When was the moment that you felt the Oscars betrayed you?

By Edward Copeland
My good friend Matt Zoller Seitz has went on a rant at his blog about how if Crash should pull an upset victory Sunday night for best picture it would be the most indefensible Oscar win since Around the World in 80 Days and he will cease to care about the awards. In a way, I know how he feels. I don't share his sentiments about Crash, but I think any movie buff with even a casual interest in the Academy Awards always gets riled by their picks. We don't like to admit it — but that's part of the enjoyment of the whole enterprise — getting thoroughly pissed off over what the Academy picks when it doesn't matter in the end and we'll come back for more anyway. In a way, it's like some of us are in an abusive relationship with Oscar — we threaten to leave every time he smacks us, but something convinces us that Oscar loves us anyway and we refuse to leave him.

The first truly outraged moment (actually moments) I can remember all involved the 1985 race. First, there were the nominations where The Color Purple got 11 nominations but none for Steven Spielberg as director. At the time, Spielberg was like a demigod to many of us, so our outrage was fierce and palpable, though when time passed and some of us saw The Color Purple again, we had to wonder if it would have gotten the notice it did if Spielberg's name hadn't been attached.

Then the real straw that broke that camel's back came on Oscar night itself — even though we knew victory was a near certainty. Don Ameche got supporting actor for Cocoon — and he wasn't even the best supporting actor in Cocoon. He didn't do his own breakdancing either. Not to mention, the truly worthy winners he defeated, namely William Hickey in Prizzi's Honor and Klaus Maria Brandauer in Out of Africa. Hell, even Robert Loggia in Jagged Edge or Eric Roberts in Runaway Train would have been better choices. My friend Dave and I declared that Oscar was dead to us — that night Sydney Pollack took director over John Huston and Akira Kurosawa as well, so the whole night qualified as cultural crime against humanity.

I got over it. I always come back for more, but their winners don't have the ability to really anger me much anymore. I admit — I did almost physically retch when Russell Crowe, who I like as an actor, won for his nonrole in Gladiator, but that's the closest I've come to the 1985 feeling. I can't remember what critic wrote it but I loved the line about Crowe in Gladiator who asked why a Spaniard fighting for the Romans had an Australian accent.

If you look through the entire history of the Oscar, the times the Academy got it wrong overwhelmingly outnumber the times they got it right. Look at its best picture winners — of that list the only winners I would truly call the greatest of films, in the all-time sense, are It Happened One Night, Gone With the Wind (and that wouldn't even have been my pick for 1939), Casablanca, All About Eve, On the Waterfront, The Apartment, Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather, Annie Hall, Amadeus and Schindler's List with several near greats such as All Quiet on the Western Front, Rebecca, The Sting, The Godfather Part II, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Terms of Endearment and The Last Emperor.

Contrast those though with the mediocrities that prevailed. I'll give Wings a pass only because I've never been able to see its competitors and the Academy shuffled the year's masterpieces The Crowd and Sunrise to a separate category called "Artistic Quality of Production" which it promptly abandoned after the first year, as if they knew the Oscar was destined to aim for the middlebrow audience.

They proved it the following year with The Broadway Melody which remains my choice for the worst best picture ever. Try watching it — it's so creaky you'll expect your VCR or DVD player to fall right through the floor.

Then there were more mediocrities: Cimarron, The Great Ziegfeld, The Life of Emile Zola — for the most part the '30s played like that whole section of 19th century presidents when we had Fillmore, Pierce and the like.

The '40s weren't much better. There was the watch-paint-drying exercise that is Mrs. Miniver, the overlong hokum of Going My Way, the noble but awful Gentleman's Agreement.

Then we hit the 50s — with some of the most mind-boggling winners ever. I know there are many fans of An American in Paris, but it's never done anything for me. Of course, this decade also went with The Greatest Show on Earth, Around the World with 80 Days and a pair of the most overrated films of all time — Bridge on the River Kwai and Ben-Hur.

Things improved a bit in the 1960s, even if the best films still didn't win. The only winner I truly don't like is Tom Jones.

The 1970s have given us a crop of winners that largely have aged badly. Patton and The French Connection to be sure. Rocky, whose worst crime is being picked over the likes of All the President's Men, Network and Taxi Driver. Then you get to 1978 and the interminable, xenophobic, borderline racist and character-less Deer Hunter which defeated the equally dated Coming Home and Midnight Express. I haven't seen An Unmarried Woman recently to see how it holds up, but at this point it looks like Heaven Can Wait is likely to emerge as the best of their lot.

In the 1980s, we start out with the kitchen-sink melodrama Ordinary People conquering Raging Bull. In 1981, we get the dull Chariots of Fire whose most exciting moment was being the last time a best picture winner was a surprise. Gandhi is OK, but over Tootsie and E.T.? Out of Africa beating Prizzi's Honor? The now laughable Platoon topping not only Hannah and Her Sisters but A Room With a View as well. Rain Man —
don't even get me started.

Then the 1990s started with the outrage of outrages when the masterpiece Goodfellas lost to Dances With Wolves, though the outrage would have been just as great if it had lost to ANY of its competitors: Awakenings, Ghost and The Godfather, Part III.

1995 may have been another lowpoint for Oscar, not only because Braveheart won but because the field was so weak that my favorite film may have been about a pig that herded sheep.

The bore that is The English Patient won the next year over the monumentally overrated Fargo and the Rain Man with a piano tale that was Shine. The best of their weak lot was Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies, but he's done better, and Jerry Maguire. The true crime of 1996 was that Lone Star wasn't even in the top five.

The next year brought Titanic, the effects extravaganza with dialogue so putrid the movie would play better if you brought something else to listen to — and it beat the exquisite L.A. Confidential to boot.

The Aughts have not been much kinder. There has yet to be a winner that I think will truly be one for the time capsule. Chicago and Million Dollar Baby are fine, but forgettable. A Beautiful Mind almost defines mediocre. Return of the King was more a testament to them feeling they owed Jackson's bloated epic something. Fellowship was the only one I liked overall. The rest were just good sequences surrounded by lots of boring scenes and dialogue that sounded like George Lucas' worst Star Wars dialogue with delusions of grandeur. I think the whole trilogy would have been helped if instead of Elijah Wood, they'd actually picked a lead who I believed for a moment might be tempted by the ring. It says a lot about the trilogy that the best character was computer generated.

Then there is the absolute bottom of the barrel of the aughts — Gladiator — whose win to this day boggles my mind.

Yes, Oscar will seldom get it right and seldom has — and I haven't even touched and the outrages of acting wins like Helen Hunt and her wandering accent in As Good As It Gets. Oscar always makes us mad — and that's really why we love Oscar. It's the same impulse that sends us to every new ridiculous Entertainment Weekly or AFI list just so we can complain about them.

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