pleasing The Sting was its opposite in so many ways, and the Academy chose the movie without demon vomit.
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Why? Would Best Picture go to Woody Allen’s nebbish romantic comedy Annie Hall over Star Wars, the most popular and beloved movie of 1977? A movie that turned the movie industry over on its head by becoming not just a blockbuster, but a pop culture juggernaut that exists to this day? Maybe Star Wars was considered too much of a kids’ movie to deserve the award, but if the Academy were a living entity, it would still be regretting the choice.
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Warren Beatty’s affable movie is about a pro quarterback who accidentally gets taken to heaven before his time (thanks to an overzealous guardian angel); as consolation, he gets put into the body of a millionaire, allowing him to buy his team and his way back to the quarterback position. It’s a breezy, pleasant watch, but it hardly compares to the harrowing Vietnam war drama The Deer Hunter.
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This Steven Spielberg-George Lucas collaboration is one of the best action movies, one of the best adventure movies, and frequently, one of the best movies of all time. It’s hard to argue against it, and yet the Academy voters did just that by choosing Chariots of Fire, about competing British runners in the 1920s, as Best Picture instead.
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This beloved family film about a small alien who is abandoned on Earth, befriends a small boy, and enters a secret murder-suicide pact with him, is secretly one of the scariest movies of all time and no one will ever convince me otherwise. It was beaten by Gandhi, a movie about Gandhi.
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A sentimental movie about a man who gets told “If you build it, they will come”—“it” being a baseball field, and “they” being the ghosts of baseball players. Field of Dreams was a bona fide hit upon its release, thanks to a winning combination of Kevin Costner, a story about daddy issues, and America’s pastime. It was beaten by an equally sentimental film, Driving Miss Daisy, which had the added benefit of incredible performances by Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman.
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Technically, Ghost is about a, well, ghost, trying to prevent his living girlfriend from being murdered by his former best friend. But all anyone remembers is the incredibly sexy scene where Patrick Swayze wraps his arms around Demi Moore in the most erotic ceramics class ever, right? Alas, a sex-pot (no apologies) was not enough to stop Costner’s winning streak, as Dances With Wolves took home the gold.
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The Little Mermaid set the stage, but the new age of Disney animation truly kicked off with Beauty and the Beast, a mesmerizing combination of songs, voice performance, and animation (including that CG ballroom dance), a combination that Disney hadn’t achieved since Walt was in charge. It was such a welcome accomplishment that Beauty and the Beast became the first animated film to ever have been nominated for Best Picture, an award it lost to the decidedly less family-friendly Silence of the Lambs.
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M. Night Shyamalan’s directorial debut was a force of nature when it premiered—a movie so good that people didn’t spoil the twist ending and deny others the jaw-dropping pleasure of learning… you know. It was a moody crowd-pleaser that earn the 10-year-old Haley Joel Osment a Best Supporting Actor nod. But Best Picture went to American Beauty, which I imagine the Academy also regrets.
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Ang Lee’s ode to classic wuxia Chinese films is a major accomplishment, elevating the martial arts film to actual art. Starring Michelle Yeoh, Chow Yun-Fat, and Zhang Ziyi, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a historical fantasy and romance that simply overwhelmed audiences with its beauty and fantastical fight choreography. While it lost Best Picture to Gladiator, it did win Best Foreign Language Film.
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The first of Peter Jackson’s adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy wouldn’t have seemed like an Oscar contender, given it was about elves and hobbits and magic and such, things the hoity-toity voters of the Academy feel aren’t serious. But Jackson’s incredible, ambitious, and jaw-dropping film was an undeniable feat of filmmaking that marveled audiences, critics, and filmmakers alike. But that wasn’t quite enough to net Frodo and company a precious statue from A Beautiful Mind.
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The next year, the sequel lost to the film adaptation of the musical Chicago. But in 2003, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King did win Best Picture. Was it really the best movie? Was it even the best Lord of the Rings movie? Was the award given instead as recognition of Peter Jackson’s tremendous achievement in filmmaking by bringing these three books to screens? And if so, would that be the worst thing in the world? Discuss.
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Brad Pitt plays a man who ages backward and has an understandably doomed love affair in this strange romance based on the story by The Great Gatsby’s F. Scott Fitzgerald. While the movie won many awards for its make-up and special effects, Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire got the Best Picture statuette.
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The highest-grossing movie ever, Avatar is of course James Cameron’s stunningly animated movie about a white guy saving blue cat-people on a bioluminescent planet. But that box office gold didn’t turn into Oscar gold, and instead, Best Picture went to the war movie The Hurt Locker, directed by Cameron’s ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow.
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Neil Blomkamp’s debut film was an unlikely Oscar contender. Set in South Africa, where bug-like aliens live in an impoverished slum called District 9, it’s a not-at-all-veiled metaphor for apartheid, with the twist being that a relocation officer plated b Source: Gizmodo