Awards Awash With Overlooked Genuis
Staff Reporter

The Lord Of The Rings may have missed out on the big Oscars yesterday, but winning isn't everything when it comes to ensuring a film - or a director - a place in movie history.

The Academy Awards are littered with overlooked classics and ignored geniuses.

Citizen Kane, consistently voted the best film ever made, was beaten by How Green Was My Valley for the 1941 Oscar, and director Orson Welles only ever received an Oscar as an honorary award.

Missing an Oscar completely but cemented in movie history are such classics as Rebel Without A Cause, Blade Runner, American Graffiti, The Manchurian Candidate, Dr Strangelove, and more recently Taxi Driver, The Godfather Part III and The Shawshank Redemption. Nominated as Best Picture but still falling at the final hurdle were Apocalypse Now, ET, Star Wars, Pulp Fiction, and Deliverance, which had the misfortune of running into The Godfather in 1972.

Hindsight makes a mockery of some selections.

In 1976, the field for Best Picture included Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver starring Robert de Niro - but the Academy went for Sylvester Stallone's Rocky.

Scorsese didn't even get Best Director, but then again neither did legend Ingmar Bergman for Face To Face - Rocky director John G Avildsen took away the prize. Did someone say "John G who?".

Winning obviously depends on the field in any particular year but 1990 wasn't a good year for the Mafia - Goodfellas and the Godfather III lost out to Kevin Costner's epic yawn Dances With Wolves. In 1980 the distinctly ordinary Ordinary People proved a knockout for de Niro's Raging Bull boxing movie.

Similar warm fuzzies cost Apocalypse Now in 1979 when dire divorce drama Kramer v Kramer took the Oscar. The Exorcist proved too much for some in 1973, when the far more friendly The Sting also beat American Graffiti.

But then the Academy doesn't like horror movies - The Silence Of The Lambs in 1991 being the genre's only Best Picture winner - and that left Alfred Hitchcock not necessarily out in the cold, but certainly Oscarless.

Still, he's in good company; there's no Best Director Oscar on the mantelpieces of Robert Altman, Bergman, Brian de Palma, Federico Fellini, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, or Scorsese.