They Never Won an Academy Award

Thursday

19Feb2009

Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 6:55PM

There's a better than average chance that Kate Winslet will pick up an Academy Award Sunday night for The Reader. It's neither my favorite performance in that category, nor is it her best work, but at 33, she's already something of an Oscar spinster, having been nominated six times with no trophies to show for it.

Among actresses, Winslet is tied for the most nominations without a win. Deborah Kerr and Thelma Ritter have six, too, and curiously, all of them were sandwiched in a short amount of time, like Winslet. Kerr amassed six nods between 1949 and 1960, while Ritter did her damage between 1950 and 1962. Kate has lost for Sense and Sensibility, Titanic, Iris, Eternal Sunshine, and Little Children.

The record for no wins, at least among actors, is the legendary Peter O'Toole, who it goes without saying is among the greatest of all time. Eight nominations with no gold. And they weren't cheap nominations in empty years, either: The Lion in Winter, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, The Ruling Class, The Stunt Man, My Favorite Year, Venus, and something called Lawrence of Arabia.

He got the honorary Oscar a few years back, before Venus, and his speech was among the most eloquent I've ever heard watching that broadcast. He's just a class act, and it's a real shame he never "earned" his profession's highest honor.

Now, the all-time records for futility in non-acting categories belong to Kevin O'Connell, with 20 nominations as a sound engineer and zero wins. He's been nominated 18 out of the past 25 years, and two years, he was nominated twice. That's gotta hurt. Randy Newman was nominated 15 times before finally winning Best Song for Monsters, Inc., although his "When She Loved Me" from Toy Story 2 is one of the absolute great integrations of a song into a film. That one lost to the song from Tarzan.

In terms of the heavyweights, though, here are some names to remember that the Academy has never chosen as a winner:

1 - Alfred Hitchcock - 5 nominations

It's frightening to think that the greatest, most influential, and most successful director in Hollywood's golden era never won squat. They gave him the Before You Die award, but to only warrant five nominations is pretty scandalous. No nominations for Vertigo or North by Northwest just doesn't compute to me. Now, he did lose to guys you don't mind winning - Billy Wilder (twice), John Ford, and Elia Kazan - and Hitch shouldn't have won in '46 when Leo McCarey took home the award for Going My Way. That probably should've been Wilder again, for Double Indemnity.

2 - Federico Fellini - 12 nominations

I can understand Fellini not being nominated a lot. The Oscars have never been about a world of film, evidenced in the past decade when some of the year's best movies or certainly films in the top five haven't even been nominated for Best Picture. In fact, no foreign language film has ever won that honor, and only a few have been nominated. Speaking to that point, though Fellini has a dozen nominations as a writer or director, he has no Best Picture nominations. Really? How does that work...every time. If the Academy had just ignored him altogether, the way it did Kurosawa, then you've got the built -in excuse. Not with four Best Director nominations, though.

3 - Richard Burton - 7 nominations

Not the greatest of his generation, but he probably had the best roles of anyone in his heyday. Nominations for The Robe, Becket, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and Anne of a Thousand Days represent the bulk of his fantastic work, and all of them came in the 1960s.

4 - Peter O'Toole - 8 nominations

It really is staggering. I mean, name me a single bad performance by Peter O'Toole. If you're looking for a guy who took chances throughout his career, it's O'Toole. And while he was making himself and the craft that much better, Oscar looked the other way eight times.

5 - Akira Kurosawa - 1 nomination

I know what I said before about the Academy having the built-in excuse of not always embracing foreign film on the same terms as it has American movies, but one nomination (Ran) for Kurosawa? There aren't too many guys in the Best Director Ever discussion and he's one of them. Criminal. The kicker is that Seven Samurai actually received nominations for its art direction and costume design, meaning those parts of the film were excellent, but Kurosawa's work behind the camera fell just short of the standard set by King Vidor on War and Peace.

6 - Kate Winslet - 6 nominations

It's likely to change this weekend, but Winslet is arguably the best actress never named Best Actress. What she has in common with the men on this list is the ability and desire to make different statements, to never be pinned down as the costume drama queen or Rose from Titanic, or even Clementine in Eternal Sunshine. She just keeps moving forward. And make no mistake, there are some big black eyes on her filmography (The Life of David Gale, The Holiday), but in her 15 years on film, she's never done the same kind of thing back to back.

7 - Sidney Lumet - 5 nominations

There aren't many careers in the movies that span 50 years, and certainly even fewer that are great at the beginning, great in the middle, and great half a century after it all began. I don't know how much the director of 12 Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Murder on the Orient Express, Long Day's Journey into Night, The Pawnbroker, The Verdict, and Network has left in the tank at age 84, but 2007's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead was better than 95% of the movies I saw that year.

