Academy Award



""I can't go on! No food, no water! It's All My Fault. We're done for! It's got me. I can't stand it! No food, nothing! No food, no water! No food! HAHAHAHAHA!!"

"What's the matter with you, anyway? There's New York. We'll be picked up in a few minutes."

(snaps out of it) "You had to open your big mouth and ruin the only good scene I got in the picture. I might've won the Academy Award!""

- Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, Road to Morocco

Here on the internet, people usually think of the awards presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as "that thing where Billy Crystal does a musical medley, runs overtime and has even made a cliche of lampshading that fact, snubbed Citizen Kane, Star Wars, and Pulp Fiction for best picture, gave that award to only one of the The Lord of the Rings films, and thought Tron was 'cheating' by using CGI.

First of all, that implies that "True Art Is Nerdy", and we shouldn't go there. Second of all, there is a lot more to the Academy Awards than that. Of note though, Before Star Wars at least four of the five nominees for Best Picture were in the top ten grossing pictures of that year. The auteur movement of the 1970s caused a separation of 'art' and 'popular'. Though Star Wars WAS still nominated for Best Picture, it lost the Oscar to Annie Hall. From then on, it was only rarely that a top-grossing film was also a nominee. Notable Exceptions were Rain Man in 1989, Forrest Gump in 1994, Titanic in 1997, the The Lord of the Rings trilogy in 2001-2003, Avatar in 2009, and Toy Story 3 in 2010.

Admittedly, the award, known as The Oscar, seems like just a way for Hollywood to suck up to itself, but its purpose was originally to encourage better filmmaking as well as promote the industry. The Academy is not actually a school, but a collection of people in the film industry that is dedicated to the advancement of films. Again, The Oscar was meant to help that along.

It's just that from the beginning, everyone knew the prestige it would hold, and the various forms of Oscar Bait almost immediately followed.

Related tropes include Oscar Bait, Vindicated by History, and a great deal of Award Snub. Mostly, it's another Award Show - albeit the most famous.

The following are some specific historical retrospectives concerning certain practices of the academy:
 * The first Oscar ceremony involved quite a bit of Early Installment Weirdness.
 * There was no "Best Picture Award" given, but instead, two oddly redundant awards--Most Outstanding Production, which went to Wings, and Most Unique and Artistic Quality of Production, which went to Sunrise. After that first ceremony the Unique and Artistic Quality award was discontinued and a single Best Production Award was instituted, with the name later changed to Best Picture. Wings is often listed as the sole "Best Picture" winner at the first ceremony. (Both categories are included in the list below).
 * Winners were announced in advance, for the only time.
 * Two Best Director awards were given, one for drama and one for comedy. Starting with the second Oscars only one directing award was given out.
 * For each of the first three Academy Awards, the Best Actor and Best Actress awards were given for the best body of work within a year, rather than for an individual performance.
 * In the 2009 Oscars, the late Heath Ledger won Best Supporting Actor for The Dark Knight, proving that True Art is Psychopathic and that Dead Artists Are Better. Ledger was only the second actor to win a posthumous Oscar; the first being Peter Finch for Network. Curiously, both actors were Australian.
 * As evidenced by The Return Of The King's sweep, the Academy is willing to give a serious look to non-mundane films as worthy of the Academy's highest honors in writing and directing in addition to the technical awards which such films can usually garner (although the fact The Lord of the Rings had such a significant pedigree before being adapted probably didn't hurt matters much).
 * Animated works have also undergone a major transformation. Back when studios still had theater cartoons, the Animated Short Subject feature was an award which studios clamored for. These days, animated works are most likely to be avant-garde subjects which most people are unlikely to ever see (unless, of course, the studio that produced them later becomes very famous) aside from the festival circuit.
 * Since 1945, the Best Picture Oscar has gone to the film that simply received the most votes; starting with the 2010 Academy Awards, the Academy will return to the original voting format: voters will rank the nominated films from best to worst, and then the votes will be tallied up to determine which film wins the award. One could argue that this was done to ensure that all of the nominated films will be on a level playing field and (along with the extra five nominations) help to placate the people who complained about the Best Picture snubs from the 2009 awards.
 * This USA Today article with an interactive graphic explains the voting procedure perfectly.
 * The award for Best Documentary Feature has also suffered from having a rather strange definition - documentaries can be disqualified for airing on TV too soon as well as for involving the use of too much archival footage. This says nothing about the fact that until Bowling for Columbine won in 2002, it was fairly rare for any Academy Award-winning documentaries to be available to the common public at all. Five of the six winners before Bowling for Columbine all involved Jews being killed as a result of anti-semitism. Not That There's Anything Wrong with That (the films that is, not anti-semitism), but people would raise eyebrows if this were the topic of the Best Picture nominee with that kind of frequency. Before that, there was the Hoop Dreams snub of 1994.
 * Since Bowling for Columbine, though, the award has come under the same scrutiny as most other major categories, and most winners, while not all are as famous as An Inconvenient Truth or March Of The Penguins, can usually be found at your local video store.
 * The Foreign Language film category is also notorious for extremely complicated rules and a country can only submit one film to the Academy for nomination consideration. It's also subject to the rules about television airings; Japan wanted to submit Shall We Dance? in 1997, but it had already had a TV airing in its home country and was disqualified. (They submitted Princess Mononoke instead; it didn't get a nomination.)
 * Until 2010, no woman had ever won the Best Director award. Kathryn Bigelow was the first, winning for The Hurt Locker -- beating out her ex-husband, James Cameron (for Avatar) in the process. Both the Animation Age Ghetto and Sci Fi Ghetto were ignored this year, as Up, Avatar and District 9 were all up for best picture. That said, the "blockbuster rule" prevailed- Avatar only won three technical awards, while The Hurt Locker became the lowest-grossing movie to ever win Best Picture.
 * As of 2012 not one African American has won the Best Director award, and only two, John Singleton(Boyz N the Hood) & Lee Daniels(Precious), have been nominated. Despite Common Knowledge, Spike Lee has never been nominated for Best Director.
 * The BAFTA Film Awards, Britain's version of the Oscars, is traditionally held as a good indicator for the winners of the Oscars.

