Losing Face: Oscar’s Best Picture history tarnished by missed calls

Geoff Carter

Thursday, March 20, 2003 | 8:22 a.m.

"Raiders of the Lost Ark." "Raging Bull." "Citizen Kane." "Pulp Fiction." "Fargo." "Star Wars."

You're looking at a list of some of the most popular losers of all time.

According to the voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, "Chariots of Fire," "Ordinary People," "How Green Was My Valley," "Forrest Gump," "The English Patient" and "Annie Hall" were better than the films above, and were rewarded accordingly.

Regardless how we feel about them now regardless how we felt about them then these films are, officially, the Best Picture winners of their respective years.

While these are fine films well, some of them they're hardly a collection of legends. Looking down the list of Best Picture nominees and winners from 1927 to the present day, it quickly becomes apparent that the Academy has made dozens of mistakes and worse still, they're not mistakes. For whatever reason, the Academy preferred "Titanic" to "Fargo," "Annie Hall" to "Star Wars."

Sympathy votes? Effective studio campaigning? Gin-fueled apathy? Only those gold statues know the truth, and they'll never talk. All we can do is look down this list of losers and wonder when and how the balance tipped the wrong way.

1. "Taxi Driver," 1976. Best Picture: "Rocky." If Hollywood would like to forget that Sylvester Stallone ever happened, the Academy probably shouldn't have given top honors to "Rocky" over a field that included "Network," "All The President's Men" and Martin Scorcese's masterwork.

Stallone went on to make several sequels to "Rocky," each of diminishing quality, and dozens of near-identical action films that are guilty pleasures at best. Scorsese went on to make one distinctive film after another, and has yet to see any of his films recognized by the Academy.

Perhaps he should line up a bout with Mr. T.

2. "Star Wars," 1977. Best Picture: "Annie Hall." A backlash, perhaps. "Star Wars" was recognized as iconic before it finished its first run. It cowed critics and audiences into stunned submission, which probably explains why Woody Allen's little film was able to beat it without rioting breaking out.

Not to say that "Annie Hall" isn't worthy, but it wasn't chosen for its worth; it was likely chosen because Lucas' success rubbed voting members the wrong way. (Worth noting: Woody Allen's equally worthy "Manhattan" didn't even get a Best Picture nod in 1979.)

3. "Citizen Kane," 1941. Best Picture: "How Green Was My Valley." Widely considered to be one of the best films ever made, "Citizen Kane" won neither Best Picture honors nor a trophy for its director, Orson Welles.

The Best Picture trophy for John Ford's fine "How Green Was My Valley" probably should have gone to Ford a year earlier, when his "Grapes of Wrath" lost to Alfred Hitchcock's first Hollywood picture, "Rebecca."

4. "Apocalypse Now," 1979. Best Picture: "Kramer vs. Kramer." That Robert Benton's forgettable "Kramer vs. Kramer" could beat what is arguably the most widely imitated war movie of all time isn't as surprising as the field in which these two films were playing: the aforementioned "Manhattan" and Hal Ashby's "Being There" weren't nominated. I scarcely remember "Kramer vs. Kramer" today, but I'll never forget the smell of napalm in the morning.

5. "L.A. Confidential," 1997. Best Picture: "Titanic." It was a Cinderella story: James Cameron's bloated "Titanic," marked as the most expensive failure of all time prior to release, not only rose to the surface but started flying, and didn't set down until it was the biggest moneymaker of modern times. Curtis Hanson's brilliant crime drama "L.A. Confidential" probably seemed a lesser film to voting members until James Cameron gave his "I'm the king of the world!" acceptance speech -- and at once, all concerned realized they'd been tricked.

"L.A. Confidential's" dream cast of Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce and Kevin Spacey probably couldn't be assembled today, which makes the film's loss all the more depressing.

6."E.T.," 1982. Best Picture: "Gandhi." The Academy rewarded Ben Kingsley with a Best Actor trophy for his stunning performance in "Gandhi," and the film's take should have ended there. Critics, audiences and even detractors agreed that Steven Spielberg's heartfelt kid-meets-alien-meets-government conspiracy picture was the most notable film of 1982, but similar to "Star Wars," "E.T.'s" success likely worked against it.

7."Grand Illusion," 1938. Best Picture: "You Can't Take it With You." One of Frank Capra's most unlikely Best Picture wins, it can be supposed that "You Can't Take it With You" is the director's compensation for the lukewarm commercial and critical reception "It's a Wonderful Life" later received. (It lost the Oscar to "The Best Years of Our Lives" in 1946.)

Hollywood might not have been ready for Jean Renoir's "Grand Illusion," a noble and deeply moving film about war and the blunt manner in which it reshapes human character, but the film soon had bigger problems than the awards snub: When the Nazis moved into France, Joseph Goebbels declared "Grand Illusion" banned, and ordered all prints of the film destroyed.

Fortunately, a negative was smuggled out of France by a German film archivist, but was soon misplaced. Piecemeal versions of the film were screened until 1997, when the original negative was discovered and restored. Even if Renoir's film had won the Best Picture trophy it deserved, the award would have paled next to "Grand Illusion's" biggest triumph -- surviving a war of its own.

8. "Double Indemnity," 1944. Best Picture: "Going My Way." Look up "film noir" in the dictionary and you'll find Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler's masterpiece sneering back at you, asking, "Do I laugh now, or wait 'til it gets funny?"

As for "Going My Way," it's got some fine moments and Bing Crosby sings "Swingin' on a Star" like nobody else could, but it's hardly the Best Picture of 1944.

9. "Raiders of the Lost Ark," 1981. Best Picture: "Chariots of Fire." In a hundred years, all that will be remembered of "Chariots of Fire" is its Vangelis-penned theme -- and even that will be eclipsed by John Williams' stirring "Raiders" march. Few adventure films prior to "Raiders of the Lost Ark" equal Spielberg's most crowd-pleasing film, and it seems unlikely that any will surpass it.

10. "Pulp Fiction," 1994. Best Picture: "Forrest Gump." Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" spawned hundreds of imitators -- even today, we're feeling the effects of its fallout. By comparison, Robert Zemeckis' "Forrest Gump" is reduced to its most popular line: "Life is like a box of chocolates."

Perhaps that line explains why the Academy chose "Gump" over "Fiction," or over "The Shawshank Redemption," for that matter. Perhaps it explains what makes the voting members decide a filmmaker is "due" or worthy of a sympathy vote. Or perhaps it can't be explained at all, and we should take the Oscars as they really are: a nice set of paperweights, sometimes holding down lightweight material that would otherwise blow away.

Geoff Carter is a Seattle freelance film and entertainment critic. Reach him at carter@pre2k.com