30 Films You Forgot Were Oscar Winners

“The Ghost & The Darkness” (1996)
As far as ‘“Jaws” with lions and also Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer‘ movies go, “The Ghost & The Darkness,” penned by the great William Goldman and directed by Stephen Hopkins, isn’t half bad. But  it’s still odd to think of it as an Academy Award-winning movie: the film picked up the trophy for Best Sound Editing at the 69th Oscars. It could have been much worse: its competition in the category were Sylvester Stallone-starring tunnel-set disaster movie “Daylight” and ropey Arnie vehicle “Eraser.”

“Affliction” (1998)
As has been pointed out by people smarter than ourselves, the Academy has stopped sharing the wealth so much in the acting categories: it’s rarer to find even acting nods from movies that aren’t Best Picture contenders. And rarer still to find a winner, like James Coburn in 1999 for “Affliction.” Paul Schrader’s Greek tragedy-like drama was a tiny film that today would most likely to be dismissed as ‘not an Academy movie,’ but the chance to honor a legend like Coburn was too good for voters pass up, and the actor beat the likes of Geoffrey Rush and Ed Harris to Best Supporting Actor only four years before he died.

“The Red Violin” (1999)
For a brief period in the late 1990s, the Academy experimented with re-expanding the Best Original Score category, splitting the music award Golden Globes-style between Dramas and Comedy/Musicals. The category was re-integrated in 1999, but the first winner on the unified system kept the surprises coming, being taken by famous classic composer John Corigliano for the little-seen Canadian drama “The Red Violin,” only his third-ever feature score (after “Revolution” and “Altered States”).

“U-571” (2000)
Should “The Imitation Game” take home a trophy this year, it won’t be the first Enigma machine-themed project to do so. Fourteen years earlier, Jonathan Mostow’s submarine actioner “U-571,” where a pre-McConaissance McConaughey, Bill Paxton and Jon Bon Jovi set out to capture a code machine from the Nazis, won the Oscar for Best Sound Editing. It’ll be pretty embarrassing if Morten Tyldum’s film can’t match it…

“Lemony Snicket’s An Unfortunate Series Of Events” (2004)
The last eyebrow-raising Oscar victor to land before our ten-years-earlier cutoff point was “Lemony Snicket,” Brad Silberling’s somewhat underrated adaptation of Daniel Handler’s cult children’s novels. Against the more highbrow competition of “The Passion Of The Christ” and “The Sea Inside,” the film took the Best Makeup trophy, the second time in five years that a film had won for putting a rubber face on top of Jim Carrey’s rubber face (“The Grinch” was victorious five years earlier).

There are perhaps obviously all kinds of other surprising curios in the annals of Oscar victors, from the original “Miracle On 34th Street” and “The Dirty Dozen” to “Pearl Harbor” and “Sleepy Hollow.” So many that we thought we might save them for another installment down the line. But let us know in the comments what your favorites are, and we’ll take them into consideration as and when Part 2 arrives. And check back in four weeks or so to discover this year’s Oscar winners.