All About Awards Show Season

It’s Oscars’ jaw-dropping moments—like Marisa Tomei’s shocking Best Supporting Actress win, arguably the most notable upset in the awards show’s 79-year history; Crash getting Best Pic over Brokeback Mountain; Rocky’s victory over everyone else—that inject life into what is, no matter what the talking heads scream at us from the red carpet sidelines, an often excruciatingly predictable ceremony,.

With the Academy Awards 2008 quickly upon us, let’s revisit some of recent history’s most famous—or infamous—Oscar upsets…

Alan Arkin poses with his Oscar
for Best Supporting Actor.
© Getty Images

10. Murphy’s Law (2007)
Everyone predicted Dreamgirls’ Eddie Murphy to walk out front and center to claim the year’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar as the industry’s recognized front-runner. But long-respected actor Alan Arkin’s quiet campaigning (no doubt it helped that his movie Little Miss Sunshine was nominated for Best Picture while Dreamgirls was not), culminated in an upset that apparently resulted in a Norbit-sized tantrum. Murphy reportedly stormed out of the show when his name was not called and didn’t come back (reps claimed he’d always planned to leave after the category was announced). Draw your own conclusions.

Charlize Theron arrives at the
2006 Academy Awards.
© Getty Images

9. The Year Brokeback Crashed (2006)
Who could forget Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee’s face when Paul Haggis’s ensemble drama Crash was announced as the 2005 Best Picture winner, trouncing Lee’s endlessly touted front-runner? No wonder he was bummed—he’d just won Best Director and it looked like his film was on a roll. Monday morning Oscar quarterbacks wondered if Brokeback had been over-publicized? Was the film’s gay romance too much for conservative Academy voters in the end? Or was Crash just — as some individuals thought —a better film? Questions about Felicity Huffman’s plunging coffin-liner of a dress and Charlize Theron’s Christmas-package number still linger, however.

Adrien Brody wins for his role in
The Pianist. © Getty Images

8. Key Victories for The Pianist (2002)
Coming off a Golden Globe win, Jack Nicholson was the slight favorite for 2002’s Best Actor for his heartbreaking performance in About Schmidt, while SAG winner Daniel-Day Lewis nipped at his heels for his spot-on gangster role in Gangs of New York. But rookie nominee Adrien Brody (The Pianist) swooped in from behind to beat them both. Whether or not his win resulted from a split vote, Jack’s previous three Oscars or the Academy’s soft spot for tortured real-life characters hardly mattered after the dip-and-smooch maneuver Brody pulled on presenter Halle Berry.

7. The Director Who Wasn’t There (2002)
Brody’s might have been the biggest upset that night, but it wasn’t the only one. The Pianist’sdirector Roman Polanski, who hadn’t made a movie in the U.S. since his infamous incident at Nicholson’s house in 1978, wasn’t doing interviews. But the Academy awarded him with the Best Director award for his magnificent survival story, triumphing over Rob Marshall (whose Chicago won Best Picture) and the long-suffering Martin Scorsese.

A side note: It’s always fascinating to see the on-camera reactions to such upsets: Harrison Ford’s little smirk as he accepted the Best Director award on Polanski’s behalf, plus the folks who gave the director a standing ovation (like Scorsese) and those who did not stand up (including, apparently, Jack Nicholson, star of Polanski’s Chinatown). 

Michael Douglas stars in Traffic.
© Getty Images

6. Upsets for the New Millennium (2000)
For the fifth time in more than 50 years, the Academy broke ranks with the Directors Guild of America: the Oscar for Best Director went to Steven Soderbergh for his edgy Traffic instead of DGA winner Ang Lee for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the highest-grossing foreign language movie ever. Lee looked genuinely teary-eyed.

Academy Award winner, Marcia Gay Harden. © Getty Images

5.  The Academy’s Harden-ed Heart  (2000)
It was expected that America’s darling boho blonde (and Golden Globe winner) Kate Hudson would win Best Supporting Actress for her star-making role in Almost Famous.  After all, Kate’s mom, Goldie Hawn, also won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar when she was an ingénue, way back in 1969 (for the comedy trifle Cactus Flower).  But the audience woke up when Marcia Gay Harden was announced as the winner for her tough portrayal in the little-seen Pollock. Harden was ecstatic, and thanked the Academy for “even taking the time to view the film.”

4. Indies Rock (1998)
This was the first year it was unclear whether Academy campaign tactics trumped movie quality. Miramax’s romantic dramedy Shakespeare in Love won the Oscar for Best Picture over Steven Spielberg’s war drama Saving Private Ryan. It was a surprising upset, despite Miramax’s spending a reported $5-10 million on marketing, hiring a small army of publicists in the studio’s employ. They loosely disobeyed Academy rules by holding a party for Academy members after the nomination announcements. Weinstein himself was rumored to have criticized the Spielberg film to journalists.

James Coburn smiles with his Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. © Getty Images

3. Age Appropriate (1998)
James Coburn looked almost as surprised as everyone else to hear his name called out as the winner for Best Supporting Actor for the little-seen drama Affliction. Although Coburn’s role as an alcoholic crank was acclaimed, fellow respected nominees like Ed Harris (The Truman Show) or Billy Bob Thornton (for A Simple Plan) were considered favorites. Coburn’s win furthered the suspicion that age can be a factor in the Best Supporting Actor category.

2. Patient’s Virtue (1996)
Most assumed the Academy would hand an Oscar to sentimental favorite Lauren Bacall (The Mirror Has Two Faces), a great actress who finally got a nomination for playing Barbra Streisand’s mother. She’d won the Golden Globe for supporting actress, and despite a performance some said wasn’t Oscar-caliber, was considered a lock for this award. Instead, the Academy handed out one of its most notorious upsets ever, awarding The English Patient’s Juliette Binoche, who was so sure she wouldn’t win that she didn’t have an acceptance speech prepared. Bacall looked a little ticked, and at the podium, Binoche graciously and emphatically declared Bacall should have won.

Marisa Tomei at the 1993 Academy Awards. © Getty Images

1. Acclaimed, or Defamed? (1993)
Forget black helicopters, 9/11 and the moon landing. Few controversies have created such hot debate as Marisa Tomei’s out-of-this-world upset win for Best Supporting Actress over such venerable UK competition as Vanessa Redgrave (rumored to have really won), Joan Plowright and Judy Davis. Because Tomei’s performance as a gum-smacking, dim-bulb mechanic in My Cousin Vinny was labeled too broad and brash to be worthy, Hollywood conspiracy theorists insisted an aging Jack Palance misread Tomei’s name by mistake as the winner when he opened the envelope (a charge that Academy officials denied). To this day her gold is still tarnished.