10) Alan Arkin
Won For: Little Miss Sunshine
Should Have Won For: Wait Until Dark
It’s no secret that the Academy oftentimes doles out acting Oscars like they’re lifetime achievement awards, long after the actor in question ideally should have won something. Alan Arkin, for example, got his first Oscar aged 72, decades after he’d started in the business, for a role that hardly featured him at his best.
Arkin’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar was awarded for his turn as generic ‘grumpy grampa’ in Little Miss Sunshine. But by rights the Academy should have given him something in his peak 60s period, most probably for his nasal, profoundly menacing villain in Wait Until Dark.
It’s Arkin at his weirdest, most frightening and most charismatic all at once.
9) Sean Connery
Won For: The Untouchables
Should Have Won For: The Hill
Forget James Bond – the best series of performances Sean Connery ever gave were for his regular 60s/70s collaborator, director Sidney Lumet. AMPAS, however, thought otherwise. They waited until 1988 to give Connery his first Oscar, as Best Supporting Actor in Brian De Palma’s blood-drenched gangster saga The Untouchables.
It’s difficult to argue that Connery’s broad, Oirish-accented take on The Untouchables‘ good cop Malone comes close to topping his performances in Lumet’s The Offence or, in particular, his classic war drama The Hill.
In The Hill, Connery’s startlingly powerful and intense; in The Untouchables, he’s as hammy as they come.
8) Kate Winslet
Won For: The Reader
Should Have Won For: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
How ironic that Kate Winslet would win her long-delayed Oscar for her performance in a Holocaust drama, just two years after Ricky Gervais’ Extras had Winslet – playing an exaggerated version of herself – declaring that starring in Holocaust-set films “guaranteed” actors a win.
The Reader‘s fine, as is Winslet in it (though her German accent is a little strangulated). Really she should have bagged the gold for Eternal Sunshine, though, and her colorful portrayal of a manic-depressive perpetually lost in the world and self-sabotaging. 12 years on, it still resonates, and it’s still her one to beat.
