Just because it’s the Academy Awards doesn’t mean the judges always get it right

As the world girds for “Sinners” to battle it out with “One Battle After Another” for Best Picture at the Academy Awards tonight, now seems like as good a time as any to reassert my claim that the two best films of 2025 were actually “The Penguin Lessons” and “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.”

Hey, to each his own. I’ll fight you for it. Check them out. (Fair warning: The cheekily spelled “Nirvanna” film is not about the band. It’s a Canadian love letter to “Back to the Future.”)

When it comes right down to it, the list of Academy Awards winners in any given year is just another subjective opinion, no more or less valid than yours or mine. The system is biased against both massive commercial hits and anything that requires English subtitles alike. Voting is influenced by campaigning, politics and shifting industry sentiment.

There is just no possible way to determine a consensus Best Picture that everyone can agree on. Unlike the Super Bowl, movies don’t come with an indisputable final score. You have your Rotten Tomatoes rating, and I have mine. That’s what makes the Academy Awards both tons of fun – and utterly irrelevant. History doesn’t care.

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The buildup to the actual awards has become an annual endurance test that now regularly stretches into March, this year so that ABC could avoid competing with the 2026 Winter Olympics. The yearly delay is turning Seasonal Affective Disorder into Seasonal Awards Fatigue.

And for what? After all that endless buildup and hype, films that had been relentlessly promoted as the consensus best of the year often quickly fade from memory. (Quick: Anyone remember the second half of “Anora”? It was last year’s winner.)

Meanwhile, films that never kissed the Oscars’ ring take their place, over time, as among history’s best. Like, say, “The Shining,” which is seared into any cinema fan’s brain but didn’t receive a single Oscar nomination.

It’s a fascinating exercise to skim the list of forgotten – or debunked – Best Picture winners. Consider “Crash” (2006), Paul Haggis’ divisive drama about racism in Los Angeles that The Guardian named both the worst and most embarrassing Best Picture winner of all time, calling it “a contrived, dated, liberal message movie.” It beat out “Brokeback Mountain,” now regarded as inarguably one of the most culturally significant films in movie history.  (It was recently ironically suggested on Reddit that if the Oscars retroactively nominated David Cronenberg’s 1996 film also titled “Crash” in place of Haggis’ “Crash,” it would win – and deserve it.)

Or consider “Green Book” (2018), an oversimplified look at race relations in the 1960s American South. Or just think: The weightless “Shakespeare in Love” somehow beat out Steven Spielberg’s war epic “Saving Private Ryan” in 1998. That is what you call a war crime.

Pop quiz: Anyone remember 2011 winner “The Artist”? It’s only 15 years old, yet it lost its cultural footprint long ago. (I’ll refresh your memories: Black and white, silent film, set in 1920s Hollywood, about a star whose career crashes with the arrival of talkies.)

I would suggest “Out of Africa” (1985) and “The English Patient” (1996) also belong on any list of Best Picture winners whose prestige has faded over the years.

When you look back at the lineup of Oscars favorites in any given year, they begin to look less like a definitive record of the actual best films of the year and more like a simple snapshot of what films seemed most meaningful at that given moment.

Consider the list of timeless films that fell short of winning Best Picture, among them:  “Apocalypse Now,” “The Shawshank Redemption,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Pulp Fiction,” “Taxi Driver,” “Do the Right Thing,” “Vertigo,” “Psycho, “Singin’ in the Rain,” “The Social Network” and “12 Angry Men.”

Sometimes the sting is not just that a great film lost, but what film it lost to. Like, say, “The Exorcist” losing to ”The Sting” in 1974. Or “How Green Was My Valley” beating out  “Citizen Kane” in 1942. Or “High Noon” losing to “The Greatest Show on Earth” in 1953.

Rhetorical question: What’s the more historically important film: “The Color Purple” in 1986 – or the winner, “Out of Africa”? Contemporary film students must mock us mercilessly when they learn that, in 1987, “The English Patient” won over “Fargo.”

We’re just getting started. Forget Best Picture. Brian Rowe, host of “The Awards Contender” podcast, compiled a list of classic films that received zero Oscars nominations, period. In any category. It includes “Groundhog Day,” “The Shining,” “Kill Bill, Volume II,” “Heat,” “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “King Kong” and “The Searchers” – with Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights” (1931) coming in at No. 1.

“How did one of the best movies ever made not get a single nomination?” Rowe said. “It’s crazy, because ‘City Lights’ is a masterpiece with a capital M. I think about the ending to that movie all the time. That it was not nominated for anything absolutely enrages me. And to make matters even worse, that’s the year “Cimarron” won Best Picture – one of the top three worst movies to ever win. It’s a huge struggle just to get through.”

