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8 Of The All-Time Best Academy Award Losers

On one level, the Academy Awards can have an enormous effect selecting which movies or singular movie will be designated as the most prestigious films from a single year. However, it's also possible that they're simply a reflection of opinions that have already been formed about the best films of the year, and when the Oscar pick for Best Picture disagrees too much with the popular and critical opinion, it gets swept aside. Driving Miss Daisy, for example, isn't exactly hailed as a lasting contribution to the history of cinema. Meanwhile two movies that weren't even nominated, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, are considered two of the greatest of their decade at the least, despite Oscar's lack of recognition.

2) Saving Private Ryan

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Consensus opinion seems to agree that Shakespeare in Love has no business having “Academy Award Winner” on its DVD cover. I watched it a long time ago and found it great and whatever, but seriously. I can see why The Thin Red Line didn’t win that year, for the same reasons The Tree of Life didn’t win last year. But how did Saving Private Ryan lose out? I have yet to find an explanation, although I haven’t looked terribly hard.

What’s undeniable is that the years that have passed since the 1999 awards ceremony are all the evidence needed to show that Saving Private Ryan is probably the most important film of 1998. It’s impossible to watch a movie or television series depicting war today without seeing in it the influence of Spielberg’s war aesthetic. The realism of the Omaha Beach sequence, the immersive feeling brought about by the background chaos, the use of sound, the casual shots of horrifying gore, these are almost cliches in the genre of epic war pictures now. It’s why the 1999 Best Picture selection is most often regarded as a joke.

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