20. It Should Take More Than A Braveheart To Beat Apollo 13
Braveheart is an action epic with a taste for run-time, historical inaccuracies, and gratuitous violence. Basically it has something to hate for everyone. Thats not to say I dont like Braveheart (I do), but your Best Picture should probably aim higher than having something easy for everyone to dislike - excluding Mel Gibson of course who now qualifies all of his films for unlikeable status retroactively because of his actions off screen. Apollo 13 should have blown it out of the water. Its a tight drama which captures the style and emotions of the sixties perfectly. The ensemble cast is nothing short of flawless. Even Bill Paxton couldnt take the acting down a notch or three. This pick also doubles as a soapbox for Ron Howard not even being nominated for Best Director. This is his finest film and the one where his directing abilities have the most room to breath. Perhaps if he had won here then the Academy wouldnt have felt guilty and let him win for the endlessly ordinary film A Beautiful Mind.
19. Randy Newman: 20 Nominations, 2 Wins?!
It took the Academy 20 years and 16 nominations to finally give Randy Newman the Oscar he deserved for Monsters Inc's "If I Didn't Have You," and he is the most unjustly snubbed Hollywood talent in history, despite what others might think. Yes, he's now won two, and that's a wonderful achievement, but a 10% win rate is just not right, especially when you consider that he somehow didn't win for the brilliant, and emotionally devastating "When She Loved Me" from Toy Story 2. Ridiculous
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