Over the Years: 10 Oscar Winners That Have Been Forgotten – Hot

Quick, name every Best Picture Oscar winner ever. Or name every winner in any given acting category. How many largely forgotten Oscar-winning films or performances are you sure you’ve seen?

Okay, name the last fifteen Best Picture releases. The last ten?

Unless you’re a big fan of trivia or have an obsessive degree of interest in all things related to film (guilty on both counts), chances are you can’t recall offhand the last several winners in any or all the major Oscar categories. Most people can’t, so don’t worry about it too much. This doesn’t even get into awards for things like makeup, film editing, and other categories the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences doesn’t seem to believe people care about.

The truth of the matter is that even with the clout and prestige of winning an Oscar, no one is guaranteed a movie people are going to remember and enjoy for generations to come. For every example along the lines of The Godfather, which continues to be watched, studied, and debated upon, there are Oscar winners like How Green Was My Valley, which is a good, but ultimately forgettable movie.

Being forgotten isn’t necessarily an indication of a film or performance’s quality. It has more to do with the fact that hundreds of movies around the world are released yearly. If we focus on Best Picture alone, we’re still talking about nearly 600 movies, with 93 of them being actual Best Picture winners. Most movies, unless they remain in the public consciousness with sequels and reboots, fade into some degree of obscurity.

Some more than others, so let’s take a look at just a few forgotten Oscar winners. These films and performances, while lost to time, are also certainly lost to the memory of even most cinephiles.

 

10. The Artist (2011)

Director: Michel Hazanavicius

Watching The Artist recently, it remains a pretty entertaining film, celebrating silent film history (the movie itself is mostly silent) in its story of a film star (Jean Dujardin), whose career in the medium is threatened as he juggles the very complex decision of whether or not to cheat on his wife. It’s hard to argue that this movie suffers from taking itself, particularly its comedy, a little too seriously. It’s also a concept that perhaps works best in small doses.

The movie is fairly pretentious. Even if you like the film, and believed it deserved to win over a field which included War Horse, The Tree of Life, or Hugo, it’s hard to argue with a movie whose energy sometimes translates to a strange smugness.

Even so, it’s mostly enjoyable, but perhaps not something you’ll carry with you for any amount of time. Even in the context of the year in which it won, The Artist did not deserve the attention of so many Oscars. The fact that people barely remember it just ten years later reflects that.

 

9. Cuba Gooding Jr. in Jerry Maguire (1996)

Director: Cameron Crowe

To be clear, we aren’t here to equate forgettable with bad. The Artist is flawed and undeserving, but it can be fun. Likewise, Cuba Gooding Jr. is a good actor who gave an immensely likable, high-energy performance in Jerry Maguire. His performance is far and away the film’s secret weapon and best piece.

Does all of that translate to an Oscar? Maybe.

What ultimately makes Gooding’s win forgettable, other than the relentless march of time, is how poorly his career has seemingly gone since. From Boat Trip, to the well-intentioned misfire Radio, to Snow Dogs, and with quite a few other duds in between, Gooding has struggled with vehicles that rarely seem to care about him. No actor should live in the shadow of expectations but appearing in one exceptionally unpopular movie after another has done a lot to diminish the memory of one of his best efforts.

 

8. Out of Africa (1985)

Director: Sydney Pollack

Out of Africa is beautifully shot, well-directed in executing its intentions and style, and it features Robert Redford and Meryl Streep displaying expectedly strong chemistry as romantic leads.

Chances are, you didn’t know until now that two of the most famous movie stars in the history of film starred in a sprawling epic that won several Oscars, including Best Picture.

Based on an extremely racist novel by Karen Blixen under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen, the film also draws from other sources as a means of at least acknowledging the book on its own is at best problematic. Out of Africa seemingly proved to be too charming to resist for Oscar voters. Redford and Streep are indeed quite good together, and the Oscar-winning cinematography by David Watkin flawlessly captures the spectacular beauty of the Ngong Hills.

Beyond that, there really isn’t much to this that stands out. It can be difficult for even those who have seen it to recall more than a few lines of dialog.

 

7. Adrien Brody in The Pianist (2002)

Director: Roman Polanski

This would be another example of a brilliant performance that arguably deserved its accolades. Adrien Brody gives a quiet-yet-monumentally sorrowful turn as real-life composer and pianist Władysław Szpilman in a brutal depiction of The Holocaust. It’s mildly surprising that such a grim movie won several major categories on Oscar night.

However, much like Cuba Gooding Jr. earlier, Brody’s film work post-Oscars has ranged from forgettable to worse, with sparse turns of the brilliance he displayed in The Pianist. Brody is a good actor who perhaps does his best work in ensemble pieces like The French Dispatch. He has veered between those films and leading man projects over the last 20 years, and the ensembles seem to hold up better.

Still, for the sheer volume of potential suggested by his performance in and win for The Pianist, it’s a shame that very little of his work since has stuck out in people’s minds.

