Stephen King names the biggest robbery in Oscars history: “Great work is almost never rewarded”
The biggest and most obvious problem with the Oscars is that each acting category can only have five nominees, and there are always more than five performances worthy of consideration.
The ‘Best Picture’ category took that to heart and expanded the field to anywhere up to ten titles, which was largely instigated by the outrage over Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight being shut out, but it does lead to the occasional bizarre moment when movies like F1 somehow manage to make the cut.
At least the Golden Globes separates its performative accolades into drama and musical or comedy, although the latter does have a habit of handing over prizes to turns that came in pictures that are neither musicals nor comedies. There’s at least one egregious snub every year, and one of them left Stephen King particularly indignant.
Does he have a leg to stand on? In a word, no. This being one of pop culture’s most prolific writers and a one-man Hollywood pipeline, though, you could have probably guessed that the performance he believed deserved an Oscar nomination at the very least came in a Stephen King adaptation.
A handful of names have been recognised for their work in the author’s page-to-screen translations, from The Shawshank Redemption‘s Morgan Freeman to The Green Mile‘s Michael Clarke Duncan, with Piper Laurie and Sissy Spacek both being nominated for Carrie. However, there’s only been one winner.
If the Academy had listened to him, though, there should have been two. Let’s agree to disagree on that front, because even though it was a well-received psychological chiller that did a tidy turn at the box office and earned its stripes as one of the most underrated King adaptations ever, did anybody watch Mikael Håfström’s 1408 and think either of the lead performances were Oscar-worthy?
At least one person did, and their name was Stephen King. “John Cusack gives a bravura performance as a cynical debunker of the supernatural who discovers that there really is an invisible world out there, one full of horrors beyond imagining,” he wrote in Danse Macabre. “As a one-man depiction of madness, it stands alone.”
Naturally, he also managed to get in the requisite dig at The Shining. “And Room 1408 in the fictional Dolphin Hotel is scarier than all the rooms of Stanley Kubrick’s Overlook put together,” he offered. “In overlooking Cusack’s performance, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences once more proved that great work is almost never rewarded if it’s done in a horror movie.”
Obviously, he wouldn’t have known it at the time, but films like The Substance and the record-breaking Sinners have helped put paid to that notion in recent years. As you’d expect, Kathy Bates’ ‘Best Actress’ win for Misery was noted as “the exception that proves the rule,” with King ensuring that he got another reference to one of his own works in there.