Films with Best Picture wins or nominations and pages on this wiki include:

 * Sunrise (Unique and Artistic Production) (1928 winner)
 * The Crowd: (Unique and Artistic Production): (1928 nominee)
 * Wings (Best Production) (1928 winner)
 * All Quiet on the Western Front (1930 winner)
 * Grand Hotel (1932 winner)
 * I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932 nominee)
 * 42nd Street (1933 nominee)
 * Lady for a Day (1933 nominee)
 * It Happened One Night (1934 winner)
 * The Thin Man (1934 nominee)
 * Mutiny on the Bounty (1935 winner)
 * Captain Blood (1935 nominee)
 * The Great Ziegfeld (1936 winner)
 * Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936 nominee)
 * The Good Earth (1937 nominee)
 * A Star Is Born (1937 nominee)
 * You Can't Take It With You (1938 winner)
 * The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938 nominee)
 * The Grand Illusion (1938 nominee)
 * Gone with the Wind (1939 winner)
 * Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939 nominee)
 * Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939 nominee)
 * Ninotchka (1939 nominee)
 * Stagecoach (1939 nominee)
 * The Wizard of Oz (1939 nominee)
 * Wuthering Heights (1939 nominee)
 * Rebecca (1940 winner)
 * The Grapes of Wrath (1940 nominee)
 * The Great Dictator (1940 nominee)
 * The Philadelphia Story (1940 nominee)
 * How Green Was My Valley (1941 winner)
 * Citizen Kane (1941 nominee)
 * The Maltese Falcon (1941 nominee)
 * Mrs. Miniver (1942 winner)
 * Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942 nominee)
 * Casablanca (1943 winner)
 * Heaven Can Wait (1943 nominee)
 * Double Indemnity (1944 nominee)
 * Gaslight (1944 nominee)
 * Since You Went Away (1944 nominee)
 * The Lost Weekend (1945 winner)
 * Anchors Aweigh (1945 nominee)
 * Mildred Pierce (1945 nominee)
 * Spellbound (1945 nominee)
 * The Best Years of Our Lives (1946 winner)
 * Its a Wonderful Life (1946 nominee)
 * Miracle On Thirty Fourth Street (1947 nominee)
 * The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948 nominee)
 * All the Kings Men (1949 winner)
 * The Heiress (1949 nominee)
 * A Letter to Three Wives (1949 nominee)
 * All About Eve (1950 winner)
 * Born Yesterday (1950 nominee)
 * Sunset Boulevard (1950 nominee)
 * A Streetcar Named Desire (1951 nominee)
 * High Noon (1952 nominee)
 * The Quiet Man (1952 nominee)
 * From Here to Eternity (1953 winner)
 * Roman Holiday (1953 nominee)
 * Shane (1953 nominee)
 * On the Waterfront (1954 winner)
 * Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954 nominee)
 * The King and I (1956 nominee)
 * The Ten Commandments (1956 nominee)
 * Around the World in Eighty Days (1956 winner)
 * The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957 winner)
 * 12 Angry Men (1957 nominee)
 * Witness for the Prosecution (1957 nominee)
 * Gigi (1958 winner)
 * Ben-Hur (1959 winner)
 * Anatomy of a Murder (1959 nominee)
 * The Diary of Anne Frank (1959 nominee)
 * The Apartment (1960 winner)
 * Elmer Gantry (1960 nominee)
 * West Side Story (1961 winner)
 * The Guns of Navarone (1961 nominee)
 * Lawrence of Arabia (1962 winner)
 * The Longest Day (1962 nominee)
 * The Music Man (1962 nominee)
 * Mutiny on the Bounty (1962 nominee)
 * To Kill a Mockingbird (1962 nominee)
 * Cleopatra (1963 nominee)
 * My Fair Lady (1964 winner)
 * Dr. Strangelove (1964 nominee)
