You asked for it, and you’ve got it! Earlier this month, I looked back at all the great movies nominated for Best Picture at the 1990s Oscar ceremonies that should have won. It was an opinionated article about a very subjective thing, so naturally, you agreed with some of the movies I chose, disagreed with others, and a few of you even thought there should be more limitations on the concept itself (I’ll get to that in a bit).cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});However, one of the main requests I got was to travel further back in time, as it was suggested there were even more worthy Best Picture losers in the decade that spawned the NES, Tetris, and Prozac, so it’s time to fire up the flux capacitor, because it’s ’80s time, baby! All That JazzWe step out of our DeLorean at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, where the 1980 Academy Awards are about to go down. Squinting from the sunlight, we cast our eyes to the red carpet, where the stars are arriving to see who will win Best Picture. It’s a tense one, because Kramer vs. Kramer is tied with All That Jazz for nominations. It feels like it could go either way! In the end, it’s Robert Benton’s divorce drama that snatches the statue. Great movie! But so is All That Jazz, and in terms of cinematic daring, it could very well be considered a better movie. Kramer vs. Kramer does a good job of capturing divorce culture and evolving gender roles at the last gasp of the ’70s, and its grounded realism soars thanks to incredible performances from Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep. Still, All That Jazz is just straight up visionary. A daring musical drama that interrogated Bob Fosse’s life while it was still happening, it blends rhythmic, jagged editing with innovative Broadway sequences and themes that filmmakers are still “paying homage” to with their own meta movies about unraveling artists. Black Swan and the Best Picture-winning Birdman owe a lot to All That Jazz.Apocalypse NowRemember about 40 seconds ago when I mentioned those “limitations” on the ’90s list? Well, some of you thought that only one movie per year should be in contention for Best Picture in this theoretical list of losers that should have won. That’s fair, but why? In these alternate realities, anything is possible, and when you’ve got All That Jazz up for Best Picture in the same year as Apocalypse Now, they’re both viable choices!Honestly, Francis Ford Coppola’s psychological epic was probably never in with a chance of winning. It may have redefined the war film, but it’s messy and abstract. An unhinged descent into madness with no clean morality to cling to. It’s also a masterpiece. If it were released today, it would stand a much better chance of wowing Academy voters, but they weren’t quite ready for this kind of fever dream about the American psyche back then (their kids are gonna love it.)The Elephant ManOl’ Bobby Redford hit it out of the park at the awards in 1981, netting Best Picture and Best Director for his directorial debut, Ordinary People, another emotional familial drama that had Academy voters saying, “Spectacular. Gimme 14 of ’em right now.” And, once again, great movie! I’m not here to slate any of the Best Picture winners; they made the shortlist for a reason. But is it wild to suggest that the late, great David Lynch should have won a Best Picture Oscar at some point in his incredible career? Is it also wild to suggest that, aside from The Straight Story, The Elephant Man might have been his best possible shot at doing so, given that so many of his other movies were considered too “weird” to make the cut? Featuring a truly unforgettable performance by John Hurt, Lynch’s black-and-white movie refuses to sensationalize its exploration of Joseph Merrick’s suffering and instead concentrates on being a masterclass in human empathy. Forty-plus years later, people are still talking about Merrick’s heartbreaking story and Lynch’s vision. Are they still talking about Ordinary People as much? Probably not, but The Elephant Man wasn’t the only black-and-white classic that lost out to Redford’s film that year.Raging BullHere we are in another love triangle because Raging Bull was also up for Best Picture in 1981. Featuring jaw-dropping cinematography from Michael Chapman that perfectly captures both the brutality of the boxing ring and the bleakness of Jake LaMotta’s personal life, Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull is “absolute cinema” of the non-linear and impressionistic variety.Today, many critics consider Raging Bull one of the greatest films ever made, yet the Academy played it rather safe that year with Ordinary People, and Scorsese had to settle for knowing he had made a movie with an enduring