14 of the Best Oscar Also Rans

There’s always a frontrunner for the biggest Oscar categories. We all suspect that Matthew McConaughey is going to win Best Actor of Dallas Buyers Club, and that Jared Leto is going to win Best Supporting Actor for, well, Dallas Buyers Club. But that attitude leads to many worthy nominees getting overlooked.

For these worthy actors, writers and filmmakers we like to say that “the nomination is their reward,” which is a nice way of suggesting that there’s no way that the Academy will vote them en masse. True, their names and films are now on the record books as Oscar nominees, and as such they will at least live on as a note of trivia, but sometimes even brilliant work that defied the odds and earned a place amongst the Oscar contenders has a way of getting overshadowed in the years that follow. When was the last time you heard someone bring up Il Postino in casual conversation? What about In the Name of the Father, or Quiz Show?

Time is the only critic that matters, which means that the films which endure over the years are the real “winners” whether or not they took home a golden statue. But even time can be overly harsh. Even over the course of the last ten years you can find a lot of Oscar nominees who did great work in amazing movies that are already slipping into obscurity. Let’s give them a hand with that by reminding audiences that their nominations weren’t a fluke. These are just 14 of the Best Oscar Also Rans of the last ten years.


William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.

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