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Evergreen content is King in today’s strange new world of media on the internet. So I’m pleased to be able to invite you to the first installment of the Passion of the Weiss Oscar Snub Expanded Universe (Or to simplify it, POWOSEU). For the last two years, I wrote this almost comically detailed and aggrieved list of grudges I’ve been carrying around with me for years over performances and films I’ve loved that I felt were unfairly slighted, either in losing to a less worthy nominee or straight up going unacknowledged. It’s a piece that aspires to do nothing less than right all the cinematic wrongs of the last two decades in film. And I’ll be honest, I learned some shit.

Almost immediately after this piece was published a number of omissions jumped out at me. How could I have forgotten the brilliance of Oscar Isaac in Inside Llewyn Davis? The words Mad Max: Fury Road were completely absent from the original piece. I didn’t even mention Ryan Coogler’s name the first time around. I caught up on some films I’d never seen before I dared to attempt writing something so knowing and authoritative. How could I have been so fucking stupid?

So it’s with some humility that I present this year’s update of my chronicling of the last 20 years in Oscars rat fucking. I can now acknowledge, what the Oscars attempts to do on its face is not just difficult, it may be impossible. I not only wrote my post-mortem for last year’s sins but also tried to fill in some of those blind spots from years past. I was thoughtful, I was incisive, I was comprehensive, and the moment this thing is published I will inevitably realize I forgot to mention five to ten other great performances above or below the line I will have to sheepishly amend next year. Enjoy.

20. 2020

The Snub: Best Supporting Actress: Laura Dern in Marriage Story over Scarlett Johansson in Jojo Rabbit.

That’s right! I’m as surprised as you are, but in the year of our lord, 2020, the Academy did as good a job as they’ve ever done this century giving out their dumb gold statues. Every single award was at the very least defensible. Laura Dern is glowing and commanding in her god-like performance as a rabid, sensitive, powerful and deadly lawyer in Noah Baumbach’s fantastic return to the divorce film, Marriage Story, and you’d be hard pressed to find an actor more worthy of distinction. Or wait, actually you can, it’s her client in the film, Scarlett Johansson for her work in Taika Watiti’s Holocaust comedy.

Johansson had a fascinating decade. No actor has her persona picked up and inspected and played with on a meta level this side of Ben Affleck. The run she went on between 2013-2014 was wild. She played a woman who unlocks the full power of her brain, essentially becoming a God, then an operating system, then a predatory alien, who had her beauty and perfection explored and dissected. Brilliant director after brilliant director discussed the inevitable distance you feel from a person who looks like they were created by an algorithm simulating symmetrical human perfection.

In the years since, she’s spent most of her time in Atlanta dancing with ping pong balls on a green screen (and marrying Colin Jost??????), but 2019 was special. In both Marriage Story and JoJo Rabbit, Johansson displayed an openness, a humanity, a vulnerability we’ve really never seen from her. In Marriage Story, she’s an open wound, alternately having her pain harnessed by an institution constructed to manipulate her anger, but also locating that pain and anger and discovering a voice, and a refusal to be docile and compliant, that is agonizing and liberating. But in Jojo Rabbit she’s a movie star that makes every second on screen count. She is the conscience of the film, the engine, the heart and soul you can’t take your eyes off. The epitome of an Oscar winning supporting performance.

You could argue she actually deserved to win for both her nominated performances, but by my estimation JoJo is the better of the two, if not Johansson’s all time best. Laura Dern got her Oscar for being Laura Dern after years and years of reliably being Laura Dern, Scarlett Johansson should’ve won for being the most Scarlett Johansson she’s ever been.

Runner Up: Ho brother. Where do we start? What’s fascinating about 2019 is every decision was arguably right, and yet, every single one was open to debate. Brad Pitt stole Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but was he really better than Joe Pesci’s career coda? It was a stunning and against type quietly powerful role that absolutely makes Martin Scorsese’s own meta reflection on what might be the greatest body of work a director has ever submitted in Irishman? And while we’re there, should that film have been basically shut out along with Steve Zaillan’s brilliant script? Are we sure the best performance in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood wasn’t Leo’s? Are we sure Joaquin’s masturbatory ACTOR exhibition wasn’t better than what both Leo and Adam Driver put up in their films? The margin between the top 3-4 movies and performances this year was so slim I can’t really say definitively, I’m just asking questions.

And because I can’t confidently say any of these are egregious slights, my runner up is somewhat of a cop out. I’m zagging to Best Animated Feature, where a very fine Toy Story 4 beat out the sad, brilliant, gorgeous French film I Lost My Body. People give Up credit for featuring the best opening montage we’ve ever seen in an animated film, but this gives it a thorough run for its money. Eight minutes into the film, the incredible score kicks in and a two minute clinic on creating visceral nostalgia assaults your senses. The rest of the movie is great, but there’s a power to that montage alone that will stick with me for the rest of my life (It’s on Netflix, please check it out!).

The Un-nominated: Well since we’ve essentially called Parasite the film of the year with a win in Best Director and Best Picture, how about at least recognizing one member of its incredible cast? (To the surprise of few who follow me, my pick would be the legend Kang-Ho Song). Pretty gross Lupita Nyong’o had two of the best performances of the year in Jordan Peele’s knotty Us but 0 noms. But the obvious answer here is Adam Sandler for Uncut Gems. I watched The Two Popes, I actually enjoyed The Two Popes, but with all due respect to Jonathan Pryce, Sandler left his heart and soul on the screen, and makes some really interesting decisions in a movie he could’ve taken the edges off, as a guy who is a fucking industry unto himself and has a reputation to preserve. That’s supposed to be how you become great, man. Leave your balls out there.

19. 2008

The Snub: Best Actor: Sean Penn in Milk over Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler. 

This was a tough one because I really love Milk and Sean Penn is fantastic in it. Something we’ll see come up time and time again on this list is a consideration of the MOMENT. To me it’s a difficult to articulate quality somewhere between career achievement, perfect marriage of the actor, the role and the performance, and the likelihood that a moment this perfect will ever come around for said actor or actress again. It’s different than the discovery of an actress perfect for her part, like Yalitza Aparicio in Roma, and it’s different than saying, eh fuck it, let’s give it to Pacino for Scent of a Woman because he deserved it a handful of other years. It’s for a guy like Mickey Rourke who came back from obscurity, found an ideal part with a great director, and did the best work of his career in a great film. We’ll likely never see something like this again from him and it was the moment to reward him for that effort and his career. Another issue worth mentioning that will occur a few other times with “difficult” personalities is due to his controversial past and some enemies made, part of this snub felt punitive. Still, I have to put it at the very back of this list because Penn was so great in a truly important film the decision is still defensible. 

Runner-Up: This really should’ve just been the year of Milk, in Best Picture and Best Director for Gus Van Sant. Instead Danny Boyle’s whatever Slumdog Millionaire won both. But there was a larger picture looming over the proceedings. 

