HOW DID THESE MOVIES LOSE OUT TO THOSE MOVIES FOR ACADEMY'S 'BEST PICTURE'?
There are winners and losers in movies. Sometimes the wires get crossed and great movies get sent to the showers in favor of movies that truly suck. Here are some glaring examples of good movies that lost out for Best Picture to some real duds.
‘Raging Bull’ somehow lost the 1980 Best Picture Award to O’rdinary People’. ‘Raging Bull’ is a graphic look at the brutal world of boxing as seen through the troubled life of Jake LaMotta. ‘Ordinary People’ was a boring look at a dysfunctional family. Too bad LaMotta wasn’t a part of the family.
He could have put them to sleep before they put the audience to sleep.
‘Chariots of Fire' beat out ‘Raiders of the lost Ark’ in 1981. I remember the preview for ‘Chariots of Fire’: A bunch of guys racing down a beach. I naturally assumed that they had just left the theater playing this crappy movie on the dead run.
Meanwhile, Indiana Jones was cracking the whip in the first of the action/adventure franchise “Raiders” movies. This was a no-brainer, but the Academy got it wrong. Very wrong.
‘The Last Emperor’ won Best Picture in 1987. Did anybody even see this movie? ‘Fatal Attraction’ was nominated that same year, and few people will forget what was on the menu in this movie. Take one live rabbit, add one crazy b***h, and you have a recipe for shock and future marital fidelity.
‘Shakespeare in Love’ won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1998. Remember the guy who single-handedly bored and confused you in high school English? A movie about his love life somehow beat ‘Saving Private Ryan’ for the Academy Award in 1998.
1996 was the year that ‘The English Patient’ won the Best Picture award. One would assume that the movie was about a sick English person. That is all I can tell you about this movie because I never attempted to watch it. Instead I watched 1996 Best Picture nominee ‘Jerry Maguire’ because I like to stay awake during a movie, and get a few laughs along the way. Show me the funny.
2002 was the year that ‘Chicago’ won the Best Picture award. ‘Chicago’ was a musical. That is the best possible reason alone to avoid this movie like an infectious leper colony handshake club. It crushed ‘Gangs of New York’ for Best Picture in the eyes of the Academy. Give one to the atheists for proof there is no God when stuff like this happens.
The last movie on my list is 1968’s Best Picture winner: ‘Oliver’. Every nominee sucked that year, so they probably gave it by default to ‘Oliver’, a musical. Its competition that year included ‘Funny Girl’ (another musical), ‘The Lion in Winter’ (boring British monarch), ‘Rachel Rachel’( boring school teacher), and ‘Romeo and Juliet’( boring Shakespeare play).
The real 1968 winner was ‘Bullitt’, a Steve McQueen classic with the best car chase ever filmed for the big screen. It wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture.
With that, I would like to thank the Academy for fumbling the ball over the years-many times.
COMMENTS
DENNIS:"Were the Oscars on TV? I must have missed them. Guess they were up against re-runs of CSI or something interesting on The Fishing Channel."
TREVOR:"Comments on the oscars are dead on! I've see the Hurt Locker and barely remember it, while Avitar blew me away! Nice to see the photo of the old Paramount theater too. In it's hey day it was a cool theater that added to the movie going experiance."
