8 Of The All-Time Best Academy Award Losers

On one level, the Academy Awards can have an enormous effect selecting which movies or singular movie will be designated as the most prestigious films from a single year. However, it's also possible that they're simply a reflection of opinions that have already been formed about the best films of the year, and when the Oscar pick for Best Picture disagrees too much with the popular and critical opinion, it gets swept aside. Driving Miss Daisy, for example, isn't exactly hailed as a lasting contribution to the history of cinema. Meanwhile two movies that weren't even nominated, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, are considered two of the greatest of their decade at the least, despite Oscar's lack of recognition.

Darren Ruecker

Published: Feb 22, 2013 04:00 pm

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3) Citizen Kane

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Even though there’s a bunch of hipster-critic pushback over the course of the past few years, Citizen Kane has long been considered the best movie ever made (if such a distinction even has any meaning). As far as the Academy is concerned though, it wasn’t even the best movie of the year it was released. It lost the Best Picture award to John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley. That one was apparently deemed less controversial and therefore more worthy of a statue. Sounds a little like this year’s backlash around Zero Dark Thirty.

Who knows a thing about How Green Was My Valley today though? Who has even seen it? I know I haven’t, partly out of spite, partly because it frankly has a stupid-ass title. Also, Quentin Tarantino says John Ford is racist so I hesitate to watch anything he did. Citizen Kane, on the other hand, has gone on to be considered such an advance in moviemaking history that it’s the one film that virtually every Film 101 class studies closely. It wasn’t textbook cinema at the time, but it is now. I think that says everything.

Not only that, since the first time I saw it (and I don’t usually respond strongly to movies from before the 1970s) it has always felt more like a contemporary movie than anything else from around that time. Some aspects are dated but it’s surprisingly easy to watch, even today. It makes you realize the Oscars tend to be the short game, but in the scope of film history, the long game is what matters, and Citizen Kane kind of won at that. Maybe I’m not giving How Green Was My Valley the credit it deserves though. All you How Green Was My Valley fans, let me hear from you.