Good movie make-up can get you an Oscar, if you're lucky. It's not one of those really memorable Oscars, but it beats not winning an Oscar any day of the week. Given the high prizes on offer for aptitude, it's only right that the people who make bad mistakes and fudged their one job should be hauled over the coals. They are the faceless folk behind the biggest and most comedic failures in movie make-up: the creators of grotesque faces that completely pulled us out of perfectly enjoyable movie experiences. Because, frankly, that's all these Frankenstein's monster-like make-up abominations managed to achieve. Naturally, Mickey Rooney's yellowface make-up was an awful decision, and is impossible to take seriously, but then that's sort of the point, since there's a distasteful comic note behind the characterisation that is pretty much just flat out racism in retrospect. So no place on this list for him. But who did make the cut?
Honourable Mention
Christopher Lloyd - Doc Brown (Back To The Future) Back before the age of high definition made nit-picking the finer details of older films possible, Christopher Lloyd's performance and appearance as Doc Brown in the original Back To The Future were irrefutably brilliant, and near flawless. Criticism of that role would have been tantamount to treachery, and punishable accordingly. But then Blu-Rays came in and it became very obvious that part of Lloyd's make-up process for the 1985 scenes involved someone lathering his neck with PVA glue to make it look aged. In high definition that looked as terrible as it sounds (which is perhaps why the film-makers decided against ageing his neck in the subsequent sequels (with the help of a handily written story detail that saw the Doc - who otherwise has no commitment to fashion - undergo anti-aging treatment for some reason.)
