“Imitation Of Life” (1959)
Perhaps rightly, the Oscars have a certain bias against remakes, it seems: only two films based on other movies, “Ben-Hur” and “The Departed,” have taken the top prize. It’s still not an excuse for why Douglas Sirk’s masterpiece, “Imitation Of Life,” was so roundly ignored, with only two Supporting Actress nominations. Adapted, like the original, from Fannie Hurst’s novel, the film stars Lana Turner and Juanita Moore as two mothers, and Sandra Dee and Susan Kohner as their two daughters, one of whom has a crush on her mother’s boyfriend, the other of whom is increasingly rejecting her mother and trying to pass as white. A sprawling and almost unfeasibly rich melodrama, it still feels remarkably ahead of its time (and certainly far superior to the original, though still not perfect) in its attempt to grapple with issues of sexual coming-of-age, class and race, with Sirk subtly shifting emphasis away from Turner and Dee to Moore and Kohner (the latter two being the ones who won the Oscar nominations). It’s still one of the great films about mothers and daughters, and filmed in the usual lush Sirk style. Despite its obvious greatness, the film was initially seen by critics to be inferior to its predecessor, which may have been the final straw for Sirk, who returned home to Germany and never directed a full-length feature again.
“Spartacus” (1960)
Subject of probably the most egregious Oscar oversight of all time (he never won Best Director), Stanley Kubrick was also overlooked in other areas, too — again a fact that reflects more poorly on Hollywood than on the director’s many masterpieces. But it feels like he was unluckiest to miss out on a Best Picture nod specifically, with “Spartacus” the film of his that seems on paper like the one most likely to be embraced even by a body as conservative as the Academy. More classical, less experimental than many of his later films, and firmly in the historical drama groove that the Academy favors over other genres he worked in after (like horror or sci-fi), the story of the Roman slave revolt, starring Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis with a screenplay byDalton Trumbo, did pick up six nominations and won four (Peter Ustinovfor Supporting Actor, Cinematography, Art Direction, Costume Design). But while that wasn’t a terrible year — we wouldn’t take the win away from “The Apartment” for the world — there was certainly room for “Spartacus” in Best Picture. Even keeping in the remarkable “Elmer Gantry,” it still could easily have replaced “Sons and Lovers,” “The Sundowners” or “The Alamo” without too much protest, and posterity would have been somewhat appeased.
“Cool Hand Luke” (1967)
1967 was one of the most fascinating years in history, a year when a new wave of bold new counter-culture movies — “The Graduate,” “Bonnie & Clyde” — clashed with some of the last gasps of the old guard, like bloated flop music “Doctor Dolittle,” and Spencer Tracy’s farewell with “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” (read Mark Harris’ phenomenal “Scenes From A Revolution” for more). But one great movie that fell somewhere between the two stools, and that didn’t make the cut in the final five, was Stuart Rosenberg’s “Cool Hand Luke.” Adapted by Frank Pierson and Donn Pearce from Pearce’s novel, it mixes an anti-establishment vibe with religious allegory in its story of a veteran (Paul Newman) sentenced to prison after vandalizing parking meters with a chainsaw. Newman, in one of his most charismatic turns, leads a killer cast of character actors (George Kennedy, Strother Martin and Morgan Woodward being among the particular standouts), but it’s about much more than just him: this is one of those films where everything works. The film wasn’t entirely rejected by Oscar voters: it won four nods in total, for Newman, Kennedy (who took the prize home), the script and Lalo Schifrin’s score. But in the end, it lost out, pushed out by the more obviously counter-cultural “Bonnie & Clyde,” and by Fox spending a ton of money pushing “Doctor Dolittle.”
“2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968)
It’s come close a few times in recent years — “Gravity” and “Avatar” were among those firmly in the mix — but we’ve still never seen a science-fiction movie win Best Picture, and “The Martian” and “Mad Max: Fury Road” probably won’t change that this year. Perhaps the most shocking genre omission ever is that Stanley Kubrick’s game-changing masterpiece “2001” didn’t just miss out on the prize, it wasn’t even nominated. The trippy epic, based on Arthur C. Clarke’s book, goes from the dawn of time as a black monolith brings violence to neanderthal man, via a space mission sabotaged by an artificial intelligence, to a psychedelic, mind-bending conclusion, and was a slow-burning box office hit, ultimately the biggest of 1968. Its innovative effects changed the genre forever, and it cemented more than ever Kubrick’s visionary status. The director was lauded by the Academy — he won the Visual Effects Oscar, and was nominated for Director and Original Screenplay (with an Art Direction nod for Anthony Masters), but the film itself was overlooked. Given its stone-cold classic status now, it’s baffling, but it’s close to unforgivable when you look at the films that were nominated that year, including Paul Newman’s damp directorial debut “Rachel Rachel,” and eventual winner “Oliver!”
“They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1969)
There’s a special, slightly sad section of Oscar history for the movies that racked up a large number of nominations without figuring into Best Picture. Recently, both “Dreamgirls” and “The Dark Knight” received eight nominations (the former with more nods than any other movie that year), while failing to go up for the big prize. But the all-time winner, if winner is the right word, for this category is Sydney Pollack’s breakthrough movie “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,” which managed a whopping nine Oscar nominations while still missing out for Best Picture. Based on Horace McCoy’s novel, it tracks a group of people hoping to win a $1500 prize in a dance marathon in Santa Monica during the Great Depression. It’s an odd film, like “Cool Hand Luke” torn between classic and New Wave Hollywood, novelistic and undoubtedly powerful, evoking the period where it’s set while also sometimes feeling close to dystopian science fiction. The cast in particular were excellent (Gig Young won as the MC, Jane Fonda andSusannah York were both nominated, as was Pollack), but with the revolution kicked off by “Bonnie & Clyde” et al now in full force, it was “Midnight Cowboy” that dominated the awards that year, and ‘They Shoot Horses’ was shut out of Best Picture.
