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5th Feb: Echo Chamber Season 1 blooper reel on Youtube here
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 | Please don't list this on a work's page as a trope.
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Sick Boy: All I'm trying to do, Mark, is help you understand that The Name Of The Rose was merely a blip on an otherwise uninterrupted downward trajectory. Renton: What about The Untouchables? Sick Boy: I don't rate that at all. Renton: Despite the Academy Award? Sick Boy: That means fuck all! It's a sympathy vote.
Trainspotting (which didn't win an Oscar for best adapted screenplay) - in case you don't know, the subject of the conversation is Sean Connery.
What may happen as a result of someone getting one too many Award Snubs. Basically, someone in the entertainment industry has gone too long without winning a particular award, despite their work being considered some of the best in their field. Eventually, they do end up winning said award...but for something considered pretty inferior to the rest of their work.
Ironically, this ends up continuing the cycle of snubs, since, well, someone better has to lose.
Examples:
- Peter O'Toole has been nominated eight times for the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, making him the most-nominated actor never to win the award. In 2003, he instead received an Academy Honorary Award for his entire body of work and his lifelong contribution to film. Thanks a lot. Not.
- Martin Scorsese's The Departed is not widely considered to be one of his best. So, one can't help but wonder if this trope was in effect when it won Best Picture and he won Best Director, after decades of Scorsese's work never getting the honor. Arguably, though, it might also because it was the most successful movie out of that year's Best Picture nominees.
- Cecil B. DeMille's 1952 film The Greatest Show On Earth is considered by many to be one of the worst films to ever win Best Picture. Some suspect the only reason it got the award was because DeMille's films had never won one yet, despite the man's career dating all the way back to the silent era. Ironically, they could have just waited a few years and given it to his last film and one of his best-The Ten Commandments. Instead, it lost best picture and DeMille wasn't even nominated as Best Director.
- John Wayne's Best Actor win in 1969 for True Grit is seen as a consolation for him not winning the award for his work in films like The Quiet Man, The Searchers or The Sands of Iwo Jima.
- Henry Fonda's Best Actor oscar for On Golden Pond, the last movie he ever made. It was his first Best Actor award in over 40 years of acting.
- By the time 2008 rolled around, Kate Winslet had been nominated six times and had yet to win an Oscar. What makes people believe that this occurred is that she won Best Actress for The Reader, even though she won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress for the same role (Interestingly, she also won Best Lead Actress at the Golden Globes that year, but for Revolutionary Road.)
- Al Pacino got Best Actor in 1992 for Scent of a Woman, despite him deserving the award back in 1972 for The Godfather, or in 1974 for The Godfather Part II. This in turn displaced Denzel Washington for Malcolm X (he later got his own consolation award-see below).
- An example of the cycle continuing: in 2001, Nicole Kidman was nominated for Moulin Rouge!, but lost to Halle Berry. The next year, she won for The Hours, a film that has been all but forgotten. She beat Renee Zellwegger in Chicago, who ended up winning Best Supporting Actress in 2003 for Cold Mountain. A lot of the reviews of Cold Mountain actually contain comments along the lines of "just give Renee the Oscar already".
- One of the more infamous of these was Paul Newman winning for his work in a sequel to The Hustler called The Color Of Money because he'd been snubbed decades earlier for his work in the original.
- Possibly the most famous (or infamous) is that Alfred Hitchcock never won an Oscar as a director (though Rebecca won Best Picture). The Academy gave him a life achievement award, which he deserved anyway, but mostly as an apology for never giving him an award for Vertigo, Psycho, North By Northwest, The Birds, Rope, Strangers on a Train, The Man Who Knew Too Much, To Catch a Thief, Dial M For Murder, Rear Window, Marnie...
- Arguably, the entire The Lord of the Rings trilogy deserved Oscars for each and every film. Instead they gave nothing but technical awards to the first two chapters, and then every Oscar to the last one in the series. It was either this trope or a Crowning Moment of Awesome for the series.
- It has been stated in some quarters that the Academy decided to treat the trilogy as a single movie released in three episodes, hence the wait for the final episode, as it were. Besides if you had all three films clean up then you've got three years where nobody else stands a chance of picking up anything but scraps like Oscar for Best Clapping And Loading.
