Hey, hi, how are you. We’ve meticulously written a rundown of all the Best Picture of the Oscar nominations, which as we start writing this will be airing in two and a half hours, and we spent the last hour doing a rundown of the male acting categories. So let’s not waste time. WE GOT DEADLINES.
“Shit, we forgot to put quotes on the last one of these. WAIT THE OSCARS ARE TODAY?”
~AFFotD Editor-in-Chief, Johnny Roosevelt
We posted our rundown of all the Best Picture nominees to illustrate that we’re masochists who have watched all the Oscar nominees for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress. We then were planning on posting our rundown, and predictions, for all the other awards in three additional articles. Then we got lazy (read as, drunk) and forgot.
But the awards are in four hours so we still have time to either come off as Award geniuses, or Award FOOLS. So let’s get started with the male acting awards.
As you no doubt know, the staff here at America Fun Fact of the Day are certified sickos. We also are weirdly obsessed with the Academy Awards. It’s an illness we can’t explain. As a result, our entire staff sat down and watched every single movie nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress, as well as a handful of wildcard nominations.
We don’t necessarily recommend this. We saw about 20 Academy Award nominees, which by a rough estimate means we spent 50 hours watching movies that are trying to be prestigious (also Top Gun and Avatar).
Families were abandoned. Funerals were skipped. Hot Pockets were consumed en masse. But we did all this so that you can hear our arbitrary opinion of each nomination, and our predictions going into Sunday’s ceremony.
So sit back, and probably get ready to be mad at some of our rankings.
“I have more Academy Award nominations than Tom Hanks? That…that can’t be right.”
~Bradley Cooper
As a nation, Americans don’t agree on much. We know that pizza is good, traffic jams are bad, and Jack Black is either the greatest gift we could ever ask for or a complete scourge from hell and there is no middle ground there. Seriously, it’s impossible to have a neutral opinion on Jack Black.
But one immutable fact that all Americans can share is simple—Tom Hanks is America’s dad, and we love him fiercely.
When Hanks first appeared on the small screen as *check notes* a young ad man who had to dress as a woman to live in an affordable girls-only apartment (lol, wait, really?) you might be forgiven for not immediately assuming that the then-24-year-old would go on to become a full-stop national icon and one of the greatest actors of all time, but here we are.
Ever since his big screen breakthrough in 1984’s Splash, however, Hanks has gone on to become the fourth-highest-grossing actor of all time, and one of the more critically praised as well. Along with Spencer Tracy, Tom Hanks is one of two actors ever to win the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in consecutive years.
But despite appearing in numerous Golden Globe- and Academy Award-nominated films in the past several decades, Hanks randomly went 19 years between Oscar nominations, until his work in 2019’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was nominated.
That got us thinking. Tom Hanks, arguably the greatest actor of his generation, has been nominated for a total of six Academy Awards in his career. That’s a lot, but given Hanks’ stature, you’d assume he’d have more, right? Hell, Bradley Cooper has eight nominations (though some of those are for producing, and he got a screenplay nod for A Star is Born).
So join us in a journey through Tom Hanks’ storied career as we determine—
Posted in America Fun Fact of the Day
Tagged Academy Awards, America, Oscars, Tom Hanks
“It’s called the Money Plane. Some of the baddest motherfuckers on the planet are on that plane, all craving action. Whatever you want to wager on, the Money Plane has you covered. You want to bet on a dude fucking an alligator? Money Plane.”
~Darius Emmanuel Grouch III (a.k.a. The Ruckus)
On July 10th, just less than a week after its birthday, America was blessed with a belated gift. With of a reported budget of “under $50 million” according to Wikipedia (because the director jokingly said “Well it was under $50 million”) and an actual budget of, like, $75 bucks and the promise to delete several portable hard drives worth of compromising data, we were given MONEY PLANE.
And it’s the best film of 2020.
Don’t let the haters fool you. Don’t listen to the 3.3/10 rating on IMDB. Or the 27% Fresh rating on RottenTomatoes. This movie is gold.
And speaking of gold, we’re going to award it SEVENTEEN FUCKING ACADEMY AWARDS.
“Ha, shit, wait, I’ve been nominated for more Oscars than Burt Reynolds? Haha, what?”
~Nicolas Cage
We talk about the Academy Awards a lot around these parts (some might say to a “dangerous to our health” degree). Now, there are a lot of reasons for that. Movies take a lot less effort to get through than books, first of all. Also, as manufactured and imperfect as it is, the term “Academy Award nominee” lends a film or actor an impressive amount of prestige. But mostly, it’s the randomness.
