Oscar Who?

"Everyone else was acting so compulsively I had to do something compulsive too."  That was Nelson Algren, writing about writing about Hemingway in "Notes from a Sea Diary " (1959). But I feel much the same in writing about the Academy Awards.  Everyone is doing it.  If you don't do it, they come and take away your laptop and your Blockbuster Video card.

I don't really want to write about the Academy Awards, and I feel uneasy about again sitting through the four-hour show.  When it's over you feel like the guy in the old TV commercial who said "I can't believe I ate the whole thing."

So what I'm going to write about (and probably everyone has a list of this sort) is people who should have won Oscars and didn't.

* Peter O'Toole.  Perhaps the most astonishing mistake of all.  O'Toole wasn't even nominated for Best Actor for his role as Lawrence of Arabia.

* Peter Sellers.  Played three distinct characters in "Dr. Strangelove"--RAF Captain Lionel Mandrake, US President Merkin Muffley, and the crazy genius Dr. S. himself.  After Marlon Brando won for "On the Waterfront," Humphrey Bogart said "They should wrap up all the Oscars in Hollywood, including mine, and give them to Brando."  They should have given Sellers three for "Dr. Strangelove."  Not even a nomination.

* Richard Jaeckel.  At least he got nominated for his enormously likable evangelical and wildly sex-happy lumberjack in "Sometimes a Great Notion."  But no golden statuette at night's end. 

* Lee J. Cobb.  Never a nod from the Academy, despite decades of great performances; e.g., Johnny Friendly in "On the Waterfront." 

* "The Big Knife."  The Academy has never had a category for ensemble performances, but had there been one in 1955, a major contender would have been this film of a Clifford Odets play with a cast that included Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Rod Steiger, Wendell Corey, Jean Hagen, Shelley Winters and Ilka Chase.  Other superb ensemble performances include almost everything Robert Altman made, but especially "Gosford Park."

* "Singin' in the Rain."  Now generally acknowledged to be the best musical ever made.  What did it win?  Fuhgeddabudit.

* Jean Hagen.  Most often seen as a mistreated and teary gangster's moll, Ms. Hagen gave an unforgettable knockout comic performance as Lina Lamont, the silent movie queen with an appalling voice in the aforementioned "Singin' in the Rain."  If ever a performer deserved a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, it was Ms. H.

And we will leave you with one of her memorable lines from that film:  "If we bring a little joy into your humdrum lives, we feel all our hard work ain't been in vain for nothin'."  

That line, and all the others in "Singin' in the Rain," was written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who also wrote "On the Town," "The Band Wagon," "Bells are Ringing" and half a dozen other movies.  They didn't win anything, either.