Oscar Week: They've Never Won an Academy Award

We're bringing back another column from last year's Oscar Week, because it's just as relevant this year. Kate Winslet was mentioned in this space 12 months ago because she had earned her sixth Oscar - at the age of 33, no less - and had no wins to show for it. She was in a three-way tie for most nominations for an actress with no trophy. This year, Jeff Bridges joins a group of five male performers with at least five nominations and no wins. He won't be part of that group for long. The record for no wins, at least among actors, is the legendary Peter O'Toole, and it goes without saying that he's among the greatest of all time. Eight nominations with no statuette. 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 26 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 completely forgotten tune 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 - Jeff Bridges - 5 nominations He should have seven or eight nominations, the well-deserved handful he's got plus The Big Lebowski, The Fisher King, and Fearless. The beauty of Bridges' work is and always has been its simplicity. He can work any style believably and just absorbs the script. So why include him here if he's probably going to win? So we can mention all those other actors with at least five nominations but no gold: Deborah Kerr and Thelma Ritter with six each, and Glenn Close, Irene Denne, Arthur Kennedy, and an artist to be named later with five. 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, who was nominated twice for 2007 films, and still didn't win: 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 last 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, especially given his prolific Oscar history. Now for some accounting...Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, and Charles Chaplin all won Oscars, none of them for directing, however. Welles co-won for the Kane script, Kubrick for 2001 effects (also shared), 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.

Comments

[D]

So that means they have as many awards as Eminem, Kevin Costner, and Happy Feet
Actually Kevin Costner has two which I guess just goes to further prove your point.

On another note, as upsetting as it is to think about how the Academy Awards have overlooked Hitchcock and Kurosawa, I think we can all take solace in the fact that Sandra Bullock will (probably) finally be getting that Oscar we all know is so thoroughly overdo.

[Get The Big Picture]

I was in denial about one of Costner's win. Just pick one.

[anybody]

Deakins for sure! It's one of the few I picked wrong two years ago (I hated Assassination of Jesse James from a narrative standpoint but boy was it ever beautiful to look at, the scene with the bandits waiting for the train to arrive wow! Not that Robert Elswit's work on There Will Be Blood wasn't also great but maybe a hair shy of Deakins that year... also on that note how did Jonny Greenwood's score for TWBB not get a nomination or win? But I digress). I would add Gordon Willis to this category as well, his work with Pakula, Coppola and Allen should have got him at least one statue.

[Sam]

Satyajit Ray wasn't even nominated for an award. He did get an Honorary Award for Lifetime Achievement though.

[Tchad]

I'll tell you who never won an Academy Award: Tron wasn't even nominated for the special effects Oscar because the Academy felt using computers was "cheating"! That team should get some of those "Before You Die" Oscars for inventing the future of special effects.

[Robert Hamer]

"Sandra Bullock will (probably) finally be getting that Oscar we all know is so thoroughly overdo."

Okay, I know I'm late to the party here (I stumbled on here from IMDb), but I have to ask; how exactly was Sandra Bullock "overdue" for an Oscar? Don't get me wrong, I like her just fine, but why did everyone - including general moviegoers, awards pundits, and the Academy themselves - believe that she suddenly needed the industry's highest honor? Can you name a single performance from her that comes even close to those given by Kate Winslet and Nicole Kidman, who both had to wait for an Oscar after several years of amazing work? In a world where Michelle Pfeiffer, Liv Ullmann, Glenn Close, Barbara Stanwyck, Sigourney Weaver, Isabelle Huppert, Kathleen Turner, Julianne Moore, Joan Allen, Catherine Deneuve and Laura Linney have never won an Academy Award, was it really that important for Miss Congeniality to get it for a competent performance in a manipulative, racist tearjerker?

[Oscar Movies]

Roger Deakins is a great cinimatographer. He nominate twice in year 2007 films, but he con't get yet. He might work hard to get one time.

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Simon