 * Mary Poppins (1964 nominee)
 * Zorba the Greek (1964 nominee)
 * The Sound of Music (1965 winner)
 * Doctor Zhivago (1965 nominee)
 * A Man for All Seasons (1966 winner)
 * Alfie (1966 nominee)
 * The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966 nominee)
 * Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966 nominee)
 * In the Heat of the Night (1967 winner)
 * Bonnie and Clyde (1967 nominee)
 * The Graduate (1967 nominee)
 * Guess Whos Coming to Dinner (1967 nominee)
 * Oliver! (1968 winner)
 * Funny Girl (1968 nominee)
 * The Lion in Winter (1968 nominee)
 * Midnight Cowboy (1969 winner)
 * Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969 nominee)
 * Hello, Dolly! (1969 nominee)
 * Z (1969 nominee)
 * Patton (1970 winner)
 * Airport (1970 nominee)
 * Five Easy Pieces (1970 nominee)
 * Love Story (1970 nominee)
 * M*A*S*H (1970 nominee)
 * The French Connection (1971 winner)
 * A Clockwork Orange (1971 nominee)
 * Fiddler On the Roof (1971 nominee)
 * The Godfather (1972 winner)
 * Cabaret (1972 nominee)
 * Deliverance (1972 nominee)
 * The Sting (1973 winner)
 * American Graffiti (1973 nominee)
 * The Exorcist (1973 nominee)
 * The Godfather Part II (1974 winner)
 * Chinatown (1974 nominee)
 * The Conversation (1974 nominee)
 * The Towering Inferno (1974 nominee)
 * One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (1975 winner)
 * Barry Lyndon (1975 nominee)
 * Dog Day Afternoon (1975 nominee)
 * Jaws (1975 nominee)
 * Nashville (1975 nominee)
 * Rocky (1976 winner)
 * All the Presidents Men (1976 nominee)
 * Network (1976 nominee)
 * Taxi Driver (1976 nominee)
 * Annie Hall (1977 winner)
 * Star Wars (1977 nominee)
 * The Turning Point (1977 nominee)
 * The Deer Hunter (1978 winner)
 * Coming Home (1978 nominee)
 * Midnight Express (1978 nominee)
 * Kramer vs. Kramer (1979 winner)
 * All That Jazz (1979 nominee)
 * Apocalypse Now (1979 nominee)
 * Ordinary People (1980 winner)
 * The Elephant Man (1980 nominee)
 * Raging Bull (1980 nominee)
 * Chariots of Fire (1981 winner)
 * Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981 nominee)
 * Gandhi (1982 winner)
 * ET the Extraterrestrial (1982 nominee)
 * Missing (1982 nominee)
 * Tootsie (1982 nominee)
 * The Verdict (1982 nominee)
 * Terms of Endearment (1983 winner)
 * The Big Chill (1983 nominee)
 * The Right Stuff (1983 nominee)
 * Amadeus (1984 winner)
 * The Killing Fields (1984 nominee)
 * A Passage to India (1984 nominee)
 * Out of Africa (1985 winner)
 * The Color Purple (1985 nominee)
 * Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985 nominee)
 * Witness: (1985 nominee)
 * Platoon (1986 winner)
 * The Last Emperor (1987 winner)
 * Broadcast News (1987 nominee)
 * Fatal Attraction (1987 nominee)
 * Hannah and Her Sisters (1987 nominee)
 * Moonstruck (1987 nominee)
 * Rain Man (1988 winner)
 * Dangerous Liaisons (1988 nominee)
 * Mississippi Burning (1988 nominee)
 * Working Girl (1988 nominee)
 * Driving Miss Daisy (1989 winner)
 * Born On the Fourth of July (1989 nominee)
 * Dead Poets Society (1989 nominee)
 * Field of Dreams (1989 nominee)
 * Dances with Wolves (1990 winner)
 * Awakenings (1990 nominee)
 * Ghost (1990 nominee)
 * The Godfather Part III (1990 nominee)
 * Goodfellas (1990 nominee)
 * The Silence of the Lambs (1991 winner)
 * Beauty and the Beast (1991 nominee)
 * JFK (1991 nominee)
