10. Harry And Tonto
Won: Best Actor (Art Carney), 1975 It's all but slipped from the collective cinematic memory, but cult director Paul Mazursky's Harry And Tonto saw a surprising Best Actor win for Art Carney, one which saw the primarily-TV actor triumph over two iconic performances in Jack Nicholson's J.J. Gittes (Chinatown) and Al Pacino's Michael Corleone (The Godfather Part II) at the 1975 Academy Awards (as well as Dustin Hoffman for Lenny, and Albert Finney for Murder On The Orient Express ). That being said, Carney is nevertheless great in Harry And Tonto, the rather odd story of a lifelong New Yorker (Harry) who goes on a cross-country odyssey with his beloved cat (Tonto) when his (Harry's) apartment building is torn down. Mazursky, a self-proclaimed master of "serious comedy" (his influences can be seen in the work of David O. Russell), is at his peak here, and indeed Harry and Tonto is by turns touching and hilarious, melancholy and manic. And at the centre of it all is Carney's fierce performance, which probably didn't deserve to beat out Pacino or Nicholson but did so anyway, with the kind of nonchalance that this underrated film came and went with.