 

6. How Green Was My Valley (1941)

Director: John Ford

Arguably one of John Ford’s least interesting movies, you would be forgiven for not remembering this movie, simply by virtue of its age. Most people are not going to be able to list any Oscar winners from the 40s. The film itself is largely fine, with strong performances by Walter Pidgeon, Donald Crisp, the great Maureen O’Hara, and a very young pre-Planet of the Apes Roddy McDowall, but even in its time can’t help but feel like an appealing drama that you probably won’t remember a week after seeing it.

On the other hand, while you have probably never heard of How Green Was My Valley, which won several Oscars in 1942, you probably know one or two of the movies it beat for an award that was then called Outstanding Motion Picture.

One of them is the relatively-remembered The Maltese Falcon.

The other?

Citizen Kane.

Some movies really are timeless.

 

5. Jean Dujardin in The Artist (2011)

Director: Michel Hazanavicius

Back with The Artist for the one modern Best Actor win with perhaps the shortest probable list of people who remember it. Even those who remember The Artist might be surprised when told Dujardin won above Demián Bichir, George Clooney, Gary Oldman, and Brad Pitt (particularly Bichir, who was outstanding in A Better Life).

While Dujardin has gone on to do good work since, there is little about what he brought to The Artist that suggests he won for any other reason than the abundance of personality The Artist seemingly brought to awards season. His win was largely greeted with indifference, despite most agreeing that he gave an appealing performance, and that indifference has turned into a void of memory.

No one from the 2012 list of Best Actor nominees gave a performance widely discussed today. This is weirdly best reflected in the performance of the actual winner.

 

4. The Last Emperor (1987)

Director: Bernardo Bertolucci

The Last Emperor was both a critical and commercial success. While an imperfect epic, one which glosses over the life of Puyi, the final man to be the Emperor of China, The Last Emperor is visually spectacular, well-acted by its cast, and manages to remain fairly interesting for most of its massive running time. It captures a fascinating period of human history and manages to make the most of connecting to the human story of a man who lived a very complicated life.

Yet, for any number of reasons, the movie is scarcely remembered today. It is part of the Criterion Collection and has held up well enough in retrospective reviews. Unfortunately, it is also a very dense, multilayered epic that perhaps expects too much of a casual audience (maybe, maybe not, but it does help to know some of this history going in). Its qualities drew enough attention to earn a few Oscars, including Best Picture, in 1988.

It just isn’t the easiest film to approach, and so it hasn’t been able to keep a large audience as the years go on.

 

3. Kate Winslet in The Reader (2008)

Director: Stephen Daldry

A powerhouse of an actress with a long resume of standout, challenging, and memorable performances, Kate Winslet ultimately won for a movie no one really seems to remember anymore. The film received mostly good reviews, but many critics and audience members found a tedious, Oscar-bait story of a young man (David Kross, then Ralph Fiennes) who grows up to discovers his long-gone, much-older romantic partner (Winslet) is now on trial for Nazi war crimes.

The Reader isn’t a bad movie, but it’s a little too long, and its story never really picks up any momentum. Oddly listless in places, even lifeless, it all really comes down to a stellar cast. Kate Winslet easily stands out from that, but even she can’t completely save a movie that many would describe at best as being good, but certainly not great.

Kate Winslet remains a well-known actress. The Reader is only barely remembered because she was in it.

 

2. The English Patient (1996)

Director: Anthony Minghella4

Famously dumped on in its day for being overlong and perhaps a little too ambitious in its efforts to portray so many different people and periods of time, The English Patient is not without merit.

While it’s hard to argue with anyone who found the film pretentious and boring, it does feature one of Willem Dafoe’s absolute best performances. The cast in general, including Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Naveen Andrews, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Colin Firth, are fine. They just have a lot of soggy melodrama to wade through, combined with a film that is perhaps a little too upfront about aspiring to a higher purpose than a love story set during World War II.

For good or ill, if The English Patient is now remembered for anything at all, it’s for being the kind of movie that the Academy seems to like more than general audiences. Do with that what you will, but this 1997 Best Picture Winner is challenging for all the wrong reasons.

 

1. Joel Grey in Cabaret (1972)

Director: Bob Fosse

Cabaret is still well-regarded, in addition to being consistently watched and appreciated by generations since its release. Many remember Liza Minelli winning Best Actress in 1973 for a powerful, but also fragile, performance as an American cabaret performer getting caught up in a love triangle as the Nazis seize power throughout her home of Berlin and beyond.

Yet despite all of this, many forget that Minelli wasn’t the only big acting winner for the film on Oscar night. Joel Grey, one of the most supernaturally talented human beings who has ever lived (and who recently appeared in current Oscar darling Tick, Tick…BOOM! in a sweet cameo), also took home an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

Indeed, as the Emcee of the club in which Minelli’s Sally works, and as essentially a narrator for the audience, Grey’s performance is a sublime combination of high, singular energy, and a means of providing insight and context to what’s going on around this love story. You may remember and agree with all of that, but you may not recall he won an Academy Award for it.

The reason why people have forgotten is simply because there are so many remarkable elements to this film. It’s a musical drama with staying power, and it could be said that this is far more important than who won what.

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