The Unnominated- The Dark Knight didn’t get a nod for Best Picture. The field would expand to 10 the next year largely because of this. Nolan probably should’ve been nominated for Best Director, along with Darren Aronofsky, not nominated for The Wrestler. 

18. 2000

The Snub: Best Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published: Stephen Gaghan for Traffik over The Coen Brothers for O, Brother Where Art Thou? 

Surprisingly, this was a year the Oscars more or less got right top to bottom. Partially because it was a strange, not great year for film. Of the nominated pictures, the Academy pretty much nailed it. Ridley Scott’s Gladiator was a monster popcorn movie that was also a pretty great sandals and swords Spartacus throwback, if somewhat formulaic and not as good as Spartacus. The Castaway stans probably wanted it for Tom Hanks and kids today are probably baffled that Russell Crowe was once an annually nominated A-list actor but this all made sense at the time. As for my choice for Snub, the Coen Brothers took the fucking Odyssey and set it in Mississippi during the Great Depression. It’s insane as it is inspired and what’s crazier is it actually worked.  The film and soundtrack were hits, it’s a dense and beautiful film that rewards multiple viewings. Traffik was a British miniseries from the late 80s, and as I’m about to address, I think it would’ve been better served in a longer, more patient format. At the risk of cliche, today it would be a fantastic Netflix series (And with Narcos, it kind of is).

Runner-Up: Best Director- Soderbergh for Traffic over Soderbergh for Erin Brockovich. This was The Year of Soderbergh. He was nominated twice in the director category, a feat not even Coppola matched in 1974 when he wasn’t nominated separately for his two classics, The Godfather II and The Conversation (Though both movies were up for Best Picture. He should’ve been nominated for both as director. Some days I wake up thinking The Conversation should’ve won Best Picture). Traffic is still a good watch but its style hasn’t aged well. The kaleidoscopic ISSUE movie that gives us underwritten snap shots of all the different threads of a complex issue like the war on drugs was pretty much (I hope) killed forever by the great Crash debacle of 05 we may be returning to at some point later in this list. Erin Brockovich, a smaller, angrier, more specific film has, if anything, become more relevant as time has passed and the agendas of ruthless corporations have continued to have a more malignant impact on our lives and our environment. 

The Unnominated: I really like Rom-Coms even though Oscars don’t. I want to briefly cape for High Fidelity, a dorm room standard that is a touch clever and probably doesn’t sit well with 21st Century feminism. And yet I have nostalgic ties to it and would still advocate for it if we’re allowed to appreciate it in context by its own logic. It was a well made, well acted post modern rom-com that was pretty groundbreaking for its time. Cusack is probably never better, Iben Hjejle is a fantastic as the lead actress, and the film is littered with little and large supporting performances from Catherine Zeta Jones, Tim Robbins, Lisa Bonet and a career maker for Jack Black. Also this one is a pie in the sky but it would’ve been nice to see Cinematographer Tim Orr and/or his Director David Gordon Green get some shine for their work on the beautifully stylized Malick riff, George Washington. 

17. 2001

 

The Snub: Best Actor: Denzel Washington for Training Day over Will Smith for Ali. 

This one will probably raise some eyebrows. First of all, I think in many ways this was a makeup call for the Oscar Denzel should’ve won for The Hurricane (It instead went to Kevin Spacey for American Beauty. I’m sure with hindsight they would’ve done it all the same). I’m never mad at Denzel winning, but it shouldn’t have been for this. Training Day is a lot of fun but I don’t think it’s a particularly great film and Denzel is playing an even bigger comic book villain version of his larger than life movie star shtick. He also just kind of put it on auto pilot for the next decade and settled into the old man action hero mode making some very good thrillers with the likes of Tony Scott, I think as a result of this award and to the detriment of “serious film”. 

Ali is an underrated film and one of the most complicated depictions of the Civil Rights Movement we’ve ever seen. Its scope, and stunning depth of thought and feeling was unexpected from what was marketed as a standard sports biopic, not to mention its adrenalized director, Michael Mann. Will Smith puts on the muscle, he nails the charisma and the patter and the mannerisms. But what’s most admirable is the quiet, pensive melancholy he brings to Ali off stage and out of the spotlight. It’s a studied, thoughtful performance that achieves the rare feat of adding perspective and dimension to one of the most famous people on Earth you thought there was nothing left to learn about. Smith would be nominated once more for the saccharine Pursuit of Happyness but has generally spent this century falling to earth and incinerating after his incredible mid to late 90s run. This should’ve been his coronation. 

Runner-Up: Best Screenplay: Julian Fellowes for Gosford Park over Wes Anderson for The Royal Tenenbaums. 

Far be it for me to besmirch the good name of my lord and savior Robert Altman, but this was a bad call. Gosford Park was bizarrely over nominated for a good but not great upstairs/downstairs murder mystery. Its lasting claim to fame will probably be as the inspiration for Downton Abbey. Anderson’s Royal Tenenbaums isn’t his best work but its close. It’s the best of his early period Glass Family obsessed Jewel Box shit, anyways. The film was more or less shut out despite powerhouse performances all around. 

The Unnominated: There’s a ton of air balls here. David Lynch was nominated for his all time great Mulholland Drive, but the unreal House-on-fire performance by Naomi Watts wasn’t. For degree of difficulty and how radically she changes between the first and second movements of the film, it has to be one of the best performances this century. And Christopher Nolan’s Memento, another Film Bro, poster on the wall cult hit that announced the emergence of a very big talent, in its director as well as Guy Pierce a few years removed from L.A. Confidential (I love character actor weirdo late period Pierce more than his early leading man hero shit, this is the best of both worlds and a precursor for what was to come) was nominated for Best Screenplay but otherwise shut out.

Michael Mann was also not nominated for Ali as Best Director or for Best Picture. Still, even considering Watts, the worst snub could be Jamie Foxx in his gauntlet throwing, scene jacking portrayal of Bundini Brown in Ali. The snub is bad enough, but it’s compounded by the nomination of John Voight in a blah with prosthetics nothing part as Howard Cosell which netted a Best Supporting Actor nom. Real racist, classicist (as Foxx was the In Living Color, Booty Call guy at the time) typical scumbag Oscar bullshit.

16. 2004

The Snub: Best Director: Clint Eastwood for Million Dollar Baby over Alexander Payne for Sideways. 

I had this higher but it occurred to me that there probably aren’t many people who love Sideways as much as I do and I didn’t want to invalidate the list by leaning too hard on my own personal grievances (Well they’re all personal grievances, but some more particular and idiosyncratic than others). Let’s have this award stand in for the many baffling times Clint Eastwood has been nominated as Best Director over many other deserving candidates (Five, he’s been nominated five times). He’s only deserved one nomination and win for his Western deconstruction, Unforgiven. The rest have been Old Hollywood right leaning messy often clumsy movies and its confusing the allegedly liberal shadowy cabal of Jews who run this shit haven’t called shenanigans on his semi annual Oscar noms.

