5 Movies that Should Have Won Best Picture

Since we are a day away from the Oscars I decided to post a little about some past awards. Sometimes the Oscars get it wrong. Actually it’s more often than not. But, some of the big mistakes in my opinion are as follows. I am not going to include any movies I feel were the best of the year and not even nominated. These are all movies that were nominated but lost.

1)In 1990 Dances with Wolves won Best Picture. Dances With Wolves is fine, I don’t mean to knock it, however the film it beat is not just the best mafia movie ever but one of the best movies of all time.

Goodfellas

Goodfellas is an amazingly fast paced hard edged look at three decades of life in the mafia. It was based on the true story of wiseguy turned informant Henry Hill. It followed his rise and fall during the 60s 70s and 80s. The cast was perfect, the soundtrack amazing, and it served as a pretty good blueprint for The Sopranos. I love The Sopranos but it is very reminiscent of Scorsese's masterpiece of the mafia genre. Speaking of cast, this is hands down Joe Pesci's best performance ever. "Am I a clown, am I here to amuse you?"






2) Four years later the Academy dropped the ball on another crime drama. One very influenced by Goodfellas but very different. In 1994 the award went to Forrest Gump. Gump is a cute film and entertaining, but it was nowhere near as visionary, challenging and original as Quentin Tarentino's

Pulp Fiction.

Fiction was unlike anything that had come before it. It borrowed from many influences of course (as a lot of Tarentino bashers like to point out) but it assembled them a completely original way. Like Goodfellas, the pacing, editing, soundtrack and cast are outstanding. Scorsese and Tarentino are both geniuses when it comes to assembling a soundtrack. John Travolta, Sam Jackson, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis, Harvey Keitel, Christopher Walken and more fill out the cast of criminals and low lifes whose lives intersect over a few days in California. This movie is incredibly re watchable and just as fresh as it was when originally released. It's only fault is the countless copycat movies that came out afterwards that were almost all terrible. A side note, another better film that lost to Gump that same year, The Shawshank Redemption.

3) The Academy loves romantic epics and often gives them the award over much more deserving films. 1996 was no exception. The long, boring and completely forgettable The English Patient beat out the wonderful Coen Brother's classic

Fargo

Fargo is a dark black hilarious comedy thriller. It's a movie I can watch over and over and always find new things to love. Francis McDormand is hilarious and believable in her Oscar winning role as Marge Gunderson, the very pregnant Midwestern cop trying to catch a couple of killers who have come through her town on a kidnapping job gone wrong. The cast of Coen brothers regulars are hilarious dark and shocking. It is very similar to the film that won the brothers their Best Picture statue years later, No Country For Old Men. Although this film was a lot funnier than the even darker No Country.




4) In1998 Shakespeare In Love won. It's an ok romantic comedy that is also pretty forgotten. Yet somehow it beat out the Spielberg WWII epic,

Saving Private Ryan

Saving Private Ryan is mostly remembered for the intense, extremely graphic and realistic recreation of D Day. While that sequence is sobering and engaging and kicks off the film strongly, the rest of the movie in my opinion is just as strong. It raises a lot of great questions about war, the value of a life and the destruction of men in battle. It also contains a good performance from Tom Sizemore right before he kind of fell off the map and landed in a jail and rehab over and over.





5)The final movie on my list that should have won, lost in 2000. That year the Ridley Scott throwback to sand and sword epics of the past Gladiator nabbed the award. Gladiator is an entertaining movie. The battles are fast paced and violent, Russel Crowe is at his best as Maximus, the soldier turned slave. However, it is also pretty cheesy and by the numbers. The movie that should have won was

Traffic

Traffic directed by Steven Soderbegh was an American adaptation of the British miniseries Traffik. The original covered the opium, heroin trade. The new version was focused on the drug world in America and Mexico. It had multiple plots all shot in a different colored filters to guide the audience through the huge world of police, politicians, drug dealers, socialites, drug users and their families. It was huge in scope yet very focused on it's characters. Traffic won the Academy Awards for Best Director, Best Editor and Best Screenplay. So while they thought it was the best written, directed and edited film, they somehow came to the conclusion it was not the best film.