Yes, being an Academy Award winner or nominee is an achievement that you can carry with you to your grave, but 80% of the time these nominations are extremely random and hardly make any sense. If you look at their history of work, it’s sort of strange that Charlie Chaplin and Angela Bassett have the same number of Oscar nominations as Andrew Garfield and Abigail Breslin, but that’s just how the Academy throws down, baby.
And we love it. We love it so much in fact that we went through a list of all the actors who have been nominated for acting’s highest honor to remind ourselves of a few actors whose nominations, in retrospect, seemed kind of bonkers. We’re not saying that these actors did not deserve the honor—in fact almost every one put up an award-worthy performance.
We’re just saying that if aliens landed on Earth, took in the entirety of our cultural history, and were told that Gary Busey was once nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role, they would probably respond, “Wait you mean that toothy guy from Point Break? Is this one of those ‘pranks’ you Earthlings seem so fond of?”
Let’s dive in.
Posted in America Fun Fact of the Day, Miscellaneous America
Tagged Academy Awards, America, Babe, Buddy Holly Story, Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Dan Aykroyd, Diana Ross, Driving Miss Daisy, Gary Busey, James Cromwell, Jonah Hill, Lady Sings the Blues, Moneyball, Oscars, Randy Quaid, rip Torn, Surprising Oscar Nominations, Taraji P. Henson, The Last Detail, Wolf of Wall Street
“Wait, we’re done? Like, I can go home now? I don’t have to keep watching hundreds upon hundreds of movies?”
~Our Film Screener. He’s So, So Tired.
Well, it’s been a long, weird ride. We’ve gone through the relatively boring 70s, the all-over-the-place 80s (literally half of the revised winners were films that weren’t even nominated initially, and no, you will not make us rescind giving Die Hard an Oscar, fuck you), the “are you fucking kidding me with this, Dances With Wolves” 90s, and the Lord of the Rings comeback tour of the early 00s, but now we’re finally on our final article of this sordid crazy ride we’ve been on.
By the end of this article, we will have written over 40,000 words (Jesus, that’s like a short novel, what are we doing with our lives) telling you about over 200 films (well actually 209, because 9 of these 40 Academy Awards ended up going to movies that were not originally nominated). If you think it’s been exhausting going through this list (and we know it has, so many of our choices have made you so angry for mostly completely legitimate reasons, sorry about American Beauty, guys) it’s been about a million times more exhausting to compile it.
But we’re at the finish line! Just five more years of Academy Award ceremonies to go through in order to correct history! One last time for those in the back, here’s how we’re doing this.
We’ll list each group of films by the year their Academy Awards ceremony was held. So when we talk about 2005, we’re discussing the 2005 Academy Award ceremony, which was given for movies made in 2004. 2006’s entries are all films from 2005, you get the deal, we’ve literally done seven of these already (and if you’ve randomly found this article because you googled “Oscar Sex Party Big Boobs” and clicked the second link on the third page of results, um, listen we’re sorry we honestly didn’t think that would work SEO-wise, we’re sorry, there are no Oscar Sex Party Big Boobs here, or even Oscar Sex Party REGULAR Boobs, but, um, check out our other films in our brand new Re-Awarding the Academy Award section if you want to see the other articles in this series. No, none of them have boobs. Again, we’re sorry).
So yeah. The parenthetical number next to each movie is their IMDB user rating, which we realize was a dumb and arbitrary thing to go by, but we just include it to give you an idea of how fondly the film has been remembered. And finally, as you no doubt have gathered, we’ll be listing every winner and nominee from each year, but you don’t have to be nominated to go home with the re-awarded statue.
Enough of our jabbering, let’s finish this bitch. Here we are…
Posted in America Fun Fact of the Day, Re-Awarding the Academy Award for Best Picture (1970-2009)
Tagged Academy Awards, America, Atonement, Babel, Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Crash, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Finding Neverland, Frost/Nixon, Good Night And Good Luck, Letters from Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine, Michael Clayton, Milk, Million Dollar Baby, Munich, No Country for Old men, Oscars, Ray, Re-Awarding the Oscars, Sideways, Slumdog Millionaire, The Aviator, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Dark Knight, The Departed, The Queen, The Reader, There Will Be Blood
“Hahaha wait, we won Best Picture? That can’t be right. Are you guys Moonlighting us here or?”
