10 directors who won an Oscar for the wrong movie
Whereas the ‘Best Picture’ shortlist at the Academy Awards has been expanded to anywhere up to ten films, the rest of the major Oscar categories remain restricted to a field of five nominees. It was clearly an issue for the organisers of the event, who saw the potential of increasing the field.
The organisation even admitted that Christopher Nolan and The Dark Knight were among the driving forces behind increasing the volume of titles that can compete for the industry’s most vaunted accolade, even though there have been plenty of egregious directorial snubs over the years, too.
While many of the industry’s most iconic auteurs and gifted filmmakers have at least one Oscar to their name, in many instances, it’s come for the wrong movie. Politics are every bit as important to awards season as quality, which has left plenty of deserving winners on the outside looking in.
All ten of the following directors have an Oscar, which is the least they deserved for their career-long efforts to leave the art of cinema in a better place than they found it. However, it can’t help but be noticed that every single one of them should have won for a completely different feature.
10 directors who won Oscars for the wrong movies:
Leo McCarey
A regular fixture of the Oscars, Leo McCarey won three Academy Awards from eight nominations but made the entire accurate complaint upon winning his first that he’d been rewarded for the wrong movie.
It’s not often a filmmaker will call out a self-perceived snub when they’re being celebrated for their latest work, but when he took to the stage to collect his ‘Best Director’ prize for 1937’s The Awful Truth, McCarey told the world that he’d just won an Oscar for the wrong movie.
In his acceptance speech, he said, “Thanks, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture,” alluding to Make Way for Tomorrow, which had been released three months before The Awful Truth but wasn’t nominated. If that’s the opinion of the guy who made it, then it’s hard to argue, especially when he was right.
Ron Howard
Ron Howard isn’t a director who often troubles the Oscars, although Hollywood’s safest pair of hands does have ‘Best Director’ and ‘Best Director’ trophies in his cabinet.
Nobody would call A Beautiful Mind his greatest work, but the Academy decided he was the consensus pick for the industry’s most prestigious directorial prize in 2002, which boggles the mind when David Lynch and Mulholland Drive were right there.
Apollo 13 should have gotten Howard onto the podium, yet despite winning the Directors Guild of America award, he wasn’t even nominated, another bizarre call in a year where Braveheart‘s Mel Gibson trumped a weak field that included Babe‘s Chris Noonan, Dead Man Walking‘s Tim Robbins, Leaving Las Vegas‘ Mike Figgis, and Il Postino: The Postman‘s Michael Radford.
Wes Anderson
Cinema’s resident king of quirk was running the risk of becoming a permanent Oscars bridesmaid after notching seven unsuccessful nominations, only for Wes Anderson to finally claim one for a 39-minute short that barely troubled Netflix’s top ten most-watched list.
The streaming service’s Roald Dahl adaptation, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, scooped the ‘Best Live-Action Short’ trophy, more than 20 years after Anderson should have won ‘Best Original Screenplay’ for The Royal Tenenbaums.
No offence to Gosford Park, but Anderson should have emerged victorious at the very first time asking instead of one of the industry’s most recognisable and distinctive auteurs getting their long-awaited Oscar for something almost immediately swallowed by Netflix’s algorithm.
Guillermo del Toro
The only person in Oscars history to win ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, and ‘Best Animated Feature’, Guillermo del Toro has turned his lifelong obsession with horror and fantasy into critical, commercial, and awards season gold.
That said, was The Shape of Water really a better-directed movie than Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, or Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, the four features the fish-fucking epic defeated to earn del Toro his statue?
He should have won an Oscar a decade previously, but he didn’t even get on the directorial shortlist for Pan’s Labyrinth, which was also usurped in the ‘Best International Feature’ race by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others.
George Cukor
Legendary filmmaker George Cukor won his Oscar for ‘Best Director’ on his fifth and final nomination for 1964’s sweeping musical dramedy My Fair Lady, which was the runaway victor of that year’s awards season.
