Won For: Save the Tiger Should Have Won For: Some Like It Hot/The Apartment Jack Lemmon's film career is a treasure of American cinema. His roles spanned from the profoundly comical to the startlingly dramatic and everything in between. Lemmon actually won two Oscars in his career, one for Best Supporting Actor in Mister Roberts and one for Best Leading Actor in Save the Tiger. While he gave a fine performance as Harry Stoner in John G. Avildsen's Save the Tiger, it simply does not compare to two of Lemmon's most famous and incredible roles: Jerry in Some Like it Hot and C.C. Baxter in The Apartment. In Billy Wilder's monumental 1959 comedy Some Like It Hot, Lemmon joins Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe in a hilarious cross-dressing adventure that you have to see to believe. His side-splitting reactions in the final scene are the highlight of one of the best endings in film history. In Wilder's The Apartment from the following year, Lemmon's nuanced performance in a more serious comedy alongside Shirley MacLaine is supremely underrated. Lemmon should have gotten his Best Actor award for either one of these titanic film roles. In the end, this probably came down to the Academy's preference for rewarding dramatic performances over comedic ones, despite both of Lemmon's comedic roles being multifaceted and featuring dramatic elements.
