Skip to content

Top Navigation

EW.com EW.com
    • All TV
    • TV Reviews
    • TV Reunions
    • Recaps
    • What to Watch
    • Winter TV
    • Comedy
    • Crime
    • Drama
    • Family
    • Horror
    • Reality
    • Sci-fi
    • Thriller
    • All Movies
    • Movie Reviews
    • Trailers
    • Film Festivals
    • Movie Reunions
    • Movie Previews
    • All Music
    • Music Reviews
    • All What to Watch
    • What to Watch Podcast Episodes
    • TV Reviews
    • Movie Reviews
    • All BINGE
    • EW's Binge Podcast Episodes
    • Recaps
    • Survivor
    • This is Us
    • RuPaul's Drag Race
    • Stranger Things
    • The Boys
    • The Blacklist
    • The Walking Dead
    • Better Call Saul
    • All The Awardist
    • The Awardist Podcast Episodes
    • Oscars
    • Emmys
    • Golden Globes
    • SAG Awards
    • Grammys
    • Tony Awards
    • All Books
    • Book Reviews
    • Author Interviews
    • All Theater
    • Theater Reviews
  • Podcasts
  • Gaming
    • All Events
    • Comic-Con
  • Celebrity
  • Streaming

Profile Menu

Your Profile

Account

  • Join Now
  • Email Preferences
  • Newsletter
  • Manage Your Subscription this link opens in a new tab
  • Give a Gift Subscription this link opens in a new tab
  • Logout
Login
Subscribe

Explore EW.com

EW.com EW.com
  • Explore

    Explore

    • The 10 best songs of 2022

      The 10 best songs of 2022

      From disco-trap to deconstructed techno to Dolly-style country, we rank our favorite tracks this year. Read More
    • The 10 best movies of 2022 (and 5 worst)

      The 10 best movies of 2022 (and 5 worst)

      Let there be Mavericks, Bollywood magic, and a Cate Blanchett maestro on the loose. Read More
    • The true story of the g-strings and murders behind Welcome to Chippendales

      The true story of the g-strings and murders behind Welcome to Chippendales

      A look back at the crazy true story of Chippendales founder Somen "Steve" Banerjee and the murder and murder-for-hire plots at the center of the Hulu series. Read More
  • TV

    TV

    See All TV
    • TV Reviews
    • TV Reunions
    • Recaps
    • What to Watch
    • Winter TV
    • Comedy
    • Crime
    • Drama
    • Family
    • Horror
    • Reality
    • Sci-fi
    • Thriller
  • Movies

    Movies

    See All Movies
    • Movie Reviews
    • Trailers
    • Film Festivals
    • Movie Reunions
    • Movie Previews
  • Music

    Music

    See All Music
    • Music Reviews
  • What to Watch

    What to Watch

    See All What to Watch
    • What to Watch Podcast Episodes
    • TV Reviews
    • Movie Reviews
  • BINGE

    BINGE

    See All BINGE
    • EW's Binge Podcast Episodes
    • Recaps
    • Survivor
    • This is Us
    • RuPaul's Drag Race
    • Stranger Things
    • The Boys
    • The Blacklist
    • The Walking Dead
    • Better Call Saul
  • The Awardist

    The Awardist

    See All The Awardist
    • The Awardist Podcast Episodes
    • Oscars
    • Emmys
    • Golden Globes
    • SAG Awards
    • Grammys
    • Tony Awards
  • Books

    Books

    See All Books
    • Book Reviews
    • Author Interviews
  • Theater

    Theater

    See All Theater
    • Theater Reviews
  • Podcasts
  • Gaming
  • Events

    Events

    See All Events
    • Comic-Con
  • Celebrity
  • Streaming

Profile Menu

Subscribe this link opens in a new tab
Your Profile

Account

  • Join Now
  • Email Preferences
  • Newsletter
  • Manage Your Subscription this link opens in a new tab
  • Give a Gift Subscription this link opens in a new tab
  • Logout
Login
Sweepstakes

Follow Us

  1. Home
  2. Movies
  3. 12 deserving Oscar winners (who should have won sooner)

12 deserving Oscar winners (who should have won sooner)