8 - Albert Finney - 5 nominations

So wait...O'Toole, Burton, and Finney have 20 nominations between them and no wins, but Cuba Gooding has an Oscar? How is that right? Finney has been one of the most reliable and surprisingly versatile film actors of his generation. At 37, he played the wheezing, much older Hercule Poirot in Lumet's Orient Express, he had already played a young lothario in Tom Jones, and along the way, Finney has portrayed Pope John Paul II, Scrooge, Daddy Warbucks, Churchill, and Hemingway. He could probably have ten nominations and you wouldn't argue against any of them. Finney likely doesn't care, though; he's never been to the Oscars, anyway.

9 - Roger Deakins - 8 nominations

This might seem like a strange pick, but there are very few craftsmen in the movies as respected as Roger Deakins, who might be the greatest cinematographer going. So what? Who cares about the camera guy? Well, it is a visual medium, and as far as that goes, Deakins is up there with the best of all time. Think of the following movies. Each can be identified by their distinctive look, and that has a hell of a lot to do with Roger Deakins, nominated twice for 2007 films and once again this year for The Reader: Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Shawshank Redemption, Fargo, Kundun, The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou?, The Man Who Wasn't There, The House of Sand and Fog, No Country for Old Men, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, one of the most purely photographed films in a long, long time.

10 - Mike Leigh - 6 nominations

Six nominations in 12 years for Leigh, the rather irascible British director of this year's Happy-Go-Lucky, as well as Vera Drake, Topsy Turvy, and Secrets & Lies. The films themselves have picked up 11 nominations, and it's surprising that in at least one instance, Leigh didn't win a screenplay award. It's doubtful he will this year, but with all the good fortune he's had in the past decade, it's surprising that it's never come his way yet.

Now for some accounting...Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, and Charles Chaplin all won Oscars, none of them for directing, however. Welles and Kubrick won for screenplays and Chaplin picked up an award in the 1970s for a musical score he co-wrote 20 years earlier. So that means they have as many awards as Eminem, Kevin Costner, and Happy Feet.

Colin Boyd |

Permalink | in

Academy Awards,

Akira Kurosawa,

Awards Shows,

Hitchcock,

Kate Winslet,

Mike Leigh |

Print Article |

Email Article |

10 Comments |

Reader Comments (10)

Great article recognizing talents that deserve credit. I would like a similar article on actors who haven't been NOMINATED. Christopher Plummer, for example.

Thursday, February 19, 2009 |

Colin Bruce Anthes

Thank You for mentioning Deakins and Finney. Also just with the great directors you could fill a book.
Lynch, Cronenburg, fincher, I believe Van Sant but he might've won for Hunting, Burton, I think Renior, I think Huston, yada yada Should have won something.

Thursday, February 19, 2009 |

knives

1980 Should have been! .....Best Picture BEING THERE, Best Actor PETER SELLERS

Friday, February 20, 2009 |

Bob

It boggles my mind every year when people do Oscar overviews and mention Peter O'Toole as having never one an Oscar--- one of the greatest actors of our day-- and just put in another brilliant performance in "Dean Spanley", which has yet to play the US.-- and still no recognition.

I hope someone is reading this in Hollywood and gives Otoole another shot before its too late!

Friday, February 20, 2009 |

Ely Cross

The misbegotten remake of All the King's Men is an even bigger black eye than the merely medioce The Holiday, although either is STILL preferable than anything Kate Hudson has crapped out since 2001...

Friday, February 20, 2009 |

Stringer

It still amazes me that Hitchcock never got the Oscar. He must have really annoyed some people at the Academy...

Friday, February 20, 2009 |

The Aussie

When a nation has no history to value, then it has no real sense of value.

Sunday, March 15, 2009 |

L810th

mr kubrick won his oscar for special effects (2001-a space ...)and only because the academy rules at the time eould only allow a maximum of 3 people per film in this catagory to be nominated,the film had 4 ,kubick argued against it but to no avail ,they used his name and credit him with the victory. no writing victory i am aware of.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 |

ryanryan

Digging deeper:

Actress Deborah Kerr - 6 nominations
Actress Thelma Ritter - 6 nominations
Composer Alex North - 15 nominations
Composer Thomas Newman - 10 nominations

Sunday, June 21, 2009 |

Invisigoth

Kubrick never won for a screenplay. He won for 2001: A Space Odyssey and it was for the special effects.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009 |

Jacob Scarberry

Post a New Comment

Enter your information below to add a new comment.

My response is on my own website »

Author:

Author Email (optional):

Author URL (optional):

Post:

↓ | ↑

Some HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>