Ten Completely Bizarre Academy Award Nominees

Whether or not they admit it, critics – and most audiences – all typically feel the same way about the Academy Awards. That is: despite being a definitive declaration of what is the Best Picture of the year, they are no serious gauge what is actually best picture of the year, or even any kind of testament to a movie’s actual quality. Indeed, the notion of the Best Picture of any year is such a subjective argument that it calls the entire presumption of the critical authority of the Academy Awards into question.

Nonetheless, the Academy Awards are followed doggedly, and with no small degree of passion, by many of the very critics who decry them. For lovers of movies, the Awards are a combination Super Bowl/prom night, wherein we get to watch what Hollywood thinks about itself. It’s a sporting, playful event, wherein we’re given a gentle reminder of what movies we saw during the year. And we can gander at some nice outfits.

TriStar Pictures

Related: 25 Great Actors Who Haven’t Been Nominated for Academy Awards

It’s commonly whinged about that so-called “genre” films are rarely nominated for Academy Awards. Best Picture nominees do tend to be “serious” dramas and studio-sanctioned prestige pictures that feature grand historical dramas, or make some sort of political comment that the Academy feels is particularly timely in whatever year they were released. We rarely see the adrenaline-inducing actioners, the bonkers, effects-driven sci-fi flicks, or, indeed, the big summer blockbusters in the Best Picture category (there are outliers like Inception and District 9, but I don’t think anyone expected any of those films to actually win, while Lord of the Rings was just a pat on the back for the project’s ambition). But such films often creep in the outsides, usually getting a mention when it comes to a technical category, like Best Visual Effects or Best Sound Mixing.

Actually, when one scours some of the minor categories throughout Oscar history, one begins to uncover numerous oddities lurking. Not only do you begin to find action-packed genre films, but also outright rotten comedies, off-the-wall kid flicks, and some truly baffling decisions made by Academy voters. Indeed, if one goes back far enough, you begin seeing titles that, well, most audiences – and even critics – have never heard of. The Academy may seek to find the Best Picture of the year, but in the moment, they tend to attach their enthusiasm to movies that do not stand the test of time, and even fade into obscurity quickly.

Heck, even some of the Best Picture winners are downright obscure in the modern age. Who amongst you, for instance, has seen Cavalcade from 1933? I’ve seen it, but it’s likely I would never have heard of it had it not won Best Picture. Indeed, some of the films it beat out are more familiar to me (42nd Street, Lady for a Day, A Farewell to Arms), but the other contenders are just as obscure as the winner. Only film junkies and Academy buffs now tend to bother with, say, Cimarron, The Great Ziegfeld, The Life of Emile Zola, How Green Was My Valley, The Gentleman’s Agreement, Gigi, Tom Jones, Ordinary People, Out of Africa, and several others.

20th Century Fox

Related: Why Are the Oscars Anti-Blockbuster?

And when one begins to delve into the more obscure categories, we find even more obscure films, many of them lost to the realm of textbook footnotes. Actors and actresses and authors of movies that were once under consideration for the best film of the year, and are now never mentioned, not even in film classes. Are these films good or bad?

Predicting the Academy Awards is both easy and difficult. You can be sure of one or two shoo-ins (the Best Picture nominees can be more-or-less predicted), but then some just blindside you. Someone somewhere thought that certain films should be honored, but the films are so plain, so bad, so obscure, or just plain medoicre, that you wouldn’t think they would deserve any sort of recognition.

But recognized they are. We here at Crave has scoured our histories, and come up with some of the more oddball instances of the Oscars selecting unusual films to nominate. Looking over the following list, one can sense no predictable pattern. Se can say this for the Academy Awards: They keep us on our toes.

 Ten Completely Baffling Academy Award Nominees

Witney Seibold is a contributor to CraveOnline and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.