Consider This from NPR - When Oscar got it wrong

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

What do Babygirl, Singing in the Rain and Apocalypse Now have in common? They've all been overlooked by Oscar voters.Some Oscar blunders fall into the category of snubs - others show a failure to recognize films that will endure.Now sometimes, these critiques are a matter of movie taste. Sometimes, they're a broader matter of representation – raising questions about who the movie industry chooses to celebrate or ignore.The Academy Awards have made some truly epic misses over their long history.Two of NPR's film regulars dig into those times when the Oscars got things very wrong, and what that tells us about the art, culture and business of the movies. For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.orgEmail us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

That special day is here again. Good morning, everyone. The members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have voted and Thursday at 5.30am Hollywood time we finally found out... Are we ready for some nominees? How badly they messed up this year's Oscar nominations. Look, that's not to knock this year's picks. You can't disagree with Coleman Domingo, Demi Moore, long overdue recognition.

Wicked, it speaks for itself. But complaining about who got snubbed is an essential part of the Oscars experience. Last year the internet was up in arms for Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie who missed out on Best Director and Actress Noms for Barbie, even though Ryan Gosling was nominated for playing Ken. Actually my job, it's just beach. It happens every year. In fact, you can find annual biggest snubs

and surprises clickbait headlines going back to 2010 and probably further, honestly, we just got tired of Googling. Now, sometimes these critiques are a matter of movie taste and sometimes they are broader matters of representation, raising questions about who the movie industry chooses to celebrate or ignore. Like in 2015, when every nominated actor or actress

was white, which host Neil Patrick Harris nodded to in his opening monologue. Tonight we honor Hollywood's best and whitest, sorry, brightest. Or the next year when it happened again. Oscars So White, part two. And even when the Oscars avoid glaring emissions like those with 23 categories, you are going to get some wrong,

as Stephen Colbert made clear on The Late Show in 2018. I've got this well of a ward angry that I've got to focus at something. So this year, I've just decided to be furious that the Lego Ninjago movie was not nominated for best sound mixing. Consider this, the Academy Awards have made some truly epic misses over their long history. Coming up, two of NPR's film regulars dip into those times when the Oscars got things

very wrong and what that tells us more broadly about the art, culture, and business of the movies. From NPR, I'm Scott Detro. It's Consider This from NPR. What do each of these movies have in common? I love the smell of my pum in the morning. All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up. Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the war room. I'm singing in the rain Working backward from Gene Kelly, that's Singing in the Rain, Dr. Strangelove, Sunset Boulevard, Apocalypse Now, and Citizen Kane,

all on many lists of the best films ever, but not one of them took home the Oscar for Best Picture. Some Oscar blunders fall into the category of snubs. Others show a failure to recognize films that will endure the Academy on the wrong side of history. Let's talk about how that happens, what it means, and why we should care. We're joined now by NPR critic Bob Mandello. Hey, Bob.

Hey, good to be here. And our own producer and film fanatic, Mark Rivers. Hey, Mark. Happy Oscar, Scott. I'm glad we're celebrating. So, Bob, we started off with some of the greatest misses in Academy history. Like I said, this is always a conversation this time of year. Is there one particular movie that always jumps out to you as like an iconic miss? Oh my God, yes. It was the first Oscars that I paid attention to. It was in 1968. It was

the year that Oliver won Best Picture. Oliver, Oliver, won't gasp for more when he knows what's in store. And the biggest movie of the year, the most exciting movie I had ever seen in my life, came out. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it. 2001, a space odyssey, and it didn't get nominated.

It didn't even get nominated. What kind of crazy is that? And so at that point, I just sort of said, okay, the Oscars are stupid. And here you are. I mean, this is crazy. My first Oscars were probably in 2004, and this was the year that Lord of the Rings Return to the King ran the table on everybody. And that was my favorite movie at the time.

So watching it, I was thinking, oh my God, your favorite movie is just going to win all the awards? This is great. And then I quickly realized the following year that that was not going to be the case. So yeah, there have been many in a mission, many a snob in Oscar history. I feel like there's two kinds, right? It didn't even get nominated. The Academy is just on a different planet

than a lot of moviegoers. And there is the, it was nominated, but it somehow lost. And I think to me, like, I guess we are going on 20 years later, like I still think about Brokeback Mountain losing to Crash, which was like this cartoonish algorithm of a dumb movie plot that was heavy handed and Brokeback Mountain was so good

in so many different ways. And that caused like a bit of a scandal in Interpor for a while of like why the voters voted one way as opposed to another almost always there's a good reason I it's a actually let me rephrase that there's a dumb reason That that makes no sense, but that it makes sense to the Academy somehow I mean for instance another movie that was not nominated for Best Picture is Singing in the Rain. Oh my God, right? I mean, today it's regarded as a classic musical. They're one of the great musicals.

It is one of the great musicals. It's arguably the great movie musical, right? But back then, it came out the year after American in Paris won the Oscar for Best Picture. They were not going to give another Best Picture to a Gene Kelly musical. It just wasn't going to happen. Another example is Apocalypse Now. How could you not give Apocalypse Now the award for Best Picture? But the year before, Deer Hunter won. And so that would look like the Academy was obsessed with Vietnam and they didn't want to be obsessed with anything. And so they shifted and they gave it to Kramer versus Kramer. Ted, I'm leaving you. Here are my keys. Here's my American Express card. Here's my Bloomingdale's credit card.

