Daniel Day-Lewis over Bradley Cooper?!: The 13 most confusing Oscar screw-ups of all time

From awarding Rami Malek’s all-teeth performance as Freddie Mercury to Julianne Moore winning Best Actress for the wrong movie, the Oscars have always inspired confusion and frustration. Ahead of this year’s Academy Awards, Adam White explores the most egregious mistakes in recent Oscar history.

The Oscars don’t typically award bad acting performances. The worst of cinematic crime scenes feature talented stars trying to salvage what they can, from Viola Davis making the most out of The Help, to Colin Firth acting his royal socks off in The King’s Speech.

In truth, the Oscars tend to be more confusing than they are outright offensive. Many actors seem to win for the wrong performances (does anyone think Still Alice is Julianne Moore’s best work?), while interesting performances in provocative movies tend to be overlooked in favour of awarding more traditional Oscar bait.

It means that it’s far easier to curate a list of the most “what the hell?” wins than it is the truly bad ones. These are times when the victor seemed much less deserving than their fellow nominees, or when a juicy Oscar narrative overpowered the performance itself: Who hadn’t won in a while? Who’d been snubbed too many times? Who risked their health the most through all that weight loss/weight gain/potential hypothermia, and so forth?.

Ahead of this year’s Oscars, which fall on Sunday 2 March, we’ve gone through more than 30 years of ceremonies to find 13 of the most frustrating Academy Award screw-ups in the acting categories. To say anything negative about Daniel Day-Lewis is tantamount to sacrilege – so I won’t. But Steven Spielberg’s Abraham Lincoln biopic is also among the actor’s most unexciting work. His performance as one of America’s greatest presidents is driven by stoicism and reserve – qualities that are basically the Oscars’ kryptonite. With that in mind, it’s admirable that he triumphed in 2013. Yet you wish Oscar had ventured elsewhere that year based on Day-Lewis’s fellow nominees. Compared to an electric Bradley Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook, or Joaquin Phoenix’s strange and beguiling work in The Master, Day-Lewis felt (dare I say it?) a bit pedestrian.

Meryl Streep is the queen of technicality. She’s never been an especially naturalistic performer, but it’s still thrilling to watch her move and gesture and project. But in something like The Iron Lady, where she played Margaret Thatcher, it’s almost unbearable. Try as she might, she never seems to have a handle on the character, possibly because The Iron Lady isn’t a very good movie, but it’s incredibly distracting. This Oscar year (2012) was also a great one for performances by women, most of whom didn’t even get nominations – Charlize Theron in Young Adult, Tilda Swinton in We Need to Talk About Kevin, Kristen Wiig in Bridesmaids, Elizabeth Olsen in Martha Marcy May Marlene. Streep sweeping the various Best Actress races, despite all of that strong competition, was particularly egregious.

This was an “it’s time” Oscar. Still Alice marked Julianne Moore’s fifth Academy Award nomination, with the Academy deciding she finally deserved a spot at the podium. While she’s very good as a woman experiencing early onset Alzheimer’s, the film itself is forgettable. An easy fix would have been to give Moore her much-deserved Oscar back in 1998, for her gorgeous work in Boogie Nights. Or in 2003 for Far from Heaven, where she embodied heartbreaking fragility as a tortured Fifties housewife. With such an “it’s time” narrative therefore unnecessary in 2015, that year’s Best Actress Oscar could have gone to a terrifying Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl instead.

Everyone loves Martin Landau, so it’s difficult to begrudge this win too much. His work as Bela Lugosi in this underrated Tim Burton drama is also magnetic and poignant. But he was also up against Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction. A true cinema-shaking, star-making performance if there ever was one, Jackson’s work in the Quentin Tarantino classic is funny, frightening and endlessly quotable. It seems bizarre that it wasn’t an awards shoo-in at the time.

Or the second time Samuel L Jackson missed out on his Oscar. While you could excuse Landau’s win based on the quality of his performance in Ed Wood, it remains mystifying that the Academy Awards determined Waltz to be the standout of the Django Unchained ensemble – particularly when he had won for another Tarantino film, Inglourious Basterds, just three years earlier. Neither of Waltz’s Django co-stars – Jackson and a similarly terrifying Leonardo DiCaprio – earned Supporting Actor nominations, and he ultimately triumphed over The Master’s Philip Seymour Hoffman, in what marked Hoffman’s last great performance before his tragic death.

For someone who has won two Best Actress Oscars, Hilary Swank has had an odd career. Last seen as a psychotic policewoman in the lurid thriller Fatale, Swank probably didn’t need a second Academy Award, for the maudlin Clint Eastwood weepie Million Dollar Baby. Awarding that year’s Best Actress Oscar to Kate Winslet instead – for her show-stopping performance in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – would have also freed her from an “it’s time” narrative four years later (when she won for her role in the stuffy courtroom drama The Reader). Oh, what could have been.