Top Ten Biggest Oscar Snubs – Nominations #7
7
Dreamgirls (1966) and The Dark Knight (1998)
Both Dreamgirls and the mega box-office hit The Dark Knight received nominations from the Producers Guild and the Directors Guild. Additionally, the Dreamgirls cast was shortlisted by the Screen Actors Guild, while The Dark Knight got a nod from the Writers Guild.
Both films went on to garner a total of 8 Oscar nominations — but not in the Best Picture, Best Director, or Best Screenwriting categories.
I’m assuming that Dreamgirls and The Dark Knight received lots of votes from Academy members in the aforementioned categories, but not enough of those votes were in the #1 slot. Hence — see Oscar vote-counting rules — no nominations.
Regarding the Dreamgirls omission, Gold Derby’s Tom O’Neil blamed the "straight ole white geezers in the academy [who] just don’t ‘get’ the wow-pow of what’s going on between all those hip black folk singing, loving, dancing, dreaming, hearts breaking up on screen. Yes, voters admire their performances, the songs, art direction, costume design, even sound mixing, but they’re not doing their fundamental job as filmgoers, they’re not projecting themselves into the characters on that screen, thus experiencing what they feel. Why? Because they can’t break out of their white skins, that’s why. From a distance they applaud Effie’s roof-rattling role, sure (Jennifer Hudson), but they don’t feel her pain. If they did, they would experience a whole, different cinematic experience — one of the finest of this year, any year."
Regarding the Dark Knight omission, The Guardian’s Ben Child made no remarks about the Academy’s "ole white geezers" being unable to get into their bat skins, but he did comment, "… I suspect that somewhere along the way, the idea that a film can be both critically and commercially successful has been forgotten. There is simply no other way to explain the absence of The Dark Knight, 2008’s most seen movie, from this year’s best film list. … One could understand the omission if the film had been panned by critics, but on the contrary, The Dark Knight is one of the year’s best reviewed movies, with a 94% ‘fresh’ rating on the review aggregator site Rottentomatoes.com’s end-of-year list. Of the five movies which made it on to the best film card, only Slumdog Millionaire sits above it, while The Reader languishes on just 60%."
Top Ten Biggest Oscar Snubs – Nominations #10
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