(“And don’t get me started on individual injustices, like Julia Roberts (“Erin Brockovich”) beating out Ellen Burstyn’s career-best performance in 2001’s “Requiem for a Dream.” Burstyn already had an Oscar, and Roberts was seen as somehow “due” for an award. It remains one of the  biggest snubs in Oscars history.)

It’s not often that audience sensibilities align with Academy voters, but it does happen. The three highest-grossing Oscar winners (adjusted for inflation) are “Gone With the Wind” (1939) – $4 billion in today’s dollars – “Titanic” (1997), “Oppenheimer” (2023), and “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” (2003). By straight-out cash, it’s “Titanic” on top with $2.3 billion, “Oppenheimer” (the highest-grossing Best Picture winner in 20 years) and “The Lord of the Rings” (2003).

To be fair, the Academy does sometimes get it right and name the actual best picture as, well … Best Picture. The Independent just ranked these films as the Oscars’ 10 greatest BP winners:

10. “The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946)

9. “An American in Paris” (1951)

8. “Casablanca” (1942)

7. “On the Waterfront” (1954)

6. “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962)

5. “All About Eve” (1950)

4. “The Godfather Part II” (1974)

3. “Unforgiven” (1992)

2. “Parasite” (2019)

1. “The Apartment” (1960)

Whatever your film taste, on this one point we can all agree: We’re all sick of this year’s awards contenders. That’s what happens when there’s one awards show after another for two months. And then Timothée Chalamet ping-pong slams something so stupid, he makes you want to root against the greatest actor of his generation.

In short order, all that buildup and hype fades, and the nomination list we obsessed over for months settles into its proper place in film lore, whatever that place is.

Give it a few years. I wonder whether retro movie streamers will be cueing up ”One Battle After Another” (tonight’s inevitable winner), or “Sinners.” I’m guessing “Sinners,” only because it’s more fun. And it’s a better film (even though it’s not going to win).

Among tonight’s fellow best-pic nominees, I can absolutely see “F1” ($633 million worldwide) becoming appointment couch-cable TV (if there is such a thing in a few years), and “Hamnet” taking its quiet place among the conferred if little-known classics. Same for the impeccable nominee “Train Dreams.”

But will anyone remember which “Frankenstein” this one was, exactly, or will they maybe mistake “Bugonia” for a sandwich”? I can see a clip from “Marty Supreme” earning its seven seconds in Chalamet’s inevitable career retrospective. But featured in a classic film series? Highly unlikely there will be many Marty maniacs out there down the line.

Just for fun, I just looked up nominated Best Picture films from 10 years ago. How well do you recall these titles from the class of 2016?

Ranked in order of (my) remembrance: 8. “Brooklyn.” (I got nothing.) 7. “The Revenant.” 6. “The Big Short.” 5. “Bridge of Spies.” (I sort of remember a spy on a bridge.) 4. “The Martian.” (Was that Ray Walston?) 3. “Room.” (Solid.) 2. “Spotlight,” the winner. One of the best journalism films ever made. And yet, No. 1 with a historical bullet: No question it’s “Mad Max, Fury Road” – the nominated film that had the least likely chance of actually winning.

The moral: Don’t get too worked up about how your personal favorites do tonight. Remember that the Oscars are voted on by 9,000 industry professionals with varying degrees of agendas. The divide between Oscar winners and popular film “classics” makes it plain that the Academy Awards are less a barometer of universal cinematic worth and more a curious reflection of how the film industry views itself at any given time.

And if you need a palette cleanse after it’s over, go find “Penguin Lessons” (based on the true story of an English teacher who rescues a penguin from an oil slick in Argentina, and the bird – much like my cat – refuses to leave him alone). Or “Nirvanna,” a delightful and stupidly sincere sleeper comedy about two time-travelling best friends messing around with a camera.

As pictures go, they are the best.

John Moore is the Denver Gazette’s Senior Arts Journalist. Email him at john.moore@denvergazettedev.gazette.com.

The Oscars/On TV

• What: The 98th Academy Awards
• When: 5 p.m. Sunday on ABC; also available on Hulu, at abc.com and on the ABC app
• Red carpet coverage: Starts at 1:30 p.m. on ABC
• Host: Conan O’Brien
• Length: Scheduled for 3 hours and 30 minutes

Favorites

(According to goldderby.com)

• Film: ‘One Battle After Another,’ 76.3%
• Actor: Michael B. Jordan, 62.1%
• Actress: Jessie Buckley, ‘Hamnet, 97.5%
• Supporting actor: Sean Penn, ‘One Battle After Another,’ 70.9%
• Supporting actress: Amy Madigan, ‘Weapons,’ 59.8%
• Director, Paul Thomas Anderson, ‘One Battle After Another,’ 94.9%