1 The Academy Loves Irrelevant Studio Politics: Best Picture (1998, 1942)

With their track record of fuck-uppery, you'd think Hollywood would take the Oscars with a grain of salt. When the barometer for artistic success in your industry doesn't even really care if you're all that good at what you do, then why should you? If you took such an innocent attitude into an Oscar race against the Weinsteins, you'd wake up the morning of the Oscars wearing a necklace made from the teeth of the Chinese dignitary whose murder they'd framed you for.

Throughout the 90s, Miramax's entire business plan was built around creating films specifically tailored to the Academy's delicate sensibilities, banking on the added exposure a win would bring. This plan was put to the test in 1998, when Miramax's Shakespeare in Love was nominated alongside Saving Private Ryan, which spent the summer making every war film that had ever won an Oscar look like a high school play. It was a foregone conclusion Saving Private Ryan would win. And then the campaign started.

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The month leading up to the Academy Awards are like an especially petty high school election, if high school students had access to the money cannon that made Transformers 2 possible. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, "Miramax spent an estimated $16 million (about $2,700 for each academy member) on its Shakespeare (in Love) campaign." Miramax also leaned on journalists to criticize Private Ryan for being historically inaccurate, a ballsy maneuver when you consider that Ryan's storming of Normandy made veterans of that battle shit their theater seats, and Miramax's film turned Shakespeare's creative process into a gender bending romantic comedy.

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Didn't matter. On the night of the Awards, Shakespeare in Love shocked everyone by winning Best Picture award out from under the Citizen Kane of modern war films.

Which brings us to the Citizen Kane of all films: Citizen Kane. Anyone who cares a little too much about movies swears Orson Wells's 1942 film is the best thing ever projected onto a silver screen. And it's not like people didn't realize it at the time: It was nominated for nine Academy Awards, and was widely expected to win most if not all of them. Then William Randolph Hearst, the publishing giant whose life Kane is loosely based on, started a smear campaign that focused on director Orson Wells's contempt for Hollywood. On the night of the Awards, the audience of Academy members actually booed every time Wells's name was mentioned. The most influential film of all time lost Best Picture to How Green Was My Valley, a film that archeological records indicate nobody gave a shit about even then.



That'll show him to question Hollywood's integrity.

The passage of time reveals a movie's true quality, not the number of gold statues it won. Citizen Kane didn't win the Best Picture, neither did Raging Bull, or Dr. Strangelove, or Rear Window or Star Wars. Keep that in mind while you're watching the circus, and you'll have a better time all around.

For more on the Academy Awards, check out 5 Great Careers Destroyed By The Post-Oscar Curse and 6 Cheap Acting Tricks That Fool The Critics Every Time.

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