By DANIEL FINNEGAN
STAFF WRITER
The Academy Awards, while being one of the most prominent cultural award ceremonies in the world, has been criticized in the past for its predictability. Whether it is the Academy’s supposed weakness to the influence of big money marketing rather than sheer movie quality, or the folly of obvious frontrunners, the Oscars are never short of controversy. With notable snubs in this year’s nomination process, it is time to take a look at some of the most disputed decisions in Oscar history.
Perhaps an even bigger travesty than overlooking “Vertigo” (1958) in the Best Picture and Best Director categories is that Alfred Hitchcock never won an Oscar for Best Director in his entire career. Although he was nominated five times, the only Academy Award Hitchcock ever received was the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, which seemed to be more of an apology than an award. With “Vertigo”, Hitchcock corralled the numerous themes that fill his movies, his fear of women, or, rather, his unique voyeurism, into one sympathetic film about a manipulated and heartbroken man.
Transcending the comic-book genre, Christopher Nolan managed to create haunting and electrifying characters who occupied the ever-morbid city of Gotham. To this day, the final act of “The Dark Knight” remains one of the most tightly-wound and action-packed conclusions in movie history. While it did garner eight nominations, mostly in the technical categories, and did win a well-deserved Oscar for Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker, the Academy’s failure to nominate “The Dark Knight” for Best Picture is still a hot topic today, causing many to wonder if a superhero film could ever overcome the connotations that come with the genre and ultimately win the Oscar.
Another famous snub is “Saving Private Ryan.” It is one of the few films which received the award for Best Director, but failed to receive the statuette for Best Picture. The shockingly graphic opening scene at Normandy paired with Tom Hank’s performance as the courageous Captain Miller, who, while seemingly on the verge of a nervous breakdown, always manages to perform his duty merits an Oscar. Spielberg displayed his incredible gift of creating numerous visual delights, while capturing vulnerable and relatable characters through the immensely powerful film. The Academy must be amazed today at its ability to sustain the test of time, and manage to remain an incredible viewing experience.
Prior to Martin Scorsese’s Best Director win for “The Departed,” he had never received an Academy Award. Scorsese was not only overdue for a Best Director statue, but seemingly could have won a Lifetime Achievement Award that year. Since the beginning of his career, Scorsese has constructed his own identity, establishing a unique style that characterizes all of his films. Scorsese is known for his lengthy and entertaining plays on morality: he uses pop music in contrast with the escalating emotions of his characters. He builds tension with long steady-cam takes. He seemed destined to live an Oscar-less life, even though he had created arguably the best films of three consecutive decades, with “Taxi Driver” (1976), which lost the Oscar to “Rocky,” “Raging Bull” (1980), which lost to the incredibly ordinary “Ordinary People” and “Goodfellas” (1990), which lost to the sleep-inducing “Dances with Wolves.” With “The Departed”, Scorsese was awarded both the Best Director and Best Picture awards in 2006, thus ending the most embarrassing misstep in Oscar history.
While the Academy attempted to incorporate a diverse range of directors into the Best Director category this year, they still played true to their front-runner roots. Although the nominations for Ben Zeitlin Beasts of the “Southern Wild,” a magnificent and joyous explosion of creative genius squeezed into a small independent film which was the Sundance darling this year, and Michael Haneke “Amour,” the socially conscious and critical Austrian director, were fresh and unexpected, the Academy still had its miscues. They played to their typical conventions, nominating David O. Russell for his commercial hit “Silver Linings Playbook” and, of course, Stephen Spielberg (a favorite of the Academy’s) for “Lincoln.” The critically acclaimed directors Kathryn Bigelow, whose “Zero Dark Thirty” has been dominating the critic’s society awards, as well as the National Board of Review awards, and the previous front-runner Ben Affleck, for his film “Argo,” failed to be nominated.
Other snubs this year come in the omission of Wes Anderson’s indie-hit “Moonrise Kingdom” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s amazingly talented, but critically divided “The Master” from the Best Picture Category. Although the Academy allows for up-to ten nominations for this category, this year they only managed to nominate nine films, leaving a hole for either of these films to fit. With numerous snubs this year, it seems as though the criticisms of the Academy Awards will not be over in the near future.