~Chicago
It’s been a long journey for all of us, but we’re nearly finished. Started on a whim, our decision to go through every single Oscar winner for Best Picture from 1970 to 2009, tell you about all the nominated films, and re-award the Academy Award has taken so much time and research we don’t know why we even started.
Simple math should have told us that this would require us to discuss two hundred fucking movies, but we don’t do math, and we literally just figured that out now. But it’s too late to turn back. Just two more left to go, so let’s get going.
You can of course look here, here, here, here, here or even here for our previous entries, but for now, let’s go through each Academy Award ceremony for the first half of the 2000s and determine where the Academy got things right, and where they went wrong.
Posted in America Fun Fact of the Day, Re-Awarding the Academy Award for Best Picture (1970-2009)
Tagged A Beautiful Mind, Academy Awards, America, American Beauty, Chicago, Chocolat, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Erin Brockovich, Gangs of New York, Gladiator, Gosford Park, In the Bedroom, Lord of the Rings, Lost in Translation, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Moulin Rouge, Mystic River, Oscars, Re-Awarding the Oscars, Return of the King, Seabiscuit, The Cider House Rules, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Green Mile, The Hours, The Insider, The Pianist, The Sixth SEnse, The Two Towers, Traffic, Why did we keep trying to make Tobey Maguire a Thing?
“Don’t you take away my Academy Award you dirty goddamn j…”
~Mel Gibson Right Before We Hung Up the Phone On Him
We feel like we don’t really need to rehash this another time. The Oscars are sometimes wrong, so we went ahead and made them right. Go here, here, here, here or here for the first five segments of this feature. Once again, the years listed are for the year the ceremony took place, not the year the winning film was released. And the number in the parentheses after each name is just the IMDB user rating, which is one of many factors we take into consideration when doling out the final prizes.
So strap in, once again, for AFFotD’s…
Posted in America Fun Fact of the Day, Re-Awarding the Academy Award for Best Picture (1970-2009)
Tagged Academy Awards, America, Apollo 13, As Good as It Gets, Babe, Braveheart, Elizabeth, Fargo, Forrest Gump, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Good Will Hunting, Il Postino, Jerry Maguire, LA Confidential, Life is Beautiful, Oscars, Pulp Fiction, Quiz Show, Re-Awarding the Oscars, Saving Private Ryan, Secrets & Lies, Sense and Sensibility, Shakespeare in Love, Shawshank Redemption, Shine, The English Patient, The Full Monty, The Thin Red Line, Titanic, Toy Story
“You son of a bitch you can’t just give my Oscar to Die Hard and move on with your weird list thing like nothing even happened.”
~Mark Johnson, the Producer of Rain Man
It’s been a long road on this misguided journey. Since last week, we’ve been going through all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting from the year 1970 (the year the award was held, mind you. All the movies came out the previous year) and have redistributed those prizes with the knowledge we have today, as well as a lot of subjectivity that has been driving our readers insane.
We’ve listed the winners, listed the nominees, and then told you what film released that year deserved to win. The 1970s were pretty clean, with 5 Oscars staying with their original winner, and five going to other films that were nominated, but the 1980s saw things take a messy turn. Sure, a few movies, like Platoon and Amadeus kept their statues, but a lot of worlds were turned upside, especially in 1988 where we gave the damn thing to the Princess Bride. Oh, and if you’re expecting us to try to explain giving an Oscar to Die Hard, just watch this clip and tell us we’re wrong.
…Shut up, you’re wrong.
Anyway, there’s no stopping us now. Look below for our redistribution of the all the Oscars of the first half of the 1990s. Here’s hoping that the Academy nominated more movies we’ve heard of this decade.
Posted in America Fun Fact of the Day, Re-Awarding the Academy Award for Best Picture (1970-2009)
Tagged A Few Good Men, Academy Awards, America, Awakenings, Beauty and the Beast, Born on the Fourth of July, Bugsy, Dances with Wolves, Dead Poets Society, Driving Miss Daisy, Field of Dreams, Ghost, Goodfellas, Howards End, In the Name of the FAther, JFK, My Left Foot, Oscars, Re-Awarding the Oscars, Scent of a Woman, Schindler's List, Silence of the Lambs, The Crying Game, The Fugitive, The Godfather: Part III, The Piano, The Prince of Tides, The Remains of the Day, Unforgiven
America Fun Fact of the Day 