Some ground rules. It would take an aeon to go through the best films that simply failed to take the Oscar for best picture. What we’re doing here is detailing the best films that were nominated but lost (more often than not to a lesser work). That distinction explains why almost all the unfortunate runners up below are in English. We have picked only one film per director, which proved bad news for Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg.
We also allowed only one film per year. This led to some rending of garments when 1939 and 1975 were under the microscope. Apologies, in advance, to Alfred Hitchcock, often nominated, but never for the right film.
We’re betting that The Zone of Interest would make the list if we were compiling it after the 2024 Academy Awards on Sunday. But who knows?
25. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
It’s a lumbering beast that often slips into pretentiousness, but it still has enormous gut-churning power. As one of the dullest stretches for the Oscars loomed, it lost out to the none-more-different (and now largely sniffed at) Kramer vs Kramer.
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24. LA Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997)
You couldn’t walk to the shops that year without someone telling you Hanson’s sprawling noir thriller deserved to edge out the unstoppable Titanic. That was never going to happen. Maybe not as celebrated now as when it came out.
23. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)
In these more careful times, we are a little unsure about the exoticisation of Japan in Coppola’s utterly original anti-romantic comedy. But no film better captures the numbed ambience of the postmillennial temperament. Lost to Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (which many people seem to like).
22. A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2009)
Not Fargo? Not quite. The Coen’s finest film – a black comedy that dares the bleakest imaginable ending – profited as, for the first time since 1943, the academy nominated all of 10 films. The Hurt Locker came up past Avatar on the inside to triumph.
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21. Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)
This wasn’t supposed to be on this list. In, perhaps, the second biggest upset in this category – after Moonlight beating La La Land – Lee’s perfect western romance lost out to the profoundly ordinary Crash. There was much speculation that lingering homophobia was to blame.
20. The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)
The build-up is among the finest experiments in tension Hollywood has attempted. Maybe it gets a tad overheated after that, but still a stunning piece of contemporary Grand Guignol. We also were tempted by Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers. They lost to the perfectly grand The Sting.
19. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
The mid-1990s. Indie! Miramax! Harvey We*nste*n! Here is where it all kicked off. Not Tarantino’s most polished screenplay – that is still Reservoir Dogs – but an unbeatably hip and quotable festival of comedy and violence. Of course, the voters went for the fatuous Forrest Gump instead.
18. Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982)
And I don’t care who knows it. “You were a tomato! A tomato doesn’t have logic! A tomato can’t move!” Pollack won for the dreary Out of Africa a few years later, but this old-school comedy remains his masterpiece. Nothing was getting past Gandhi that year. Welcome to Oscars’ flabby 1980s.
17. Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2017)
A good year. Get Out. Phantom Thread. Dunkirk. Call Me by Your Name. The Shape of Water (which won). But the film that will last best is Gerwig’s endlessly touching tale of growing up awkward in drab Sacramento. Saoirse Ronan is just perfect in her snitty battles with a frustrated Laurie Metcalfe.
16. Great Expectations (David Lean, 1947)
Quite simply the best Dickens adaptation ever made. The huge cast is perfectly chosen – chummy John Mills as Pip, wise Alec Guinness as Herbert Pocket – but Martita Hunt steals it as a sly Miss Havisham. Elia Kazan took the prize for his worthy, not much remembered, Gentleman’s Agreement.
15. Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953)
A perfect romantic comedy that brought Gregory Peck together with a virtually unknown Audrey Hepburn. Walk the streets of Rome today and you will see stills from the flick displayed in every third cafe. We were also tempted by Shane that year. They lost to From here to Eternity.
14. The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)
As the 1970s loomed, the generation that treated classic Hollywood as sacred texts took over and began working tributes in with their looser stories. Bogdanovich’s adaptation of a Larry McMurtry novel used the movie house as a symbol of fading glories. Beaten by the very different, but equally ground-breaking, The French Connection.
13. Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
How could Polanski’s knotty variation on mid-century noir lose? Well, it was up against The Godfather Part II, among the greatest films made, so nobody could reasonably call foul. Great script by Robert Towne. Jack Nicholson at his sneaky best.
12. The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980)
Everyone still groans about Ordinary People – a fine film – beating out Raging Bull, but David Lynch’s second feature, an unbeatable evocation of Victorian grime, was at least as worthy. Proved early on that he was not just a master of the surreal.
11. The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940)
A finely oiled mechanism that makes the best of supremely gifted comics: Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, James Stewart. Everybody is assembled in a posh Philadelphia estate for squabbling of the most elegant fashion. That year saw the only best picture win for a Hitchcock project: the inky Rebecca.
10. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
It was round about here that the promise of the early 1970s began to give way to mainstream fightback. Scorsese’s untouchable urban nightmare – set at a time when New York looked set to go the way of Carthage – lost to the less conflicted Rocky. A year later Star Wars was nominated.
9. There Will be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
It is hard to imagine any actor other than Daniel Day-Lewis getting away with the enormousness he brought to oil tycoon Daniel Plainview. Anderson just about contains that character’s boiling ambition within a film that, for its opening half-hour, plays like a machine-driven ballet. All clanks, whirrs and sighs. Lost out to the fine No Country for Old Men.
8. Dr Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
Maybe not the best Kubrick film to lose (see next entry), but no flaws attach themselves to his bitter, hugely imaginative comedy about no funnier a subject than the end of the world. Peter Sellers, in three roles, bossed the production, but Ken Adam, the legendary designer, deserves almost as much credit. Lost to Cukor’s My Fair Lady.
7. Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)
This year, man! One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest won. Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Nashville and (sue me) Steven Spielberg’s best film all belong on this list. Even with that clunky shark hogging more sunlight than he deserves, Jaws remains a masterly amalgam of suspense and lads-on-the-piss comedy.
6. It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)
What you heard is true. Until as late as the 1980s, Capra’s sprawling, sometimes scary tale of a life lived well – even if it doesn’t seem so – had no particular special place in the American Christmas. Reruns on TV eventually won it the audience it deserves. The moving postwar drama The Best Years of Our Lives took the prize.
5. The Red Shoes (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1948)
It now seems beyond belief that the UK’s finest filmmakers fell into relative obscurity during the 1960s. The Archers were at their absolute best with this eerie, romantic drama set amid the London ballet scene. As ever, the celebration of creative artificiality is a treat. Lost to another British film: Olivier’s Hamlet.
4. Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)
This was the year of the showdown between two spiky tales of female actors superannuated before their time: Joseph L Mankiewicz’s All About Eve won the Oscar battle, but the defeat did no lasting damage to Wilder’s odd masterpiece. Gloria Swanson a near-expressionistic pleasure.
3. Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)
The famous annus mirabilis of classical American cinema. The Wizard of Oz (sorry), Ninotchka (sorry, again) and Goodbye Mr Chips were among the films losing to the problematic Gone With the Wind, but we went for the most purely entertaining western. Orson Welles watched it 40 times when preparing ...
2. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
Never mind Brokeback Mountain or La La Land. Kane’s loss to John Ford’s (perfectly fine) How Green was My Valley is still perhaps the most chewed over defeat in Oscar history. Welles’s variation on W Randolph Hearst’s rise survived the pressure of being labelled “the greatest film ever made” thanks to its speed, ingenuity and endless wit. Nothing clicks along quite like it
1. La Grande Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937)
The presence of Renoir’s flawless French prison-of-war drama among that year’s nominees is a real anomaly. It took over 30 years for another film not in English, Costa-Gavras’s Z, to make the shortlist and more than another 50 for Parasite to become the first winner. An anti-war film of the wittiest stripe, La Grande Illusion still makes the case for poetic realism with undiminished vigour. Lost to Capra’s mid-level You Can’t Take It with You.
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