3. Goodfellas Loses Best Picture and Best Director to Dances with Wolves
It’s one of the most inexplicable decisions in the Academy’s history. Somehow, Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves managed to defeat Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece Goodfellas and took home Best Picture and Best Director. After going on a spree of wins throughout the critics awards, including wins with the NYFCC, NSFC, and LAFCA, Goodfellas lost momentum with the major guilds and ultimately walked away with just one Oscar (Best Supporting Actor for Joe Pesci).
I can imagine that everyone had a good laugh at the Academy that year when the winners were announced. The British Academy had managed to get it right, awarding Goodfellas Best Film, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, among others, but for some reason, instead of Scorsese’s quintessential mobster film, the American Academy opted to go with a film about a man who becomes close to a group of Native Americans on the Frontier. Again, don’t get me wrong. Dances with Wolves is a fine film, but it’s no Goodfellas, as anyone can attest. To this day I have not found one person who thinks that Costner’s film is better than Scorsese’s, and it’s doubtful that I ever will. If things had gone as they should have, Scorsese would have had his directing Oscar 16 years earlier and for an even better film than what he eventually won for (The Departed).
So how did this egregious error end up happening? Well, the best way to explain it is that the Academy tends to choose films that are easier for them to digest (Argo, The Artist, The King’s Speech, etc.), not necessarily the ones that are better. Goodfellas was probably too much for them to take in at the time, but as we can clearly see, it went on to be regarded as the better film down the road. Looking at the Sight & Sound poll, Goodfellas is tied at #171 with the critics and tied at #48 with the directors, whereas Dances with Wolves is completely absent from both lists. It’s one of those things that’s very hard to believe, but believe it or not, it did happen, making it just another incident that the Academy has to look back on and blush at.