He won for this old workhorse boxing melodrama that is quite intentionally a gender flipping Fat Cityish neo-noir boxing epic. I just don’t understand what people see in Eastwood’s one take, point and click style. You could close your eyes and count the beats of this standard and you wouldn’t miss much. Sideways is part character sketch, part road film, part rom-com; mid-period Payne at his shaggy Cassavetes-esque best. It’s probably the darkest sunny movie I’ve ever seen, absolutely brutal and along with The Descendents, probably represented his best shot at a statue thus far.  

Runner-Up- Best Picture: Million Dollar Baby over Sideways.

There’s a lot left to be desired when it comes to the un-nominated but given the available nominees for each category, they pretty much nailed it this year. I’m putting up the two movies from the director debate for the same reasons, but I feel the Best Picture nod for Million Dollar Baby makes more sense than the director nod for Eastwood. The film may not be a technical accomplishment but it’s occasionally warm and dramatic and familiarly watchable in all the traditional ways that make sense for winning over a wide swath of voters. 

I’ll also give a quick shout to Clive Owen and Natalie Portman nominated for Mike Nichols’ Closer. I think I’m the only person left on Earth who remembers the film, and if I’m not I’m probably the only person that loves it. Julia Roberts and Jude Law could’ve been nominated as well. I don’t really think Owen should’ve beaten a sturdy, classic Morgan Freeman performance, you could argue Portman should’ve taken it over Blanchett for her weird turn in The Aviator, but really this is just an excuse to profess my love for Closer.

The Unnominated: A year of glaring omissions. Sideways got nominated for everything except for Giamatti’s performance which anchors the entire movie. Nothing for Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine? There was also Tom Cruise in Collateral. I don’t understand why Crouching Tiger was so appealing to Foreign Language voters a few years before but there was no love for the big, beautiful epic Hero, which has this great really surprising final turn that inverts classic Western mythology and makes you question the entire general idea driving Star Wars (The Foreign Language Oscar is a category I could bag on every year as there are almost always 5-10 films that don’t even get longlisted so I’ll try to focus exclusively on the standout misses and not my personal picadillos). 

Both Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy deserved a look for Before Sunset, an unlikely sequel much harder to pull off than the first installment (but not quite as difficult as the excruciating third). Christian Bale lost a ton of weight for the challenging, therefore unlikely to get a look Machinist, but he should have. And while we’re at it, Mean Girls anyone? Tina Fey, Rachel Mcadams, and yes, Lindsay Lohan? Will teen girl classics pass us by without mention until the end of time?

15. 2013

The Snub: Best Actress: Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine over Amy Adams in American Hustle. 

Another unfortunate occurrence of an unstoppable force colliding with an immovable object. Cate Blanchett is fine here, she’s doing her standard, striking, regal, tall, blonde, domineering, movie star shit. Blue Jasmine is perfectly passable late Woody Allen. But I have a bottomless well of love and adoration for Amy Adams and her incredible talent, nominated five times and always a bridesmaid. She has impeccable taste in the films she chooses but time and time again is relegated to these Lady Macbethian women behind the Great Men who she plots with and manipulates. Adams has been working constantly for two decades, and has one of the deepest, most impressive resumes you’ll find of any headlining working actor.

But up until her run with David O. Russell, I at least personally had perceived her as pigeon holed into nice girl roles. She was a literal Disney princess come to life in Enchanted, her breakout role. Russell relocated her grittiness and meanness that used to be her thing during her character actress period. She’s all low cuts and hoop earringed in his Altmanesque The Fighter but had to fight for oxygen on all sides with Wahlberg at his best, Melissa Leo going big and Christian Bale winning a statue. The level of competition is just as high in fun and freewheeling American Hustle (the film received four nominations for performance, all deserved) but she’s by far the best thing in the movie. She’s flinty, gorgeous, witty and dangerous. You’re never quite sure where her allegiances lie and it’s all thanks to her reliably pre built and thought out performance. So I’d never take credit away from Cate Blanchett but they awarded her for swimming well in shallow water while Adams smoked a pool full of Olympic competition. 

Runner-Up: Best Actor: Matthew McConaughey for Dallas Buyers Club over Leonardo DiCaprio for The Wolf of Wall Street.

A very close second. As entertaining as that McConaughey moment was, this was DiCaprio’s career best performance and as always, morality makes for shitty decisions as most critics seemed willfully ignorant to what the fantastic Wolf of Wall Street was actually about and what it was trying to say. Ironically, McConaughey won largely due to the MOMENT logic I presented earlier in defense of Mickey Rourke, it was a symbiosis of career narrative and a once in a lifetime role and performance. And look, McConaughey is truly great in this film. But DiCaprio is probably our greatest working actor. The guy is talented but he’s always so fucking grim. He’s bound to serious roles working with great directors. So it was such an unexpected and thrilling shock to the system to see him letting loose, coked up, laughing his ass off and improvising with Jonah Hill. It was like Harmony Korine and Judd Apatow joined up with Adam Mckay to make a Wall Street farce. And it’s not just deeply funny, it is a demanding, athletic performance. Those speeches should be taught in acting classes. The level of full bodied, red faced commitment is off the charts. I don’t cry for DiCaprio. He’s rich, brilliant, incredibly good looking, awash in models and he’d actually get his trophy two years later. But it should have been for this and not The Revenant. 

Also I’d be remiss not to mention The Great Beauty over Omar in Best Foreign Language Film. I actually really like The Great Beauty, a gorgeous existential Fellini throwback, but Omar is a better film. It’s a smart, constantly surprising political thriller. The rare entertainment that is also important and devastating. It should get an American remake but unfortunately it wouldn’t translate because we’re not currently embroiled in absolutely abhorrent nationalistic oppression that breaks down along racial and socioeconomic lines so no one would- oh wait.

The Unnominated: In any just or decent universe, Inside Llewyn Davis would’ve set every conceivable record for most nominations and wins by a single film. I literally can’t think of a category you couldn’t justify a nomination if not victory where applicable. But my heart really bleeds for Oscar Isaac who picked a very bad year to turn in a once in a generation performance. I can almost sympathize with the Academy on this one because despite my deep reservoirs of love for this film and his performance I myself accidentally omitted it from last year’s list.

There’s also Ethan Hawke (A guy who pops up on this list way too much and is destined for an old man lifetime achievement Oscar for the wrong performance) and Julie Delpy yet again for their agonizing work in Before Midnight.

