You Probably Forgot These Movies Were Nominated For Oscars
Every year at the Oscars, there are nominees that are utterly predictable—movies whose inclusion in the race feels so inevitable from day one, it's hard to muster much excitement when they actually get a nod, no matter how deserving. And then there are those movies whose nominations produce a collective sense of "WTF?" like, say, The Boss Baby from 2017.
We all remember the really famous injustices when it comes to actual winners; let's not even dwell on the now-infamous travesty that was Crash winning over Brokeback Mountain at the 2006 Oscars. But it's a lot easier to forget the weirdest nominations. Here's a list of 20 movies you probably forgot were ever nominated for an Oscar—and the unlikely winners who the gold statue home.
Won: Best Picture; Best Supporting Actress (Jennifer Connelly); Best Director (Ron Howard); Best Adapted Screenplay
Also nominated for: Best Actor (Russell Crowe); Best Film Editing; Best Makeup; Best Original Score
This movie won Best Picture! In the same year that the first Lord of the Rings movie was nominated! There are things to like about Ron Howard’s handling of the story of John Nash, a brilliant but mentally fragile mathematician, but the best movie of the year feels like a stretch.
Won: Best Cinematography; Best Visual Effects, Best Art Direction
Also nominated for: Best Picture, Best Directing, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing
Remember the collective delusion that overcame the film industry and critical community in 2009 and 2010, when people insisted that James Cameron’s sci-fi epic Avatar was going to chance cinema forever? It did not, and those endlessly-promised sequels are still nowhere to be seen. But the movie did get a huge number of Oscar nominations, despite garnering only technical wins.
Nominated for: Best Original Song; Best Animated Feature
Pixar has a long history of success at the Oscars, but unless you’re a person with kids who happen to love the Cars series, it’s easy to forget that Cars was a movie at all, never mind an Oscar-nominated one. It’s nowhere near as beloved or culturally significant as Pixar faves like Wall-E, Up or the Toy Story series, but the Academy nominated it anyway.
Nominated for: Best Makeup
Click! Remember Click? No, you don’t, because literally nobody does, but Click has the dubious honor of being the only Adam Sandler movie ever nominated for an Oscar. It’s a sci-fi comedy drama in which Sandler plays an overworked dad who neglects his family, and does so even more once he obtains a remote that lets him fast-forward through life as he chooses.
Nominated for: Best Picture, Best Actor (Max von Sydow)
Despite being based on a great book by Jonathan Safran Foer, this adaptation—which follows a young boy who sets out to unravel a mystery about his father shortly after his death in the 9/11 attacks—is entirely forgettable, stripping out all the things that made the book unique while doubling down on schmaltz. The fact that this was up for Best Picture was an oddity at the time, and truly bizarre in retrospect.
Nominated for: Best Original Song
Admittedly, The Weeknd’s lead single for the Fifty Shades soundtrack is a legitimately good song—it won the Grammy Award for Best R&B; Performance in the same year—but it’s easy to forget that literally any aspect of this adaptation was considered Oscar-worthy. Director Sam Taylor-Johnson certainly improved on the source material, but that’s a low bar.
Won: Best Original Song
Nominated for: Best Cinematography; Best Film Editing; Best Original Song
Flashdance is not even an objectively good movie, never mind one of the best of the year it was released. It tells the story of a young factory worker who dreams of becoming a ballerina with empty glitz that completely wastes its charming lead, Jennifer Beals.
Won: Best Picture; Best Director; Best Adapted Screenplay; Best Cinematography; Best Art Direction-Set Decoration; Best Costume Design; Best Film Editing; Best Original Song; Best Score
Gigi’s absolutely not a bad movie, but it’s one of Vincente Minnelli’s less memorable efforts—which makes its nine Academy Award wins truly insane. This was the movie that held the record as the film with the most Oscar wins in every category in which it was nominated, until The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King broke that record in 2004.
Won: Best Costume Design, Best Production Design
On paper, Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of this American literary classic seems like a no-brainer for awards success, but the movie ended up feeling like a pretty hollow spectacle, lacking the vibrancy and soul of its source material. And though the movie was largely ignored by the Academy, it still pulled off these two wins for its admittedly beautiful costumes and rich production design.
Won: Best Makeup
Nominated for: Best Costume Design, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration
Sure, this is based on a beloved Dr. Seuss text, and sure, Jim Carrey is kind of charming as the curmudgeonly title character. But this movie is such an objectively unpleasant viewing experience that it’s hard to comprehend how its makers ever convinced the Academy that it should be in consideration.