Here's my checkbook. I've taken $2,000 out of our savings account because that's what I had in the bank when we first got married. What's this some kind of joke? It's a nice movie. Perfectly nice movie. It's a it's arguably a terrific movie I'm glad yeah I think that's an important point to mention about Kramer v. Kramer Like I think looking back now obviously as Bob said that we have this kind of like timid domestic drama going up against this Grand operatic vision by your friends for Coppola But Kramer v. Kramer was not considered the kind of like, you know, it wasn't it wasn't weak at its in its time

This was critically acclaimed. So this was an example of a movie where the audience, critics, and the Oscars all converged. I feel like it's something that doesn't happen as much these days. You'll find more modest successes in this picture. And there's a kind of complaint that you'll find lately about, are the Oscars out of touch? I think there's one of the interesting trends

that you see at different points in history is kind of this big movement happening that people are responding to in theaters. And the Academy itself, the people who make it up, don't quite like the direction that Hollywood is moving and they snub it. And I think Mark the Dark Knight is an example. I'll show you. When the chips are down, these civilized people, they'll eat each other. The big Christopher Nolan epic Batman movie, the one where Heath Ledger plays Joker, changed the way movies were made in a way that we are unfortunately still living in.

Even though to me, Dark Knight is one of my favorite movies of all time, and as a person of a certain age, I think about it all the time. But I feel like it came, it made its presence felt, people took signals from it right or wrong. It changed the way movies were made. It changed the way it changed the Oscars. Because it didn't get nominated at all. It famously did not get nominated. I remember at the time there was a someone who came out from the Academy who said, you know, when they voted to change the rules to allow more

nominees, you know, to extend from five to 10, it, you know, it was part of the discussion where they said, you know, we can't lie that the Dark Knight was in our mind when we did this. I think the Dark Knight being snubbed is an example of just what voters are comfortable with, right? I think you see biopics a lot, you see the kind of historical dramas. You know, we talk about familiarity.

I think Academy voters also like what's familiar. Which is what happened with Citizen Kane. If you look at the stuff that was around then, there were- Nothing looked like Citizen Kane. Right, nothing at all. And no one was prepared for it. And they didn't know how to deal with it.

I think it's actually incredible that it got nominated because that said, you know, this guy Orson Welles is kind of a big deal. We respect the art, but it's kind of too much for us. Right. But we'll give you our props, but it's too much. It's the moderate approach that wins. And what I'm thinking of is driving Miss Daisy versus Do the Right Thing. What kind of sense does that make, right? Driving Miss Daisy is a nice, polite movie about race.

Your speed and I can see it. We're only going about 19 miles an hour. I like to go under the speed limit. It has the word Daisy in it. Exactly, exactly. It's an adaptation of an off-Broadway hit, a theatrical hit. Do the Right Thing was just like an explosion happening. Yeah, Spike Lee's movie from 89 about swimming racial tensions on a neighborhood block in Brooklyn, New York.

Hey, hey, Sal, how come you got the brothers up on the wall here? You want brothers on the wall? Get your own place. You can do what you want to do. You can put your brothers and uncles and nieces and nephews your stepfather stepmother Whoever you want you see but this is my pizzeria American Italians on the wall only remember reading contemporaneous reviews of it where you know Some people thought that black people were gonna riot At the end of a movie so people were legitimately losing it over do the right thing and driving miss Daisy Drive miss Daisy was like a hug, you know, I kind of touch you in at night Driving and do the right thing was a slap across the face telling you to

wake up, you know, wake up to the realities of race relations. And people didn't want to wake up at that time. Yeah. Let me ask the flip side of this. Are there years that jump out to you in that the Oscars got it right, they perfectly put their finger on that moment in cinema, that moment in pop culture, and there was the right movie, and they picked it. I have a couple moments, but Bob, you wanna go ahead? I know, I'm thinking.

Oh, come on. Did they ever pick the right movie? Come on. No, no, seriously, I think the whole notion of art as a horse race is stupid, just dumb. But if we're gonna do it, if we're gonna do it. And I think about a year that arguably contained the biggest Oscar blender of all time, the infamous Moonlight Loll and Envelope Mix-Up.

You'll recall when a number of producers got on stage and actually gave thank you addresses before they realized the wrong movie was announced. There's a mistake. Moonlight, you guys won best picture. I look at Moonlight, which I think not only was the best movie of its year, 2016, but also one of the best, best picture winners of all time. I think Moonlight was representative in a lot of ways of how the industry and by proxy how the society wanted to kind of view itself as far as what stories it valued. I mean, you look at La La Land and Moonlight,

you have this big Hollywood production, these two bright white stars. About LA, about Hollywood in a sense. About LA, it's about Hollywood. And then you have Moonlight, this really small intimate drama about a gay African American coming of age. And what you have there is this movie came at the tail end of the Obama years. And Obama represented this historic expansion of what a black person could do or be in this country, right? And Moonlight to me represented an expansion of the kind of black stories we could tell, how they could look, how they could move, how they could feel.

When someone like Moonlight does what, I think it does send a message to not only audience members, it sends a message to other directors and filmmakers who say, well, you know, I may not have a La La Land in me, but I do have a Moonlight in me. And maybe that can get represented. Or a hearthlocker. Or a hearthlocker. I mean, yeah, when those happen, it is magical. Exactly. It's really, it's great. It shakes things up.

For sure. And I think we've looked at the Oscars to shake things up. They rarely ever do. But when they do, I think it's worth noting. Senfieres, Bob Mandela, and Mark Rivers, thanks to both of you. Great fun. Thank you, Scott. This episode was produced by Connor Donovan.

It was edited by Adam Rady and Claire Lombardo. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detro.