10. Never Naming Stanley Kubrick Or Alfred Hitchcock As Best Director
They're perhaps the two iconic directors in the history of film, but neither Alfred Hitchcock nor Stanley Kubrick were ever awarded the Best Director Oscar by the Academy, a startling oversight when you consider their importance and stature (and even more so when you consider some of the far inferior directors who Oscar have otherwise bestowed the award upon). All of Hitchcock's five Oscar nominations (a paltry amount when you look at his output) came in the Best Director category, but he lost every time, including twice to Billy Wilder (for The Lost Weekend and The Apartment). Perhaps the real travesty is not that Hitchcock lost five times, then, but that some of his greatest films never even earned him a nomination for Best Director in the first place, a notion that baffles most when you remember that he wasn't even nominated for Vertigo, a film routinely cited as the greatest of all time. Kubrick was nominated for thirteen Oscars in total, winning one, for the effects on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of those thirteen, only four were for Best Director, where he too lost each time, here to the likes of Carol Reed (Oliver!), William Friedkin (The French Connection) and Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). Again, these are fairly formidable opponents, but it remains that Kubrick, one of the greatest of all artists, was never recognised by the Academy as being worthy of that acclaim. Add to this the staggering fact that only one Hitchcock or Kubrick film ever won Best Picture (the former's Rebecca), and you have some idea of just how under-appreciated the pair where in Academy circles.