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Owen Gleiberman, and Chris Nashawaty list honorees like Martin Scorsese, Kate Winslet, and Denzel Washington who got the nod as a 'make good' after getting passed over for better work
By Owen Gleiberman,  Lisa Schwarzbaum and Chris Nashawaty February 20, 2019 at 03:00 PM EST
Skip gallery slides
FB

1 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

Holly Hunter for The Piano (1993)

Holly-Hunter
Credit: Kerry Hayes/20th Century Fox/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock; Everett Collection

Do you want to know what film hasn’t aged that well? The Piano. Do you want to know a film that hasn’t aged a day in 30 years – and has probably just gotten better and better in the rearview mirror? Broadcast News. James L. Brooks’ beltway masterpiece is an honest, humane, and hilarious workplace love triangle. And that triangle falls apart without Hunter as its exasperated fulcrum. Her ink-bleeding news producer is a true believer awkwardly, desperately trying to balance her own ambition, romantic desires, and compulsive need to backseat drive (much to every D.C. cabbie’s chagrin) in every facet of her life. This was not only one of the great female acting performances of the '80s, it was the great female acting performance of the '80s. —Chris Nashawaty

1 of 12

Advertisement
Advertisement

2 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

Paul Newman for The Color of Money (1986)

Paul-Newman
Credit: Everett Collection (2)

Newman went home from the Oscars empty-handed eight times in all as an actor (plus once as a director) — six of them before finally snagging a statuette as aging pool shark Fast Eddie Felson in Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money. I don’t have any issue with that win. He totally deserved it. But he also should have won for his first go-round with the character in 1961’s The Hustler (he lost to Maximilian Schell in Judgment at Nuremberg), not to mention being robbed for Hud, Cool Hand Luke, and The Verdict. I mean, come on, The Verdict! —CN

2 of 12

3 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

Henry Fonda for On Golden Pond (1981)

On Golden Pond, Henry Fonda | When Henry Fonda won his 1981 Oscar for his Very Special Oldie role as a bitter coot of a father in On Golden Pond ,Â…
Credit: Everett Collection(2)

When Henry Fonda won his 1981 Oscar for his Very Special Oldie role as a bitter coot of a father in On Golden Pond, he was too ill to attend the ceremony. Too bad the star had to wait so long for his only win: Fonda should have been handed the golden prize 40 years earlier when he was nominated for his great performance in The Grapes of Wrath. (But Jimmy Stewart took the honors that year; more on that mistake in a minute.) —Lisa Schwarzbaum

3 of 12

Advertisement
Continued on next slide.
Advertisement

4 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

Roman Polanski for The Pianist (2002)

Roman Polanski | Twenty-five years after he fled the country on a sex charge, Roman Polanski was chosen as Best Director for The Pianist , an impressively moodyÂ…
Credit: Everett Collection(3)

Twenty-five years after he fled the country on a sex charge, Roman Polanski was chosen as Best Director for The Pianist, an impressively moody but also rather sketchy and remote drama of one lost soul (Adrien Brody) stumbling through the Holocaust. On Oscar night, all of Hollywood greeted this award as a kind of honorary, penitential homecoming for a great, exiled filmmaker (even though he literally couldn't come home). Yet that only emphasized that Polanski's Oscar was, in essence, a symbolic gesture. The movies he really deserved to win for were his earlier landmark masterpieces: the demonically brilliant spookshow Rosemary's Baby (1968) and the great, labyrinthine, dark-as-midnight mystery-thriller Chinatown (1974). —Owen Gleiberman

4 of 12

Advertisement

5 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

Sidney Poitier for Lilies of the Field (1963)

Sidney Poitier | At his best, Sidney Poitier could be a ferocious actor (''They call me Mr. Tibbs!''), but Hollywood, always profoundly uneasy about how, exactly, to castÂ…
Credit: Everett Collection(2)

