“Groundhog Day” (1993)
Like a metaphysical Frank Capra, Harold Ramis’ masterpiece “Groundhog Day” is about as close as we get to a perfect latter-day comedy (or at least it’d be perfect if someone else was in the Andie MacDowell role). Despite good reviews and strong box office, the film was entirely ignored by awards bodies: partly, one imagines, due to its early-year February release date, and partly due to the Academy’s general aversion to comedy.
“Harold And Maude” (1971)
Hal Ashby was already an Oscar winner (for editing “In The Heat Of The Night”) by the time he became a director, which perhaps explains why the Academy took a little while to cotton on to his brilliance. Most of his 1970s classics like “The Last Detail,” “Shampoo” and “Coming Home” received multiple nominations (the latter getting Ashby his only directing nod), but arguably his finest film, quirky young-guy/older-lady romance “Harold & Maude,” received nothing (the film was admittedly greeted with puzzlement at the time by many critics).
“Heat” (1995)
You’d think Al Pacino and Robert De Niro working on the same film for the second time in their careers (and face-to-face for the very first time) would get some award traction, right? How about Michael Mann working at the apex of his powers? “Heat” is to L.A. crime films what “Citizen Kane” is to films period, but, hey, 1995 was a crazy year in film. Mel Gibson was beloved, and Nicolas Cage was an Oscar winning actor. Nope, see, we tried, but that still doesn’t explain this absurd lapse.
“His Girl Friday” (1940)
Remember when we said that “Bringing Up Baby” was the greatest screwball comedy ever? “His Girl Friday,” a gender-swapped adaptation of stage classic “The Front Page” starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, also from director Howard Hawks, is right up there too. But like ‘Baby,’ the film was completely ignored by Oscar voters: something that became a running theme for the director, who despite being one of classic Hollywood’s finest, was only ever nominated once, for “Sergeant York” in 1942.
“The Innocents” (1961)
Again, horror is never a big pull for the Academy, but you’d think that Jack Clayton’s “The Innocents” — an adaptation of Henry James’ “The Turn Of The Screw,” with a screenplay by Truman Capote, and starring six-time Oscar nominee Deborah Kerr — might have been an exception. But despite some stellar reviews (Truffaut called it “the best English film after Hitchcock went to America”), two BAFTA nods and the National Board of Review prize for Best Director, Oscar neglected to give a single nomination to one of the greatest ghost stories ever.
“In The Mood For Love” (2000)
Wong Kar-Wai’s tender, sensual romance “In The Mood For Love” is often called one of the very best films of the 2000s: indeed, it was ranked the highest of any film from that decade in the most recent Sight & Sound poll. But it proved a little too artsy for the Academy, who gave the Best Foreign Language Film prize that year to “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon,” leaving Wong’s film without a single nomination (indeed, none of his films got attention from the Oscars until two nominations last year for “The Grandmaster”).
“Johnny Guitar” (1954)
Despite, or perhaps because of it being the most purely American of genres, the Academy have generally looked down on Westerns. Only three films in the genre (“Cimarron,” “Dances With Wolves” and “Unforgiven”) have ever won Best Picture. As such, it shouldn’t be surprising that Nicholas Ray’s “Johnny Guitar,” the Joan Crawford-starring weird, offbeat, feminist entry in the chronicle of America’s frontier, was totally excluded from the Oscars that year (though the film was badly reviewed at the time, only gaining in critical standing over time).
“Kind Hearts And Coronets” (1948)
Comedy is notoriously resistant to traveling, which is perhaps why, aside from some mild success for “The Lavender Hill Mob” and “The Ladykillers,” the classic comedies by Ealing Studios never made much of a splash at the Oscars. The biggest casualty was the pitch-black and brilliant “Kind Hearts & Coronets,” about a man’s bid to ascend to the aristocracy by murdering multilple members of the same family, all played by Alec Guinness. Perhaps the film itself being passed over would be excusable, but that Guinness wasn’t nominated is a giant injustice.
“King Kong” (1933)
As 2017’s “Kong: Skull Island” indicates, giant ape King Kong is one of cinema’s most enduring creations, but his first outing, in Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1933 film, came up empty with the Oscars. One would like to put it down to the film being a pure genre picture, but both the inferior 1976 remake, and Peter Jackson’s slightly less inferior 2005 version, received more Academy recognition (though admittedly a visual effects category didn’t exist until 1938).
“Kiss Me Deadly” (1955)
Film noir was another genre that never really clicked with the Academy, and Robert Aldrich’s killer nuclear-paranoia-fuelled Mike Hammer mystery “Kiss Me Deadly” was just one example. Despite great reviews, the film was seemingly deemed to be too much of a B-movie to warrant any nominations, particularly after it came in for criticism by the Kefauver Committee into organized crime. History had the last laugh though, with the film being selected for the Library Of Congress in 1999 (something yet to happen for most of that year’s Best Picture nominees, including “Mister Roberts” and “Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing”).