However, as beloved as it may be, it doesn’t hold up anywhere near as well as some of the other pictures he was in the running for. His 1933 adaptation of Little Women set an early benchmark for bringing Louisa May Alcott’s novel to the screen, and A Double Life remains one of Hollywood’s greatest-ever noirs.
The Philadelphia Story realistically didn’t stand a chance in the ‘Best Director’ stakes when it went directly up against John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, but the fact remains that My Fair Lady was Cukor’s weakest nominee, yet the film he got his Oscar for.
Sydney Pollack
As an actor, filmmaker, and producer, Sydney Pollack amassed one of his era’s most impressive bodies of work on either side of the camera, reaching the pinnacle when Out of Africa earned him an overdue ‘Best Director’ Oscar.
Sure, it was a massive hit that cleaned up at the box office and won another six trophies, including ‘Best Picture’, but it wasn’t his finest hour. Even at the time of its release, the romantic epic was criticised for being too long, too dull, and prone to narrative navel-gazing, all of which is true.
Pollack had already been nominated for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Tootsie, never mind his work on This Property Is Condemned, Jeremiah Johnson, Three Days of the Condor, and Absence of Malice going unrecognised by the Academy when they were all superior to Out of Africa.
George Miller
Surely, the remit of the Oscar for ‘Best Director’ should be awarded to the filmmaker who crafted a jaw-dropping work of cinema that couldn’t have even been envisioned by anybody else, never mind captured on celluloid.
With that in mind, if it wasn’t for Alejandro G Iñárritu and The Revenant – a director and movie that definitely fits the criteria – then Miller was the standout candidate to win for Mad Max: Fury Road, an astonishing technical and artistic achievement that no other auteur could replicate.
The Australian maverick does have an Oscar, though, after Happy Feet won ‘Best Animated Feature’ in 2007. It was a three-film field that was rounded out by Pixar’s Cars and Monster House, so it was hardly the most cutthroat race of the evening or, in general, really. Still, Fury Road should have been his moment.
Spike Lee
Spike Lee technically has three Oscars, but only one of them was competitive, and it had nothing to do with his directorial prowess.
He won a Student Academy Award for Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads in 1983, an honorary gong for his overall contributions to cinema in 2016, and a ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’ trophy for BlackKklansman three years later.
Kim Basinger said it best at the 1990 edition of the ceremony when she criticised the Academy for shutting Do the Right Thing out of the ‘Best Picture’ race right before presenting the trophy to a thoroughly undeserving winner in Driving Miss Daisy. Lee didn’t make the cut for ‘Best Director’ either, which rightly left him fuming.
Carol Reed
Befitting his reputation as one of the most important and influential British filmmakers in history, Carol Reed helmed one of the most important and influential British films in history.
That would be The Third Man, the seminal noir that impacted cinema well beyond the borders of the United Kingdom, and endures eight decades later as a stone-cold classic that laid down a set of markers modern directors are still looking towards for inspiration.
Reed was deservedly nominated for ‘Best Director’, only to lose to A Letter to Three Wives‘ Joseph L. Mankiewicz. He won two decades later and two decades too late for 1968’s Oliver!, an Oscar he should never have won when 2001: A Space Odyssey‘s Stanley Kubrick was in the mix and completely overlooked.
Martin Scorsese
When it comes to the movies that should have won Martin Scorsese an Oscar long before The Departed, there’s hardly a shortage of candidates to choose from.
It was nailed-on that his crime thriller was winning the big one when Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Francis Ford Coppola emerged with the envelope, even if it smacked more of lifetime achievement than the crowning glory of an illustrious Hollywood career.
Before The Departed, Scorsese had been Oscar-nominated as a director or writer for Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence, Gangs of New York, and The Aviator, making it one of the Academy’s most long-overdue anointments. However, getting the cherry on top of the cake for a movie that isn’t even in his top five came way too late.