But the biggest snub by far was in the Original Song Category where somehow the Academy failed to acknowledge Knicks Owner Jim Dolan’s vanity project, JD & the Straight Shot, and their classic contribution to the August: Osage County Soundtrack, “Violet’s Song”. Just kidding it was Margot Robbie for Wolf of Wall Street.

14. 2015

The Snub: Best Supporting Actress: Alicia Vikander for The Danish Girl over Jennifer Jason Leigh for The Hateful 8. 

As will be an unfortunate trend throughout, this felt like a snub based on morality in a Tarantino film. Leigh has been great for too long without recognition. This is low on the list because I’ve actually never seen The Danish Girl. As you will discover later, I’m not a huge Eddie Redmayne guy. Alicia Vikander is a fine actress and I’m sure she has many great roles in her future but it looked like an issue oriented heartstring tugging melodramatic period piece, while this was one of those perfect Tarantino stunt casting jobs where he preys on our history with a talented actor to not just provoke a great performance but hit all of our nostalgic pleasure centers. The Hateful 8 is a weird and less accessible late Tarantino film. As is his wont, he makes Leigh use the N word and spends most of the film beating the shit out of her, torturing her and cathartically lynching her at the end of the film.

So yeah, if you’re a squeamish alarmist type who is going to ignore all context and just focus on the violence of the film it doesn’t come off great. But Leigh is just so awesomely vile and slimy and repulsive in this. It’s a great heel turn and to the extent the film works, Tarantino has her to thank (And as always, Samuel L. Jackson). It’s one of those performances that make you say, “Wow. I didn’t know she could even do that.” A pretty incredible feat after 40 FUCKING YEARS!

Runner-Up: Best Supporting Actor: Mark Rylance for Bridge of Spies over Tom Hardy for The Revenant.

As I said, DiCaprio is great but he won his Oscar for the wrong film. In this frozen epic he’s no fun, just glaring and scowling through an overlong phallic symbol masquerading as a masterpiece. He’s also blown off the screen in pretty much every scene they share by Hardy, a great actor who hates to open the throttle and just fucking act. His John Fitzgerald is an early American squirrely weirdo villain in the same vein as Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Daisy Domergue. His accent is sawed off somewhere between Virginia and Louisiana and delivered out of the side of his mouth. He’s funny and shifty. Inniratu could’ve built a better and more interesting movie around him instead of the bleak Hugh Glass. Rylance is fine but just try throwing Bridge of Spies on some random weeknight after work and staying awake.

Also, I liked Spotlight but you know what movie was better than Spotlight? Mad Max: Fury Road was better than Spotlight.

The Unnominated: Much in the same way J.K. Simmons’ performance in Whiplash obscured Miles Teller’s good work, I never really understood why everyone simply agreed Sylvester Stallone had the only nomination worthy role in Creed. At the time, Michael B. Jordan was a revelation and really left his heart, soul, and abs on the screen. 

But the biggest snub, and I almost broke my own rule and named this the snub of the year because it was so awful, is that Phoenix by Christain Petzold wasn’t nominated for Best Foreign Film. I’m almost certain this is the year it would’ve qualified for but even if it was 2014 it wasn’t nominated then either. I like Ida and a lot of the other nominated Foreign Films from this year but Phoenix is simply one of the best films made this century, a Hitchockian Holocaust identity piece that is right up there with Mr. Klein as the very best in that very narrow genre of maybe just two films that are both fucking masterpieces. 

13. 2006

The Snub: Best Supporting Actor: Alan Arkin for Little Miss Sunshine over Eddie Murphy for Dreamgirls. 

For all the many sins Brett Ratner has committed against the cinema and entertainment in general, the absolute worst may have been in 2011 when, in the promotional lead up to his worse than it should’ve been film Tower Heist, he stuck his foot in his mouth to the ankle and got himself fired from directing the Academy Awards. As a result, we’ll never get to see what could’ve been an all time host job by Eddie Murphy, the announced host, who Ratner brought down with him. But perhaps we can get some idea what that might’ve been like by watching the first hour or so of Dreamgirls. Murphy plays a variation of the Cooper role in A Star is Born.

Only with effortless charisma and no need to go on Fresh Air to tell the world how brilliant he is. Alan Arkin got a lifetime achievement award for playing his colorful, affable grandfather in a quirkfest but just go back and watch the “Jimmy Got Soul” number and tell me that man didn’t leave his heart on the screen. I wouldn’t have even ranked Arkin second in this year’s race. That would’ve been Mark Wahlberg’s Sergeant Dignam, who dances all over an overstuffed film and does about as much as you can do with less than ten minutes of screen time in The Departed. 

Runner-Up: Best Original Song: “I Need to Wake Up” by Melissa Etheridge in An Inconvenient Truth over three DreamGirls songs. 

Do I really need to elaborate? This type of stupidity is why I don’t watch the Grammys.

The Unnominated: Somehow, in Best Director, Clint Eastwood was nominated for Letters From Iwo Jima and Alfonso Cuaron wasn’t nominated for Children of Men.

12. 2003

The Snub: Best Actor: Sean Penn in Mystic River over Bill Murray in Lost in Translation.

Sean Penn is a slayer of beloved American treasures long overdue for recognition. This is somehow Bill Murray’s only Oscar nomination for anything. He should have a handful of others and he absolutely should’ve taken home this one among a weak field in a weird movie year. It’s a classic MOMENT performance, he reminds us of all the things we’ve always loved about him but imbues this quiet, meditative film with hard earned soul and gravitas. Sean Penn is dripping spittle and grieving all over the place and ACTING!. Murray is doing the hard work. 

Runner-Up: Best Director: Peter Jackson for Lord of the Rings: Return of the King over Sofia Coppola for Lost In Translation.

I get that the Academy wanted to award Jackson for the monumental, years-long undertaking that a definitive filming of a fantasy epic must’ve cost him, but it shouldn’t have been for this specific film. The fucking thing ends for an hour and a half. Coppola’s film is a triumph of tone, a mature and accomplished follow-up to The Virgin Suicides. She should’ve beaten Kathryn Bigelow to the podium as the first female to win the award.

The Unnominated: Like I said, weird movie year. I don’t feel strongly about any of these but a young Chiwetel Ejiofor would’ve been worthy for Dirty Pretty Things, or William H. Macy could have joined Alec Baldwin in his Best Supporting Actor nod for The Cooler. Either would’ve been better than a head scratching nom for Jude Law as a Union soldier in the absolute shit bomb Cold Mountain. 

This is a strange one and I don’t know if there is a universe in which this could ever happen but Thom Anderson’s Los Angeles Plays Itself would’ve been a bold and inspired choice for Best Documentary Feature.

I may be alone in this but I’ve always thought Richard Linklater’s School of Rock was way better than it had any reason to be. Not just as a warm family entertainment but a funny and weird movie that saw Jack Black at his best as a movie star. Wouldn’t have minded either men getting recognized but Eastwood was there yet again for Mystic River. I forget there was a stretch when he could’ve filmed himself on the toilet and gotten nominated. 

