From ‘American Beauty’ winning Best Picture to the eternal controversy over Marisa Tomei’s win for ‘My Cousin Vinny’, Oscar history is filled with divisive victories endlessly debated by film fans.
Marisa Tomei won the Best Supporting Actress award in 1993 for her turn as Joe Pesci’s spunky younger girlfriend in the brilliant legal comedy My Cousin Vinny.
Chadwick Boseman had posthumously won a variety of awards for his role in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom – Oscar producers were so certain of a victory for the Black Panther star, who died of cancer eight months before, that they shifted the category layout in a somewhat shameless attempt to create an emotional footnote to the ceremony.
You could also argue that a silly, camp story of jazz broads murdering their sleazy husbands shouldn’t have won best picture over Gangs of New York, The Pianist, The Hours, and the (admittedly interminable) second Lord of the Rings film.
There was much grousing when Alessandro Bertolazzi, Giorgio Gregorini and Christopher Nelson took home the Best Makeup and Hairstyling Oscar in 2017 for their work on David Ayer’s Suicide Squad.
