Cases Where Something Might Have Won...But Wasn't Nominated

FilmFan720
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Re: Cases Where Something Might Have Won...But Wasn't Nominated

Post by FilmFan720 »

The LEGO Movie in 2014 seems like an obvious case here.

I also think there are a lot of these in the Documentary category...Hoop Dreams, Won't You Be My Neighbor, Jane, and Apollo 11 are all cases that come right to my mind.

It's a lot tougher in the above-the-line cases...Ben Affleck is the only one that jumps to my mind.
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Big Magilla
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Re: Cases Where Something Might Have Won...But Wasn't Nominated

Post by Big Magilla »

The closest analogy to this was In 1934 and 1935 when write-in candidates were allowed.

This was allowed in 1934 because of the hubbub about Bette Davis being left off the nominations list for Of Human Bondage. Newspaper accounts of the day said that Davis came in behind all three nominees - Claudette Colbert (It Happened One Night), Norma Shearer (The Barretts of Wimpole Street), and Grace Moore One Night of Love), but Academy records indicate she actually came in ahead of Moore.

In 1935, there were write-in nominees in numerous categories including Michael Curtiz (Captain Blood) who came in second behind John Ford (The Informer) for Best Director and Paul Muni (Black Fury) who came in second behind Victor McLaglen (The Informer) for Best Actor.

Almost a century later, I'm not sure how much things would have changed but with actors still having the majority vote I think it would still be tough for a non-nominee to beat the official competition in the acting categories unless something unusual happened such as the sudden death of a beloved non-nominee. It would probably be easier in one of the artisan categories where actors outpoll the nominators and are as apt as any of us to be surprised by a particular exclusion.
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Re: Cases Where Something Might Have Won...But Wasn't Nominated

Post by mlrg »

Very interesting thread

I think Bruce Springsteen might have won for the song he wrote for The Wrestler
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Cases Where Something Might Have Won...But Wasn't Nominated

Post by dws1982 »

I mentioned in another thread that I think 1917 probably would've won the Editing award outright if it had been nominated. I also said that I think it's possible that several of the members of the Editors branch may have suspected it could win, and that made them resistant to nominating it. (No, they didn't get together to discuss this, obviously, but I do think it's possible that a lot of editors may have independently thought it could win and decided not to nominate it because of that.)

So this got me thinking: What are some other cases where the frontrunner, or at least something that could have won, ended up not getting nominated?

I feel like this happens much more in technical categories than in the big ones. I know Tee has talked in the past about the Makeup branch boxing out some films that probably could've won a vote with the general membership.

Recently, I think Black Panther probably would've won Visual Effects (and possibly Editing) if it had been nominated. I don't think its Visual Effects are that impressive, but given its popularity and given what an odd category Visual Effects was that year, I think it would've won with ease.

I think Ben Affleck for Argo is one of the more obvious choices here. It was definitely one of the most surprising snubs in my years of Oscar-watching. I also think it's possible that if Affleck does get nominated, it's possible that Directing race doesn't break in his favor--he did win the big precursors going into the Oscars, but a lot of those felt like a reaction to his Oscar snub, and if he doesn't have that snub, I think it's possible that the DGA goes a different direction and the Oscars might too. (I do think Argo probably still wins Best Picture in this scenario.)

I thought Inception would win Editing going into the nominations that year.

This one may give away my age and ignorance at the time of that Oscar race, but I thought Michael Douglas had a chance of winning for Wonder Boys before the nominations came out in 2000. It was a pretty new Oscar watcher then, but my thought was: Tom Hanks wasn't going to win number three just a few years after winning his first two for a movie that a lot of people didn't like, Javier Bardem was an unknown in a really small movie, Geoffrey Rush just won and people hated Quills, Jamie Bell is too young, Ed Harris will struggle to even get nominated, and even if Gladiator wins a bunch of awards, they aren't going to see Russell Crowe's performance as an example of serious acting. So I thought Douglas had as good of a shot as anyone.
Last edited by dws1982 on Sat Sep 05, 2020 10:19 am, edited 3 times in total.
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