10 Of The Biggest Mistakes In Oscar History

1. Stanley Kubrick Never Won a Directing Oscar/His Films Never Won Best Picture

There have been a few great directors who never won a Best Director Oscar, including Alfred Hitchcock, while others are simply still working at accomplishing the great feat, such as Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan. However, no shut out has been as downright perplexing and as thoroughly embarrassing for the Academy as the fact that the greatest filmmaker of all time, Stanley Kubrick, never won a directing Oscar throughout his amazing career, despite being nominated for four masterpieces in a row in the 60s and 70s. As if that wasn’t bad enough, three of the four films he was nominated for were up for Best Picture, but were ultimately rejected for their award as well. To see just how massive an error this was, let’s look at it on a case by case basis.

The first time Kubrick was up for a directing Oscar was in 1965 for his satirical masterpiece Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a film that is regularly included on lists of the greatest films ever made. It is a masterwork, featuring brilliant direction, stunning performances, incredible set design, and an unforgettable screenplay (“Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”). So what film did the Academy feel was better than one that’s considered one of the very best? The answer may surprise you, but it’s the musical My Fair Lady, which took three of the four Oscars that Strangelove was nominated for (Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor), while the fourth, Adapted Screenplay, was snatched away by Becket (another great film).

The best explanation I’ve ever come up with for these errors is that it was simply too much for the Academy to take in at the time. To make a black comedy about nuclear annihilation in the middle of the Cold War was a gutsy move for Kubrick and, like many of his films, it ended up being rather controversial.

Just a few years later, in 1969, we come to the single biggest pair of errors ever committed by the Academy. This is the year that the greatest film ever made, 2001: A Space Odyssey, was nominated for four Academy Awards (Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, and Best Visual Effects). No, your eyes don’t deceive you. The greatest film ever made was NOT nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. As if that wasn’t embarrassing enough, when the ceremony rolled around, instead of giving the Best Director Oscar to Kubrick, the obvious choice among the five nominees, the Academy opted to give the award to Carol Reed for Oliver!

That’s right, Kubrick had been defeated by another musical director. However, this time it was for a musical that has faded away completely from the minds of everyone who ever saw it. Not that it was a terrible film, but it just makes me blush every time I think of the fact that they opted to give Best Director to a forgettable musical over the brilliance that Kubrick displays in 2001. At the very least, Kubrick’s film walked away with Best Visual Effects (somehow it lost Best Art Direction-Set Decoration to Oliver! as well, while Best Original Screenplay went to Mel Brooks’ The Producers), but it doesn’t begin to make up for the mind-numbing mistakes made that year.

How do we explain this? Well, like Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey was a film ahead of its time. Before 1968, science-fiction was mainly seen as a B-movie genre that no one took seriously, so when Kubrick came along with this deep, philosophical film, many just weren’t sure what to make of it. Granted, there were a few who saw it for the masterpiece it was (Roger Ebert gave it four stars when it was released), but for the most part, audiences were perplexed as to the meaning of it.

However, that really only seems to explain why it wouldn’t have been nominated for Best Picture. Even if you don’t understand the film, it’s rather hard to deny that the direction is stunning. This is another case where it’s rather amusing to look back and see that Oliver! has been completely forgotten now, whereas 2001: A Space Odyssey is always included on lists of the best films ever made. On the latest Sight & Sound poll, it took #6 on the Critics’ poll and tied for #2 (with Citizen Kane) on the Directors’ poll. These terrible mistakes will forever be a stain on the Academy’s record, mistakes that I hope still torture the surviving Academy members who helped make it so to this day.

Kubrick’s next masterpiece, A Clockwork Orange, was also nominated for four Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Film Editing), showing that four was becoming the director’s magic number. This time, his film told the tale of a gang of vicious young hoodlums terrifying the citizens of dystopian Britain and the attempt to reform one of them through an experimental treatment that makes him sick at the thought of violence. As usual, controversy followed, this time in the form of copycat attacks, causing Kubrick to withdraw the film from distribution in the UK. Luckily, the Academy didn’t let controversy stop them from giving it the nominations it deserved.  However, whether or not it would be allowed to win was another matter.