11. 2007

The Snub: Tilda Swinton for Michael Clayton over Cate Blanchett for I’m Not There. 

The Academy is doomed to constantly award trophies to the right people for the wrong things. I love Tilda Swinton and her nomination, let alone victory for Michael Clayton. And she was fine but she doesn’t have much to do here. There’s this one moment of moral compromise that was interesting but she’s done a half dozen other things I would’ve awarded instead. Particularly when you’re putting her up against a fucking nuclear warhead taking the human form of Cate Blanchett, a great actress I’ve paradoxically already tried to take two Oscars away from, who shoots lightning bolts out of her eyes in Todd Haynes’ one of a kind Bob Dylan meditation. 

Blanchett is Electric Rock Star Dylan at his most angry and enigmatic. She’s not doing a straight impression but she’s also not not doing an impression and it’s impressionistically spot on. She’s still androgynously beautiful but what I appreciate about the outfit and the hair and the shades is she’s lowering her astonishing beauty shields and giving us the opportunity to appraise her power and command without the unapproachable ivory tower of her statuesque visage, and she might be even better without it. It’s like one of those “Ugly-up” prosthetic-laden Theron/Kidman performances but the best possible version of that without all the makeup and effects and way more effective as such. Blanchett spits acid and fire, seething at reporters and fans trying to solve her. Maybe it was just too weird for the voting public. It’s a performance so big and incredible that the rest of the movie suffers from aftermath on a first watch, and on a rewatch it’s the peak you build to and the crest you come down from. It simultaneously validates and destroys the film. It’s really unique and remarkable work that should’ve been recognized.

Runner-Up: Best Screenplay: Diablo Cody for Juno over Brad Bird, Jan Pinkava and Jim Capobianco for Ratatouille.

Some will stand up and walk out on this post in protest, or I guess click a Buzz Feed list on their phone or snap their laptop shut or whatever the modern equivalent of walking out is, but the flawless screenplay and subsequent execution of the all-timer Ratatouille should’ve taken the award over this already insanely dated talky twee fest. Ratatouille takes several centuries of culinary philosophy and condenses it into one beautifully considered, egalitarian message in the form of a child accessible, fish out of water story. Juno feels like it was made five minutes before I saw it for the first time, much to its detriment today. I feel confident that my grandchildren will be touched and affected by the storytelling and moral of Ratatouille. Juno, not so much. 

The Unnominated: I want to say this was a bad year in the Best Foreign Language Film category but I’m embarrassed to admit I haven’t seen any of the nominated pictures. What I will say is Carlos Reygadas’ brilliant, pyscho-sexual/spiritual Silent Light is filled with shots that still randomly pop into my head on a regular basis, and I don’t know how this is possible but Cristian Mungiu’s Romanian Communist abortion anti-drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days was never nominated for an Academy Award.

10. 2016

The Snub: Damien Chazelle for La La Land over Barry Jenkins for Moonlight.

At this point, a Best Director Award for technical achievement should be like handing out a Man Booker Prize for competent grammar. Chazelle presents some great compositions, and I don’t even dislike the movie as much as some, but if you want something well made go to ABC Carpet & Home. And it’s not like the guy was up against some schmo doing seizure inducing handheld Greengrass shit or a hack doing still frame BBC Masterpiece biopic work. If anything, Moonlight is a more technically accomplished and beautifully photographed film that has the added bonus of telling a tragic, subtle, original tale that is slightly more meaningful than a white bro and his epic struggle to preserve the authenticity of jazz. The set pieces in La La Land are truly inspiring and worthy of your attention, but everything about Moonlight was revolutionary. Its palette, the life of its camera, the way the film elevated its groundbreaking subject matter. There are multi second cuts that reveal more than 5 minute monologues, it’s a master class and the signifying Oscar Jenkins belatedly won for Best Picture is a disservice to the work he did directing a paradigm shifting film.   

Runner-Up: Best Actor: Casey Affleck for Manchester By The Sea over Denzel Washington for Fences.

This is a tough one. Context free, you could make an argument Casey Affleck deserved this award. It’s a career performance for him (Though I gotta say, Gone Baby Gone remains an underrated classic and kind of sets up this role). He plays a clenched fist the entire film, the brief rays of light we get through cellars and police interrogation rooms and Northeast alleys in semi permanent winter are Seymour-Hoffmanesque when he cathartically unloads. But it was the wrong year to say fuck it. Particularly when you’re opposite Denzel who worked his ass off on a career long passion project and he really, really gave a fuck for the first time in over a decade. Fences is not a perfect movie. Denzel, the director/star, seems to actually, potentially willfully misunderstand his source material.  That or he just can’t help being wildly magnetic and charismatic in a role that demands he should be neither. Either way, it signals a late career apex and should’ve been a no-brainer with the troubling allegations of misconduct swirling around Affleck. The next year he was so toxic he had to withdraw as a presenter. A much simpler solution? He didn’t have to win.

The Unnominated: On the other side of the Affleck debate, Paul Verhoeven’s Elle is one of those films that must’ve taken several years to make but was seemingly engineered for its specific moment in sexual politics. It’s an equal parts unsparing and perfect film with an incredible lead from Isabelle Huppert. I’ll never understand how some random ass foreign language films like Amour get elevated to Best Picture contention and something this insightful and explosive from the guy who directed Robocop, Starship Troopers, Basic Instinct and Total Recall gets shut out.

Also, I think it’s entirely possible that Ben Foster is my favorite working American actor, full stop. Nobody on Earth does live wire intensity better. People talk about how they love Adam Driver because there’s this unpredictable quality to him, that he actually seems to be experiencing moments on screen in real time, thinking and speaking and reacting to things the way a person would in real life. Compared to Ben Foster Adam Driver is one of those claws in an arcade that dig for cheap plush toys. And of all the Ben Foster performances I have to choose from, his absolute best was Hell or Highwater, a late capitalist heist movie masterpiece. He was never going to win in the face of Mahershala Ali’s captivating few minutes in Moonlight (Though I’d argue he should’ve) but not even a fucking nomination? Was it that important the world never forgets the indelible work Dev Patel did in Lion?

9. 2017

The Snub: Allison Janney for I, Tonya over Laurie Metcalf for Lady Bird.

