12 deserving Oscar winners (who should have won sooner)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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