At his best, Sidney Poitier could be a ferocious actor (''They call me Mr. Tibbs!''), but Hollywood, always profoundly uneasy about how, exactly, to cast the first black movie star, too often stuck this charismatic trailblazer in roles that turned him into a mild, saintly, eager-to-please supplicant. Lilies of the Field, the movie for which he won Best Actor, is a laughably wholesome piece of kitsch in which Poitier plays a handyman who helps a group of German nuns build a church in the middle of the Arizona desert. The role is so servile (and asexual) that Poitier seemed to be getting rewarded for turning himself into a eunuch. He should have won five years before for The Defiant Ones (1958), the original salt-and-pepper buddy movie, in which his acting had a lyrical intensity. —OG

5 of 12

6 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

Jimmy Stewart for The Philadelphia Story (1940)

Jimmy Stewart | Even Jimmy Stewart didn't vote for Jimmy Stewart to win the 1940 Oscar for Best Actor for his work in The Philadelphia Story ; heÂ…
Credit: Everett Collection(2)

Even Jimmy Stewart didn't vote for Jimmy Stewart to win the 1940 Oscar for Best Actor for his work in The Philadelphia Story; he said he voted for Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath. It sure feels like Academy voters realized they made a mistake in not awarding Stewart the top prize when they should have a year earlier, when he was nominated for his stirring work in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. (The Oscar went to the wrong good actor, Robert Donat, in Goodbye, Mr. Chips.) —LS

6 of 12

Advertisement
Advertisement
Continued on next slide.
Advertisement

7 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

Jessica Lange in Blue Sky (1994)

Jessica Lange | She actually gives a potent performance as a veteran military wife whose unstable emotional extravagance keeps spilling over the boundaries of her life. Yet whenÂ…
Credit: Everett Collection(2)

She actually gives a potent performance as a veteran military wife whose unstable emotional extravagance keeps spilling over the boundaries of her life. Yet when Jessica Lange took home the Best Actress prize for this fascinating if over-the-top curio, it was as much or more of a nod to the indelible work she'd done before — in particular, to her masterful performance as country-music legend Patsy Cline in Sweet Dreams (1985), a movie in which she memorably etched the life of a down-home artist caught up in a sexy, boozy domestic purgatory that is never less than blisteringly authentic. —OG

7 of 12

Advertisement
Advertisement

8 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

5. Denzel Washington for Training Day (2001)

Malcolm X, Denzel Washington | 2001 was a great year for African-American movie actors: Halle Berry won Best Actress for Monster's Ball and Denzel Washington won Best Actor for playingÂ…
Credit: Everett Collection

2001 was a great year for African-American movie actors: Halle Berry won Best Actress for Monster's Ball and Denzel Washington won Best Actor for playing a tough and crooked cop in Training Day. Oh well, the Academy was only a decade or so too late in honoring Washington: Nominated in 1992 for his towering performance in Malcolm X, he should have brought home the gold then. (But that was the year Al Pacino... more on that soon.) —LS

8 of 12

Advertisement

9 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

4. John Wayne in True Grit (1969)

John Wayne | As the fat, raspy, one-eyed trigger-happy old lawman Rooster Cogburn, John Wayne seemed to be doing a comic riff on his entire career. And soÂ…
Credit: Everett Collection(2)

As the fat, raspy, one-eyed trigger-happy old lawman Rooster Cogburn, John Wayne seemed to be doing a comic riff on his entire career. And so there's a certain poetic justice to his having taken home the Oscar for what was, in essence, a lifetime-achievement award. He really should have won back in 1951, for infusing the martinet Marine sergeant in Sands of Iwo Jima with such a haunted sense of private loss. But he really should have won for The Searchers, the John Ford classic in which he boldly excavated the darkest side of the West. As it happens, he wasn't even nominated for it. —OG

9 of 12

Advertisement
Advertisement
Continued on next slide.
Advertisement

10 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

3. Martin Scorsese for The Departed (2007)

Martin Scorsese | Consolation Oscar Syndrome caught up with Martin Scorsese in 2007 when the acclaimed director won his first and only statuette for The Departed . FiveÂ…
Credit: Everett Collection