Won: Best Supporting Actress (Anne Hathaway); Best Makeup and Hairstyling; Best Sound Mixing
Nominated for: Best Picture, Best Actor (Hugh Jackman), Best Costume Design, Best Original Song, Best Production Design
This sweeping adaptation of the beloved Broadway tearjerker looked like a frontrunner in several major categories, and dominated much of the awards season conversation in 2013. Has anyone given this movie a second thought since?
Nominated for: Best Makeup
It’s not absolutely clear whether this bleak, nasty Eddie Murphy "comedy" is the most poorly reviewed Oscar nominee in history, but it sure is hard to come up with an alternative. It was a particularly sad turn for Murphy, who was just coming off an Oscar-nominated performance in Dreamgirls, only to return to the Oscars with… this. The film holds a 9% on Rotten Tomatoes, and deservedly so.
Won: Best Sound Editing
Nominated for: Best Original Song, Best Sound, Best Visual Effects
Oof. This is far from the only Michael Bay movie to be Oscar-nominated, but it is the most egregious one. There are technical things to admire about Bay’s jingoistic nightmare of a wartime romance, but you’d be forgiven for trying to forget that this movie exists at all, never mind that it was nominated for four Oscars.
Won: Best Actor (Al Pacino)
Nominated for: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay
A film now remembered best through people's impressions of its widely-ridiculed lead performance, Scent of a Woman was nominated in several major categories in addition to finally winning Al Pacino his first Oscar, after seven prior nominations for better roles. Hoo-ah!
Won: Best Sound, Best Sound Effects Editing, Best Visual Effects
Yep. Just let that sink in for a second. The Phantom Menace, arguably the worst of a bad trio of Star Wars prequels, was also an Oscar-winning movie in three categories. You can certainly make an argument that the movie’s laughable script and clunky pacing and robotic performances shouldn’t diminish it as a technical achievement… but they do. They do.
Won: Best Achievement in Makeup and Hairstyling
“The Oscar-nominated picture, Suicide Squad.” Just try getting through that statement with a straight face. It’s been a rocky road for the DC cinematic universe, with critics panning just about every movie from Man of Steel through Justice League (minus Wonder Woman, of course), but the troubled Suicide Squad was a special kind of unevenly paced, cartoonish-ly edited mess.
Won: Best Actress (Sandra Bullock)
Nominated for: Best Picture
In contrast to a lot of the movies on this list, there’s nothing offensively bad about this based-on-true-events family drama, which won Sandra Bullock her first Oscar. It’s just fine, and pretty affecting in places, as it follows the story of a homeless teen who becomes a star athlete after being taken in by a wealthy family. But it’s not a movie that stayed in the cultural consciousness for even a second past its win.
Won: Best Picture; Best Writing
Nominated for: Best Director; Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing
Not to be confused with this year’s Best Song contender The Greatest Showman (although there are some similarities in premise), this early-days-of-Technicolor drama centers on the lives of employees at a circus, with a cast that includes Charlton Heston and James Stewart. For a Best Picture winner, the film has not exactly lasted the test of time.
Nominated for: Best Achievement in Sound Mixing
This is the second Michael Bay entry on this list, and the first of his interminable Transformers franchise—later chapters in the series actually went on to earn even more Oscar nominations, with three for 2011’s Dark of the Moon. Whatever your feelings about the sound mixing on the Transformers series, the fact that they’re Oscar nominees is hard to process.
Nominated for: Best Sound
Once again, the sound categories have a lot to answer for. Waterworld is a mainstay on "Biggest All-Time Flops" lists, not only for its disastrous box office but also middling reviews and a famously troubled production. But in a certain light, it’s kind of inspiring to know that even infamous flops have a shot at Academy gold.
You Probably Forgot These Movies Were Nominated For Oscars
Every year at the Oscars, there are nominees that are utterly predictable—movies whose inclusion in the race feels so inevitable from day one, it's hard to muster much excitement when they actually get a nod, no matter how deserving. And then there are those movies whose nominations produce a collective sense of "WTF?" like, say, The Boss Baby from 2017.
We all remember the really famous injustices when it comes to actual winners; let's not even dwell on the now-infamous travesty that was Crash winning over Brokeback Mountain at the 2006 Oscars. But it's a lot easier to forget the weirdest nominations. Here's a list of 20 movies you probably forgot were ever nominated for an Oscar—and the unlikely winners who the gold statue home.
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Here's a list of the worst 20 movies you probably forgot were ever nominated for an Oscar.
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