 * Unforgiven (1992 winner)
 * The Crying Game (1992 nominee)
 * A Few Good Men (1992 nominee)
 * Schindler's List (1993 winner)
 * The Fugitive (1993 nominee)
 * In the Name of the Father (1993 nominee)
 * Forrest Gump (1994 winner)
 * Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994 nominee)
 * Pulp Fiction (1994 nominee)
 * The Shawshank Redemption (1994 nominee)
 * Braveheart (1995 winner)
 * Apollo 13 (1995 nominee)
 * Babe (1995 nominee)
 * Sense and Sensibility (1995 nominee)
 * The English Patient (1996 winner)
 * Fargo (1996 nominee)
 * Jerry Maguire (1996 nominee)
 * Titanic (1997 winner)
 * As Good as It Gets (1997 nominee)
 * The Full Monty (1997 nominee)
 * Good Will Hunting (1997 nominee)
 * L.A. Confidential (1997 nominee)
 * Shakespeare in Love (1998 winner)
 * Life Is Beautiful (1998 nominee)
 * Saving Private Ryan (1998 nominee)
 * The Thin Red Line (1998 nominee)
 * American Beauty (1999 winner)
 * The Green Mile (1999 nominee)
 * The Insider (1999 nominee)
 * The Sixth Sense (1999 nominee)
 * Gladiator (2000 winner)
 * Chocolat (2000 nominee)
 * Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000 nominee)
 * Traffic (2000 nominee)
 * A Beautiful Mind (2001 winner)
 * Gosford Park (2001 nominee)
 * The Fellowship of the Ring (2001 nominee)
 * Moulin Rouge! (2001 nominee)
 * Chicago (2002 winner)
 * Gangs of New York (2002 nominee)
 * The Two Towers (2002 nominee)
 * The Pianist (2002 nominee)
 * The Return of the King (2003 winner)
 * Lost in Translation (2003 nominee)
 * Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003 nominee)
 * Mystic River (2003 nominee)
 * Million Dollar Baby (2004 winner)
 * The Aviator (2004 nominee)
 * Finding Neverland (2004 nominee)
 * Sideways (2004 nominee)
 * Crash (2005 winner)
 * Brokeback Mountain (2005 nominee)
 * Capote (2005 nominee)
 * Good Night and Good Luck (2005 nominee)
 * Munich (2005 nominee)
 * The Departed (2006 winner)
 * Babel (2006 nominee)
 * Letters From Iwo Jima (2006 nominee)
 * Little Miss Sunshine (2006 nominee)
 * The Queen (2006 nominee)
 * No Country for Old Men (2007 winner)
 * Atonement (2007 nominee)
 * Juno (2007 nominee)
 * Michael Clayton (2007 nominee)
 * There Will Be Blood (2007 nominee)
 * Slumdog Millionaire (2008 winner)
 * The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008 nominee)
 * Frost/Nixon (2008 nominee)
 * Milk (2008 nominee)
 * The Reader (2008 nominee)
 * The Hurt Locker (2009 winner)
 * Avatar (2009 nominee)
 * The Blind Side (2009 nominee)
 * District 9 (2009 nominee)
 * An Education (2009 nominee)
 * Inglourious Basterds (2009 nominee)
 * Precious (2009 nominee)
 * A Serious Man (2009 nominee)
 * Up (2009 nominee)
 * Up in the Air (2009 nominee)
 * The King's Speech (2010 winner)
 * One Hundred and Twenty Seven Hours (2010 nominee)
 * Black Swan (2010 nominee)
 * The Fighter (2010 nominee)
 * Inception (2010 nominee)
 * The Kids Are All Right (2010 nominee)
 * The Social Network (2010 nominee)
 * Toy Story 3 (2010 nominee)
 * True Grit (2010 nominee)
 * Winters Bone (2010 nominee)
 * The Artist (2011 winner)
 * The Descendants (2011 nominee)
 * Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011 nominee)
 * The Help (2011 nominee)
 * Hugo (2011 nominee)
 * Midnight in Paris (2011 nominee)
 * Moneyball (2011 nominee)
 * The Tree of Life (2011 nominee)
 * War Horse (2011 nominee)