11 Directors Who Won Oscars For Completely The Wrong Movie

5. Danny Boyle

Won For... Slumdog Millionaire

Should Have Won For... Trainspotting

Some will tell you that Danny Boyle should have won his Best Director Oscar for Sunshine or the excellent (but entirely unlikely) 28 Days Later, but you have to go further back to find the really worthy film that should have won instead of Slumdog Millionaire.

While that film was a good one framed around an excellent story, it was nowhere near superior to Trainspotting - the film that announced Boyle's arrival as a Big Deal in film-making terms. He'd already made Shallow Grave and played with tense, dark atmosphere and he took those lessons and ran with them in the follow-up to create a chilling undercurrent.

Trainspotting is a triumph of married tones: it is at once weirdly aspirational at the same time as showing the horrors of heroine addiction and poverty (ODs and all); triumphant, tragic and trying with performances that are as shocking as they are memorable. It manages to be both funny and fury-inducing and no film has EVER managed to capture an identity quite as well.