SEVEN GREAT FILMS -- NO OSCARS

Comes now another Oscar Night and, regardless of the winners, many film fans will be shouting “What the —?”   Sure, it’s easy to curse undeserved “Best” Pictures, from “Crash” to “Chariots of Fire.”  But it’s kinder and cooler to praise the great films that, incredibly, never won a single Oscar.  Here are seven.

1.  Psycho — Yep, no Oscar for Tony Perkins as the crazed Norman Bates, none for the screeching soundtrack you still hear whenever horror needs to be summoned.  Best Director?  Sorry, Alfred Hitchock never won a single Oscar.  Shocking.

2.  Dr. Strangelove — Seems the Academy didn’t like Stanley Kubrick.  He won only one Oscar — Special Effects for “2001.”  So while Kubrick’s masterpiece received a few nominations (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay) it, too, was snubbed. 

3.  Good Night and Good Luck — Again, some nominations but no winners for George Clooney’s dark, smoke-filled recreation of the moment when Edward R. Murrow took on Joseph McCarthy.  

4. McCabe and Mrs. Miller — Robert Altman’s cool anti-Western, with songs by Leonard Cohen no less, is my personal all-time favorite best movie.  Ever.  Period.  But Altman (“MA*S*H,” “Nashville,” etc.) never won a single Oscar (except for lifetime achievement.) Julie Christie was nominated as Best Actress.  Warren Beatty deserved a nomination.  Fifty years down the road, the story of the small gaggle of misfits on the wet and wild edge of the West remains wonderful.

5.  Singin’ in the Rain — The Academy is still trying to live down this snub.

6.  Taxi Driver — Martin Scorsese is another guy the Academy doesn’t like much.  Seven nominations for best director, didn’t win till 2007 with “The Departed.”  Taxi Driver is grim, but gripping and both DeNiro and Jodie Foster deserved the Oscar more than “Network’s” Faye Dunaway and Peter Finch.  But then “Network” and not “Rocky” deserved Best Picture and. . . . “What the —

7. In the Shadow of the Moon — Okay, another personal favorite and WTF non-winner.  This masterful documentary about the Apollo program lets the astronauts — old men by 2007 — share their fears, their foibles, their quasi-religious moments as they walked on the moon.  (“I called the moon my home for three days and lived to tell about it.  That’s science fiction!”). But no Oscar.  Not even nominated.