- Denzel Washington's work in Training Day, after losing for The Hurricane.
- Losing for Malcolm X, more likely, especially since that was the year Al Pacino won for Scent of a Woman
- Russell Crowe winning for Gladiator could also be seen as a make-up for his defeat for The Insider. (and he was a victim of this the following year, as his lauded performance in A Beautiful Mind lost to Training Day)
- There's a possible analogue in Professional Wrestling - some performers can work for years, often in a jobber role, but just by ill fortune, injuries or other reasons can go largely unrecognised in terms of championships, so they get a token reign later on. Hugh Morrus in WCW stands out as one - he was a classic "jobber" for years, making other people look good on the way up, and eventually got a "feel good" US title reign in 2000. It should be noted it's rarely the top belt that gets used, typically a secondary singles title is the consolation award.
- Though the top belt can be used. Mick Foley stated in his second book that he felt that his title reign in 1999 were granted more as a lifetime achievement award rather than being the "top guy" although some of the fans might have disagreed since he was the top active face at the time (Stone Cold was briefly on the shelf).
- Another notable example of a "Thank You" rein is when long time Jobber, The Brooklyn Brawler beat (by way of a fluke) WWE golden boy Triple H for the Intercontinental championship. The Brawler is one of those guys that makes anyone look great but until that week he'd never even been a title contender.
- Metallica won a Consolation Grammy after losing Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance to (shockingly) Jethro Tull the year before. The Grammys finally realized how much Metallica had contributed to heavy metal and decided to give the award for Metallica.
- Then again, Crest Of A Knave winning that award was probably a consolation for overlooking some of Jethro Tull's earlier albums, which are pretty damn amazing. (Aqualung, Thick As A Brick, Heavy Horses, to name a few.)
- Despite being one of the most beloved cartoon characters ever, a Bugs Bunny cartoon never won the Oscar until 1958's Knighty Knight Bugs. A fine cartoon, but hardly Bugs' finest moment, especially compared to the previous year's What's Opera, Doc, which wasn't even submitted for nomination. (In fact, Bugs wasn't even a nominee for the previous sixteen years.)
- Random additional factoid: NONE of Daffy Duck's cartoons have ever been NOMINATED!
- It is quite common for the Gold Logie (an Australian television award) to be awarded to someone who is retiring. A good example is John Wood, who was nominated every year from 1997 until he finally won in 2006 (the year Blue Heelers was cancelled). Similarly, Kate Ritchie won the award shortly after leaving Home and Away. Subverted the following year when Ian Smith, who had just left Neighbours after more than 20 years, was beaten by Rebecca Gibney for her role in Packed to the Rafters.
- Elizabeth Taylor's 1960 Oscar for BUtterfield 8, a film that's pretty much forgotten, and she didn't even want to do. She was nominated in 1957 for Raintree County, in 1958 for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and in 1959 for Suddenly, Last Summer, of which the latter two are considered classics. It's widely thought that she won by a vote of sympathy, because of her recent near-fatal illness.
- Aversion: In 1996, it was thought of as certain that legendary Golden Age of Hollywood star Lauren Bacall, who had never been nominated for an Oscar before, would win the Best Supporting Actress award for the poorly-reviewed Barbra Streisand vehicle The Mirror Has Two Faces. When she didn't win, instead losing to Juliette Binoche for The English Patient (which swept that year's awards), it was a huge shock. (Bacall would receive an honorary Oscar in 2009.)
- On the subject of Golden Age stars, while Humphrey Bogart (Bacall's husband) gave his usual quality performance in The African Queen opposite fellow screen legend Katharine Hepburn, it is pretty much universally agreed that his Oscar for that film was actually for his work in The Maltese Falcon, for which he was nominated and lost ten years before.
- James Baskett, the lead actor of Song of the South, was given an "Honorary Oscar" at that year's Academy Award because at the time, an African American wasn't going to be nominated for a lead role.
- Although James Stewart gave a solid performance in The Philadelphia Story, it's commonly accepted that the Best Actor Oscar he won was really for his career-defining work in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington the year before.
- Non-art example: Albertt Einstein never won any awards for Relativity theory. His Nobel Prize was for photoeffect instead, where he had only a relatively small contribution.
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