Listen, I probably love Allison Janney more than you do. She’s a unique, fierce presence that totally deserved recognition for decades of good work. And the narrative fit here. This film was her baby and she served herself up a great opportunity to perform her schtick with an oxygen tank and a parrot. But Laurie Metcalf had a MOMENT role as a tough but loving soulful mother in Ladybird, a film that was right there with Get Out and Phantom Thread as the year’s best. (I also want to briefly shout out Metcalf’s performance in future Fox News comedian and one time artistic genius Louis C.K.’s Horace and Pete. Decades from now I’d like you to remember this parenthetical when you have to read a piece by a culture blogger kid from whatever the generation after Millennials is called when he or she rediscovers C.K.’s weird Eugene O’Neil riff/online series Horace and Pete, finds it utterly reprehensible but is floored by this insane Metcalf monologue that opens one of the episodes. It was the first moment I can remember sitting up and thinking “Goddamn. Aunt Jackie is not fucking around.”) Janney played a Disney villainess, Metcalf was unbearably human and won a movie full of brilliant and tough performances. 

Runner-Up: Best Picture: The Shape of Water over literally any other movie.

Oh yeah also The Shape of Water won BEST FUCKING PICTURE BRO ARE YOU SERIOUS?

The Unnominated: Armie Hammer for Call me By Your Name. I get that the guy was born on third base but Jesus. Are you not entertained? It was a full throated joyous affirmation that felt like a direct response to the infinite sadness of Moonlight. 

Also there was no room anywhere for Good Times? The Safdie Brothers for direction or screenplay, Pattinson, nothing? 

8. 2009

The Snub: Best Lead Actress: Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side over Gabourey Sidibe for Precious. 

Sometimes I roll my eyes at the woke Twitterati, the outrage machines that hashtag campaign virulently against representation in McDonalds commercials twenty five years too late. And then there are times when I just throw up my hands because these assholes are asking for it. In this particular case you had a dichotomy pretty much tailor made for provoking a racist narrative. Sandra Bullock plays a literal white savior to a Left Tackle in a Lifetime movie that happened to get a widescreen release. Gabourey Sidibe bore her soul in a film that gave voice and agency to a type of character we never get to see on screen. In A.S. Hamrah’s The Earth Dies Streaming, a masterclass in criticism that has quickly changed the way I watch movies and think about them, his most salient and unapologetic point is how a strain of welcoming populism has boxed us all into this corner where we feel the need to validate and intellectualize American stupidity, transforming the art of criticism itself into a big tent.

I think this is an early version of that detente. Sandra Bullock is a wonderful presence in our lives, an American sweetheart in the vein of Julia Roberts. We wanted this to be her Erin Brockovich moment so we made it that. But it wasn’t. It was time to recognize a really special breakthrough performance, despite being paired with a just as good supporting role from Mo’nique who miraculously won. We don’t need a quota. Two can win. 

Runner-Up: Best Actor: Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart over George Clooney for Up In the Air.

I’m reaching a little for this one. Outside of Bullock, based on what was nominated the Academy pretty much nailed this year. I’m all for Bridges getting recognized. And he’s pretty great here doing Jeff Bridges Stuff. But the award probably should’ve gone to Clooney who was his best self in Up in the Air. He’s vulnerable and sad, it’s his Jerry Maguire where he deconstructs the Clooney character we all know and love and shows us the strings. The film was also timely and prescient and basically bought Reitman a decade of shitty to decent films we forgive him for because we’re waiting for a proper successor to the brilliance of this one.

The Unnominated: The Coen Brothers weren’t nominated for directing their best film, A Serious Man, neither was my guy Michael Stuhlbarg or the great Fred Melamed.

7. 2019

The Snub: Best Lead Actor: Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody over Christian Bale in Vice

There is what has become an old cliche around the NBA Coach of the Year Award basketball writers employ that I’ll paraphrase as: Greg Popovich should win every year. And it’s true. Year after year, the old grouchy woke wine snob makes lemonade with second round discoveries and D-league miracle refuse and foreign players too obscure for any other team and gets his 48+ wins and is a dangerous playoff foe. Christian Bale is Greg Popovich. It doesn’t matter how central or periphery the role, how abjectly awful the film is, how reminiscent it may be of other performances we’ve seen from him, he actually literally might be the best actor we’ve ever seen. Streep, Hoffman, Phoenix, Dicaprio, take your pick. On his best day, Christian Bale is probably the most talented, if not my favorite, actor I’ve ever spent time with.

And for all his incredible transformations, this one was it. This was the one. If you’ve read up to this point you must be at least kind of invested in this piece so I’m going to ask you to go a little further. Find Vice on whatever platform it may be streaming on and watch it again, but pay attention to this. Bale nails Cheney, but he does it, the magic he finds, is by pushing all his lines out in exhale, specifically through his nose. Now, I actually lived through the terror of the Bush administration; Dick Cheney was a fairly regular presence in my life for 8 years, and this is something I knew but something I never truly understood or could articulate as to why he has such strange, monotone, Death Star rhythms. So let’s just say Bale hosted Saturday Night Live one week, and just trotted out this impression of Cheney, it would immediately join the pantheon of rare, special, illuminating impressions. Like Eddie Murphy’s Cosby, it’s a representation so accurate, perfect and all consuming, every impression of this figure that comes after will not be an original take but a copy of a copy. 

But Bale doesn’t stop there. In addition to nailing all the technical components of a rote impression of a figure, he then imbues Dick fucking Cheney, one of the all time villainous scumbags in American history, with real heart and pathos. He humanizes one of our least human monsters and he’s totally believable and lived in, which is all the more impressive because off-screen Christian Bale looks and sounds like a Peaky Blinders hit man. It’s really one of the most impressive both technical and spiritual performances in recent memory, but because the movie is thorny and difficult and specific it will never get a Rewatchables episode and probably will end up lost to time for everyone but nerds like me. 

Oh and by the way, the award actually went to Rami Malek in his first actual starring role for a pair of dentures and his lip syncing acumen in a shitty juke box movie half directed by a predator who walked off the set and will probably never work again. This was one of those years, and I’d love to have some industry insider explain this to me, where for months everyone thought this award was a done deal, as good as Bale’s, and then suddenly a week before all the talk shifted and Malek became inevitable. The same thing happened with Redmayne a few years earlier with an award we may be addressing shortly. I just don’t fucking get it. 

Runner-Up: Best Documentary Feature: Free Solo over Minding the Gap.

One of my all time favorite standup bits comes from D.L. Hughley in The Kings of Comedy. The gist is the stupidity of white people partaking in adrenaline pumping activities to introduce danger and excitement into their lives while for black people simply living is fraught and dangerous enough. That’s basically how I feel about Free Solo, a documentary that dramatizes a bored white man doing something extremely dangerous and incredibly stupid that nobody asked him to do. Minding the Gap on the other hand was kind of a miracle. It’s a coming of age film, it’s an interrogation of late capitalism, it’s a beautiful film about skateboarding shot by this dude in Rockford Illinois who was simply born with the soul of a cinematographer. To me, the degree of difficulty, and particularly the accomplishment of the film was far greater than some fucking moron climbing a mountain.

The Unnominated: I almost feel like Black Panther’s Best Picture nom was comic book tokenism. If they really took the film seriously Ryan Coogler absolutely should’ve been recognized. From the opening strains of “In the Trunk” that bring us into the projects in Oakland, his soul is woven into that film. 