Consolation Oscar Syndrome caught up with Martin Scorsese in 2007 when the acclaimed director won his first and only statuette for The Departed. Five years earlier, in 2002, the it's-about-time publicity brigade behind Gangs of New York began pushing hard when Scorsese received his fourth Best Director nomination. And in 2004, they pushed again for The Aviator. No luck. The Departed is good and all, but the love showered on it had a sorry-we're-late intensity to it: Scorsese should have won his first Oscar in 1980 for Raging Bull, and another in 1990 for Goodfellas. —LS

10 of 12

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

11 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

2. Kate Winslet for The Reader (2008)

The Reader, Kate Winslet | Kate Winslet is in the Oscar record books for having received five nominations by the time she was 31. (She's been showered with six inÂ…
Credit: Melinda Sue Gordon

Kate Winslet is in the Oscar record books for having received five nominations by the time she was 31. (She's been showered with six in all.) But by the time she finally won the 2008 Best Actress award for The Reader, voters who might have rightfully recognized Melissa Leo for Frozen River or Anne Hathaway for Rachel Getting Married that year were in consolation mode. Winslet should have claimed the prize and been crowned Queen of the World for Titanic in 1997. —LS

11 of 12

Advertisement
Advertisement

12 of 12

FB
Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message

1. Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman (1992)

Dog Day Afternoon, Al Pacino | How could Al Pacino finally win a Best Actor award for a performance so operatically florid, so hambone shameless, that it's basically full of, well,Â…
Credit: Everett Collection(4)

How could Al Pacino finally win a Best Actor award for a performance so operatically florid, so hambone shameless, that it's basically full of, well, hoo-hah? He could do it because Oscar loves ham served with all the trimmings — but also because, in Pacino's case, the Academy had so much to make up for. As Frank Slade, a retired Army Colonel who lost his sight in an accident and has become an incorrigible, Jack Daniels-swilling loudmouth, Pacino grabs your heartstrings by the lapels. What everyone knew, by then, is that the award was really a nod to his earlier work: for his having so epically portrayed Michael Corleone in The Godfather (1972) as a mensch-turned-monster, for getting so far inside the pathological heroism of Frank Serpico in Serpico (1973), and for making the desperate, hapless bank robber of Dog Day Afternoon (1975) into the ultimate '70s antihero. —OG

12 of 12

Advertisement
Advertisement
Replay gallery

Share the Gallery

Pinterest Facebook

Up Next

By Owen Gleiberman,  Lisa Schwarzbaum and Chris Nashawaty

    Share the Gallery

    Pinterest Facebook
    Trending Videos
    Advertisement
    Skip slide summaries

    Everything in This Slideshow

    Advertisement

    View All

    1 of 12 Holly Hunter for The Piano (1993)
    2 of 12 Paul Newman for The Color of Money (1986)
    3 of 12 Henry Fonda for On Golden Pond (1981)
    4 of 12 Roman Polanski for The Pianist (2002)
    5 of 12 Sidney Poitier for Lilies of the Field (1963)
    6 of 12 Jimmy Stewart for The Philadelphia Story (1940)
    7 of 12 Jessica Lange in Blue Sky (1994)
    8 of 12 5. Denzel Washington for Training Day (2001)
    9 of 12 4. John Wayne in True Grit (1969)
    10 of 12 3. Martin Scorsese for The Departed (2007)
    11 of 12 2. Kate Winslet for The Reader (2008)
    12 of 12 1. Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman (1992)

    Share & More

    Tweet Pinterest Email Send Text Message
    EW.com

    Magazines & More

    Learn More

    • Subscribe this link opens in a new tab
    • Advertise this link opens in a new tab
    • Content Licensing this link opens in a new tab
    • Accolades this link opens in a new tab

    Connect

    Subscribe to Our Newsletter
    Meredith© Copyright 2023 Meredith Corporation. Entertainment Weekly is a registered trademark of Meredith Corporation All Rights Reserved. Entertainment Weekly may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice. Privacy Policythis link opens in a new tab Terms of Servicethis link opens in a new tab Ad Choicesthis link opens in a new tab California Do Not Sellthis link opens a modal window Web Accessibilitythis link opens in a new tab
    © Copyright EW.com. All rights reserved. Printed from https://ew.com

    View image

    12 deserving Oscar winners (who should have won sooner)
    this link is to an external site that may or may not meet accessibility guidelines.