The greatest outrage stirred by last week’s announcement of the Oscar nominees was not the Best Picture snub for Carol or the absurd exclusion of Todd Haynes from the Best Director category, but rather the troubling homogeneity of the twenty men and women nominated in the acting categories. Specifically, many have taken issue with the fact that this year’s Oscar slate looks about as white as a Whole Foods before noon on a Sunday. The social media hashtag OscarsSoWhite resurfaced within minutes after the nomination announcement had finished, and Spike Lee has even called for a boycott of the ceremony as a response to the blatant lack of diversity in this year’s picks.
This Sunday’s Oscars will be the 87th annual Academy Awards. In nearly a century of honoring Hollywood’s best, the Academy has sometimes has made some bold choices, and some dumb choices. This gallery has them all; the complete history of nine decades of Best Picture winners in pictures. Some are classics, still watched to this day. A few are almost totally forgotten to history. (Cavalcade, anyone?) But they all won. Even Crash, somehow.
The 83rd Annual Academy Awards will be televised live on ABC Sunday. Presenters include Mila Kunis, Amy Adams, Hugh Jackman, Robert Downey Jr. Annette Bening, Tom Hanks, Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, Reese Witherspoon, Russell Brand, Scarlett Johansson, Hilary Swank, Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, Helen Mirren, and Matthew McConaughey, among others...