Saturday Night at the Movies
Beautiful losers: Top 10 Oscar snubs
By Dennis Hartley
12-58-44%5D.JPG)
Winning isn’t everything. Consider tonight’s Top 10 list, compiled in honor (or in spite) of Oscar weekend. Each of these films was up for Best Picture, but “lost”. So here’s a bunch of losers (presented in alphabetical order) that will always be winners in my book:
Apocalypse Now
- “Are you an assassin, Willard?” This nightmarish walking tour through the darkest labyrinths of the human soul (disguised as a Vietnam War film) remains Francis Ford Coppola’s most polarizing work-an unqualified masterpiece to some; bloated, self-important nonsense to others. I kind of like it. In the course of the grueling shoot, Coppola had a nervous breakdown, and star Martin Sheen had a heart attack. Now that’s what I call “suffering for your art”. And always remember-never get outta the boat.
Year nominated: 1979
Chinatown
- There are many Deep Thoughts that I have gleaned over the years via repeated viewings of Roman Polanski’s 1974 “sunshine noir”. Here are my top five:
Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water.
Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.
You may think you know what you’re dealing with, but, believe me, you don’t.
He owns the police.
She’s my sister AND my daughter.
Year nominated: 1974
Dr. Strangelove 
- “Mein fuehrer! I can walk!” Although we have yet (knock on wood) to experience the global thermonuclear annihilation that ensues following the wheelchair-bound Dr. Strangelove’s joyous (if short-lived) epiphany, so many other depictions in Stanley Kubrick’s seriocomic masterpiece (co-scripted by Terry Southern and Peter George) about the tendency for men in power to eventually rise to their own level of incompetence have since come to pass, that one wonders why the filmmakers bothered to make this shit up.
Year nominated: 1964
La Grande Illusion 
-While it may be hard for some to fathom in this oh so cynical age we live in, there was a time when there were these thingies called honor, loyalty, sacrifice, faith in your fellow man, and basic human decency. While ostensibly an anti-war film, Jean Renoir’s classic is at its heart a timeless treatise about the aforementioned attributes.
Year nominated: 1938
The Maltese Falcon
-This iconic noir, based on a classic Dashiell Hammett novel and marking the directing debut for a Mr. John Huston, is vividly burned into the film buff zeitgeist…so suffice it to say that “When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it.” And leave it at that. Humphrey Bogart truly became “Humphrey Bogart” with his performance as San Francisco gumshoe Sam Spade. Memorable support from Sidney Greenstreet, Mary Astor and Peter Lorre (“Look what you did to my shirt!”).
Year nominated: 1941
Network
- Way back in 1976, Sidney Lumet’s brilliant satire made us chuckle with its outrageous conceit…the story of a fictional TV network who hits the ratings g-spot with a nightly newscast turned variety hour, anchored by a self-proclaimed “angry prophet denouncing the hypocrisy of our time”. Now, 37 years later, it plays like a documentary (denouncing the hypocrisy of our time). The much vaunted prescience of the infinitely quotable Paddy Chayefsky screenplay goes much deeper than prophesying the onslaught of news-as-entertainment (and its evil spawn, “reality” TV)-it’s a blueprint for our age.
Year nominated: 1976
Pulp Fiction
-Try to forget for a moment that Quentin Tarantino has become stiff on his own legend and stuck on the same cinematic refrain as of late; otherwise it’s easy to forget how groundbreaking this film actually was. Of course, depending on who you ask, what exactly was it? A film noir? A black comedy? A character study? A sharply observed social satire? A self-referential, post-modernist homage to every film ever made previously, jacked in to the collective unconscious of every living film geek? Umm, yes?
Year nominated: 1994
Reds
- It’s a testament to Warren Beatty’s sense of conviction and legendary, erm, powers of persuasion that he was able to convince a major Hollywood studio to back a 3 ½ hour epic about a relatively obscure American Communist (who is buried in the Kremlin, no less!). Writer-director Beatty plays writer-activist Jack Reed, and Diane Keaton gives one of her best performances as Reed’s lover, writer and feminist Louise Bryant. Maureen Stapleton (as Emma Goldman) and Jack Nicholson (as Eugene O’Neill) are fabulous. And Beatty deserves special kudos for assembling an amazing group of surviving real-life participants, whose anecdotal recollections are seamlessly interwoven, like a Greek Chorus of living history. The film is at once a sweeping epic and warmly intimate drama.
Year nominated: 1981
Sunset Boulevard
- Leave it to that great ironist Billy Wilder to direct a film that garnered a Best Picture nomination from the very Hollywood studio system it so mercilessly skewers (however, you’ll note that they didn’t let him win…did they?). Gloria Swanson’s turn as a fading, high-maintenance movie queen mesmerizes, William Holden embodies the quintessential noir sap, and veteran scene-stealer Erich von Stroheim redefines the meaning of “droll” in this tragicomic journey down the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
Year nominated: 1950
The Thin Man 
-A delightful mix of screwball comedy and murder mystery (based on the Dashiell Hammett novel) that never gets old (I just watched it for the umpteenth time the other night, and laughed my ass off like I was seeing it for the first time). The story takes a backseat to the onscreen spark between New York City P.I./perpetually tipsy socialite Nick Charles (William Powell) and his wisecracking wife Nora (sexy Myrna Loy). Top it off with a scene-stealing wire fox terrier (Asta!) and you’ve got a winning formula that has spawned countless imitators over the last 79 years; particularly a bevy of sleuthing TV couples (Hart to Hart, McMillan and Wife, Moonlighting, Remington Steele, etc.).
Year nominated: 1934
Previous posts with related themes:
Top 10 Best Picture Oscar Winners
Saturday Night at the Movies review archives
12-58-44%5D.JPG)
