30 Films You Forgot Were Oscar Winners

We’ve now got a little under a month until the Academy Awards ceremony, and this year’s contest continues to twist and turn, with “Birdman” now moving into the presumptive front-runner slot after surprise victories over “Boyhood” and “The Imitation Game” at the PGA and SAG awards. Everything is up in the air, but any nominee might consider caution should they assume their place in the history books is assured.

Of course, there are some Oscar winners that are memorable for good reasons as well as bad. But others, particularly in technical categories, have a tendency to fade from memory for all but the most obsessive Academy Awards-watchers, and the result is that there are more than a few movies that you’d be surprised to learn have little golden men in their trophy cabinets.

So, with the 87th Academy Awards sneaking up, we’ve delved into the archives (from 2004 backwards, figuring you might have better memories for those films in the last decade) and picked out thirty movies that you might have forgotten, if you ever knew, were Oscar winners. Take a look below, and let us know your own favorite obscure Academy Award victors in the comments.

“Black Narcissus” (1947)
The glorious films of Powell & Pressburger weren’t always big Oscar performers: only “49th Parallel” and “The Red Shoes” were Best Picture nominated, and Powell himself only received one nomination. But it’s gratifying that one of their strangest and darkest pictures, the sexually fraught Tibetan nunnery drama “Black Narcissus,” would be recognized by the Academy: the film won awards for Jack Cardiff’s unfathomably beautiful Cinematography and Alfred Junge’s Art Direction.

“The Naked City” (1948)
Even in the 1940s, it was common for realistic, docu-drama type pictures to get overlooked in favor of more lavish affairs. Which is why it’s refreshing to remember that in a year otherwise dominated by Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet,” Jules Dassin’s grippingly gritty noir won awards for Best Film Editing and Best Cinematography (Black & White).

“Titanic” (1953)
The idea of a movie called “Titanic” winning Oscars shouldn’t be surprising, but maybe it should be when James Cameron isn’t involved. This 1953 film of the same name is mostly overshadowed by Cameron’s blockbuster and “A Night To Remember” (which was released five years later), but still got some Academy glory, picking up Best Screenplay for Billy Wilder collaborator Charles Brackett and co-writers Walter Reisch and Richard Breen.

“The Red Balloon” (1956)
Albert LaMorisse’s 1956 family classic is hardly the kind of film that wins Best Screenplay (even in the 1950s). For one, it’s French, and Foreign Language winners in the category are few and far between. For another, it’s a film driven by action rather than dialogue. And for another still, it’s only a thirty-five minute short. Yet against the odds, Lamorisse took the trophy against stiff competition from Fellini’s “La Strada” and Ealing classic “The Ladykillers,” among others.

“Divorce Italian Style” (1962)
Speaking of Foreign-Language Original Screenplay winners, 1962 was something of a banner year for the category, with Resnais’ “Last Year At Marienbad” and Bergman’s “Through A Glass Darkly” competing. But the prize curiously went to Pietro Germi’s now-overlooked (perhaps rightly?) sex-farce/noir hybrid “Divorce, Italian Style.” Hard to imagine something like that happening these days…