With the exception of Christian Bale I would’ve taken Ethan Hawke’s performance in First Reformed over every other nominated performance including Malek’s. 

But I’m saving my Dennis Miller styled rant for Eighth Grade. I will preface this by saying I have a precious three year old daughter I love very dearly, so for me this was less a film and more a Rube Goldberg device designed to make me cry, but Eighth Grade was far and away my favorite movie last year. 

It’s well considered and touching. There’s a scene in the movie I think about a lot. A random kid in an assembly exploits a moment of silence to nonsensically shout out, “Lebron James!” It’s a detail that is at once of the moment and ancient and whether it was scripted or improvised only a filmmaker with real innate talent would have the ability to either write or leave it in. It’s one of a thousand little grace notes that gives this film it’s aura of authenticity. Long, slow motion female gazes of a 12 year old boy should be unbearable but it’s so well done and hilarious over the same dubstep cue that its effortlessly perfect. It takes courage and chops to construct that. It borrows from coming of age 80s and 90s raunch classics, Josh Hamilton’s heart melting (And also unjustly snubbed for supporting) turn as a clueless, hopelessly devoted single dad in his boxers walking in on Kayla’s sexual explorations is straight out of American Pie but it works here because literally everything works in this movie. 

With bits like flirting during the active shooter drill and the high school seniors dismayed at the age an underclassman started using Snapchat, it is littered with little empathic pieces of observation that elevate the film beyond the confines of genre. It feels more like Errol Morris than John Hughes in reporting how our children are living right now. I found Bo Burnham insufferable as a comedian and YouTube star to the extent I was even aware of him but Jesus Christ, for at least this one shining moment the guy was nothing short of a freak prodigy genius. 

Also, you know who was fucking awesome? Regina Hall in Support the Girls. Gucci!

6. 2002

The Snub: Best Picture: Chicago over Gangs of New York. 

Woof. This year has not aged well as we’ll discuss when we get to runner ups, but man this was a bad call. I want to say this was the dawn of the big relaunched movie/musical thing so maybe we got here on novelty, but fuck. Scorsese rips his heart out Temple of Doom style, puts it on screen and we go for Catherine Zeta Jones in pantyhose and John C. Reilly in fingerless gloves and eyeliner. Day Lewis would win the Lead Oscar a few years later for basically playing the same role in There Will Be Blood and he deserved them for both. I’m basically out of words. Watch Gangs of New York then watch Chicago and get back to me.

Runner-Up: So much to choose from. 30 years on from his statutory rape conviction, Roman Polanski wins over Martin Scorsese in Best Director. Adrien Brody over Nicholas Cage (who probably should’ve won two for playing twins to perfection) AND Daniel Day Lewis, Pianist Adapted Screenplay over Adaptation. Leonardo DiCaprio was completely shut out in an incredible year which saw him star in Gangs of New York AND Catch Me If You Can. It was brutal. I’m fortunate it was my senior year of High School and I was way too high to be invested in any of this shit at the time.

The Unnominated: No love for Spike Jonze directing Adaptation? Really?

5. 2005

The Snub: Best Picture: Crash over Brokeback Mountain. 

You knew this one was coming when you clicked on this story because you’re the type of person who would click on this story and this slight has probably been bouncing around in the back of your mind for the last 13 years too. Don’t get me wrong, it was a fucking awful decision, for most people this deservedly would land at #1. But for me just slightly less egregious then the next few. 

The Runner-Up: Best Lead Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman for Capote over Heath Ledger for Brokeback Mountain.

I’m a huge Hoffman fan, but Ledger should have won this. I personally would’ve given it to Hoffman for about ten other roles before I got to this one. It’s his big showy impression Oscar-bait role but it doesn’t really showcase most of the things I really loved about him as an actor. For that matter, Gyllenhaal should’ve taken it over a nothing Clooney performance for Supporting.

The Unnominated: Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney weren’t nominated for The Squid and the Whale which is abject insanity.

4. 2010

The Snub: Best Picture: The King’s Speech over The Social Network. 

I just don’t even know how we got here. On one hand you have a film that told a new kind of very relevant story about how we live life today. It was a fantastic screenplay, a parable created in a lab to explain modern life to us. Something we’ve never seen before by a director I never thought had something as human as this in his bag. It was really the perfect marriage of subject and stylist. Then we have The King’s Speech. A story about a white man with the most privilege on Earth overcoming his stutter, however briefly. Even as I’m writing this right now, ten years later, it’s still infuriating. What makes it even crazier is down to the wire The Social Network was the favorite. I went into the movie assuming I was watching the year’s Best Picture and walked out feeling secure in that assumption. Then this mind numbing biopic came out and the Dad Vote won the day. I would love to say this was the last gasp of an antiquated patriarchy but as we’ve seen and as we will see, they just kept doing idiotic shit like this. 

Runner-Up: The entire King’s Speech sweep, including an Oscar for Tom Hooper over Darren Arronofsky, David Fincher, David O. Russell and the fucking Coen Brothers. That actually happened.

The Unnominated: Justin Timberlake finally sheds his child pop star jacket and wins the best movie of the year, but wasn’t even nominated for his breakthrough. There’s a great scene in the middle of the film where he’s getting drinks with Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg at some Sushi Club hellscape. They get into raison d’etre, why Parker started Napster, why Zuck started Facebook, it’s a great writerly exchange from Sorkin, “The Victoria’s Secret Metaphor”. At some point Zuckerberg returns to his primal wound. He asks Parker if he ever thinks about the girl he supposedly started Napster for, the windmill that animates the quest of the film. Timberlake’s incredulous “No!” Is basically my favorite line read of all time.

3. 2011

The Snub- Best Lead Actor: Jean Dujardin for The Artist over George Clooney for The Descendents, Brad Pitt for Moneyball and Gary Oldman for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. 

It is still stupefying to me. As not great as the winning performance is, the real sin is the competition it beat out. Even considering Up In The Air, with the possible exception of his absolute drippin performance in Out of Site, this is it, the best performance from our best, or at least most authoritative movie star in a grief-stricken beautiful film from an also apex-level Alexander Payne. 1A in our best movie star department is Brad Pitt, who also found his perfect role and is downright Redfordian as Billy Beane in the elegiac Moneyball. But some days I wake up thinking this should’ve gone to Oldman, who is just perfectly buttoned up and British in a Le Carre adaptation. For a guy who made his bones as Sid Vicious it’s an incredibly restrained but deeply felt work of traditional spycraft and a movie I’ll never stop going back to and enjoying. Instead, they gave it to this fucking clown.

Runner-Up- Meryl Streep for The Iron Lady over Viola Davis for The Help.

The always great Viola Davis is a close second to yet another lame late Streep performance but The Help has its own issues and I don’t really feel like going to bat for it. 

Also while we’re at it, a big fuck you to Michael Hazanavicius for beating out Alexander Payne, Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick and Woody Allen for Best Director. 

The Unnominated: I’ll give it up to a pair of Documentaries, namely The Interrupters, Steve James’ heartbreaking look at the attempt to break the mind numbing, soul crushing cycle of violence in Chicago, and Bill Cunningham New York, the kind of UES warm and funny humanist catnip that should’ve made this a no-brainer nominee if not winner.

2. 2014

The Snub: Best Lead Actor: Eddie Redmayne for The Theory of Everything over Michael Keaton for Birdman. 

This one just made no sense. I’m no great lover of Birdman, but if you’re operating under the assumption that it’s a great movie that deserves all the awards, doesn’t it stand to reason that the performance that grounds the entire movie deserves recognition? Not to mention, we’re talking about Michael Keaton. Fucking Batman! Fucking Beetlejuice! The world’s most lovable actor, out of the limelight for far too long, who ran a fantastic Awards Season campaign and it was the epitome of a MOMENT. The perfect blend of career narrative, personality and performance. Instead they gave it to Eddie Redmayne, the Guiness Book World Record holder for Most Punchable Face for, sorry, sitting in a wheelchair with his neck cocked in a stupid biopic no one liked or remembers. If you want to break your own heart and see the physical manifestation of heart break, somewhere out there you can find video of Keaton realizing he’d lost his once in a lifetime performance and best shot at winning the award as a smug British fuckboy minces past him. I refuse to rewatch it or post that video here. In the event you’ve stuck around this long, I just want you to remember, and remind yourself everyday, that Eddie Redmayne won an Oscar for Best Lead.

Runner-Up: Best Adapted Screenplay: Graham Moore for The Imitation Game over Paul Thomas Anderson for Inherent Vice.

This one is a deep cut, and even a bit controversial because admittedly Graham Moore crushed his acceptance speech and it was one of if not the most memorable things about this Oscars, but I have to acknowledge PTA’s accomplishment with Inherent Vice. It’s basically an unfilmable book (Though ironically, as close as you get to filmable with Pynchon), so Anderson solves it by making a film that is essentially a visual companion to the novel. It’s a very difficult film to wrap your arms around if you haven’t read the novel and at least have cursory familiarity with the plot, but if you come in with that knowledge it’s an incredible set of footnotes that will bring out things in the narrative it’s nearly impossible to understand with nothing but Pynchon’s labyrinthine text as a guide.

It’s probably the most studied, literary film made this century, perhaps that I’ve ever seen and operates by its own specific, strange yet instructive shadow logic. I’ve never seen and am likely to never see something so difficult and ambitious pulled off so seamlessly.

I’d also like to recognize Boyhood. This was yet another one that was seen most of the awards season that year as a foregone conclusion for good reason. Linklater executed an unprecedented and original experiment with an incredible degree of difficulty. The fact that Ellar Coltrane wasn’t a complete disaster was a miracle. Ethan Hawke (who also probably deserves a shout out here but happened to stumble into the inevitable J.K. Simmons’) and Patricia Arquette both aged gracefully, almost perfectly into their parts and their hard earned gravitas is all over the screen. If the film was a disaster it would’ve been understandable and still worthy of attention from a scholarly point of view, but it was actually pretty great and deserved recognition over Birdman’s gimmicky navel gazing.

The Unnominated: The most egregious snub was Ralph Fiennes wasn’t even nominated for a career best performance in The Grand Budapest Hotel. The Lego Movie wasn’t nominated but How to Train Your Dragon 2 was for Best Animated Feature. Damien Chazelle wasn’t nominated for Whiplash, nor was Miles Teller in a strange habit the Academy has of letting one great performance obfuscate another. 

1. 2012

The Snub: Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz for Django Unchained over Philip Seymour Hoffman for The Master and Tommy Lee Jones for Lincoln. 

If you’ve come this far I’d guess your response is, “Really? 20 years of snubs and the worst offense in your eyes is Best Supporting Actor in 2012?” Well, yeah. It is. This was a fucking crazy one and you just have to look at the relative logic the voting body applied to their decision. For starters, Waltz was the fourth best performance in Django and yet, the only actor even nominated. My guess is that the incredible performance by Samuel L. Jackson as a house slave, Leonardo DiCaprio doing fucking everything in a character role as a villainous slaver, and Jamie Foxx who qualified as a lead but more importantly as a murderous slave hellbent on revenge, were all too hot to touch for the Oscars. 

Philip Seymour Hoffman was a co-lead and shouldn’t have been nominated as supporting, and I get why the producers wanted to avoid the Day Lewis train, but obviously if you want to explain Hoffman’s brilliance to your children you show them The Master, or I guess The Talented Mr. Ripley, or Happiness, I could go on. But really my heart bleeds to this day for Tommy Lee Jones. As Thaddeus Stevens he’s the one woke, modern perspective in an asylum run by psychos, he even wars with Lincoln and his famous pragmatism. He has to walk such a fine line between noble and abrasive and he’s both but you still love and root for him. His culminating gut punch moment is basically betraying his beliefs but putting a brilliant spin on the issue of equality. Kushner’s screenplay is a fucking miracle but I can’t think of another actor who could’ve pulled off the equal parts curmudgeonly and progressive Stevens. When he hobbles out of Congress with the newly passed Thirteenth Amendment in the crook of his arm, I tear up everytime. 

Runner-Up: Best Documentary Film: Searching for Sugarman over The Gatekeepers and Five Broken Cameras. 

Two full throated attacks on the Israeli Industrial Complex were snubbed in favor of a fluffy Dad and Mom Doc about a forgotten soul singer in Detroit. Cute over important, way to go Academy!

There was also Brave over Wreck It Ralph. Has anyone reading this ever actually watched Brave? It is a deeply fucking stupid movie that got a pass because it has a female protagonist. They should’ve called it Bears because that’s all the movie is about to the extent it has any semblance of plot. Whereas, Wreck It Ralph was a brilliant and heartwarming film that used to be Pixar’s wheelhouse and launched a modern Golden Age for Disney Animation. 

Argo over Lincoln is a distant runner up to these two. It’s peak late Spielberg in his mining the Social Studies Book cycle and just a fantastically written and paced film that is more entertaining than any historical Congressional electoral procedural has any right to be.  

The Unnominated: Here’s a random one to end on but it’s my list. Tom Hardy in Lawless, a really great weird mid tier American film from early this decade. Hardy is why we’re here but I’d be totally on board with supporting nominations for Jason Clarke, Jessica Chastain and a completely bonkers Guy Pearce. It’s the type of engaging, well made and well acted little movie that we seem to never find in the running for big Awards at the end of the year. Here’s hoping that in the next decade we do.