cultural legacy that impacted not only his own later films but also those of Steven Spielberg and David Fincher, to name just a couple. So hey, don’t be too sad for Scorsese. He got a Best Picture award later on for The Departed, and I see him smiling happily on TikTok all the time. He’s fine!Raiders of the Lost ArkMoving swiftly on to the 55th Academy Awards in 1982, where Chariots of Fire, Reds, Atlantic City, On Golden Pond, and Raiders of the Lost Ark were gunning for the gold. All terrific pictures, I’m sure. I’m gonna be real with you: I have never seen Atlantic City, so if the Atlantic City hive rises up in the comments to take me down over this, I’ll take it on the chin. I have, however, seen the others. One of them more than once. One of them about a hundred times, because it’s an absolute banger that has never lost its appeal. Raiders of the Lost Ark is a meticulously crafted, culturally iconic action-adventure that still feels fresh and thrilling today. I know The Last Crusade is a favorite for many Indiana Jones fans, but to my mind, Raiders is still the GOAT, with Spielberg, George Lucas, John Williams, Lawrence Kasdan, Douglas Slocombe, Michael Kahn, Karen Allen, and Harrison Ford teaming up to deliver a spectacular ride, along with some seriously eternal wisdom: punching Nazis is good.E.T. the Extra-TerrestrialThe Best Picture winner in 1983, Gandhi, was a proper worthy one from Richard Attenborough, and you can’t get much further away from Gandhi than E.T. for flip’s sake. It makes sense that Attenborough’s sprawling, historically and politically significant biopic dominated the awards over Spielberg’s lil alien dude waddling around saying “phone home,” but this type of snub is still enough to make you want to replace your gun with a walkie-talkie on some level. E.T. changed the landscape of family films. It was a massive hit that influenced storytelling for decades. They’re still doing retrospective screenings of it at theaters everywhere. J.J. Abrams would be out here doing lens flares in the privacy of his living room without E.T.. Stranger Things wouldn’t exist without E.T.. Neither would Mac and Me! Er, forget that last one, actually. Never mind. Let’s go with “Paul Rudd wouldn’t end up showing the same clip from Mac and Me on Conan without E.T..” That’s better somehow.The Right StuffThis is gonna come as a shock, but in 1984, the Academy picked a moving, intimate family drama over a box office bomb that chronicled the early U.S. space program and Mercury astronauts. I know! Tough to see that one coming, huh? But unless I’ve just picked up enough tissues and eye-depuffing cream from Costco to last a lifetime, The Right Stuff is probably going to be the movie I’ll choose to rewatch over Terms of Endearment on any given day. Juggling a huge ensemble cast, multiple storylines, and a buttload of complex historical events, The Right Stuff could have certainly been awarded the big one for its ambition and narrative daring. The sequences recreating test flights and rocket launches are as tense as they’ve ever been and set the template for later space epics that chose to embrace human storytelling, like Apollo 13 and even Damien Chazelle’s underseen First Man. This one’s got the right stuff. It’s not just a clever name! The Color PurpleThe Color Purple was no match for the glacially-paced Out of Africa in 1986, unfortunately. It might seem genuinely wild that a lazy colonial melodrama would ever get the nod over a powerful depiction of Black women’s lives in early 20th-century America, unless you know literally anything about America, I guess. Then, it’s sadly predictable. In fact, The Color Purple was nominated for a staggering 11 Oscars and won exactly zero of them. Based on the 1982 novel by Alice Walker, it saw Steven Spielberg swerving away from a string of blockbusters to try something different. He softened some of the book’s radical themes and leaned into his own brand of sentimentality – this is Spielberg we’re talking about – but powerhouse performances from Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey went a long way toward making up for at least some of that. It remains an inspiring if somewhat controversial movie that is still about a quadrillion times better than Out of Africa. I know I said I wasn’t going to slate any of the real Best Picture winners, but in this case, I’ll make an exception. It’s pretty bad, folks.Fatal AttractionWhatever aspects of Fatal Attraction have aged like milk, 1988’s winner, The Last Emperor, can likely match with its own problems (I won’t get into them here but feel free to google that movie along with “historical accuracy.”) Admittedly, I could quite happily go the rest of my life without hearing another perfectly sane woman called “a bunny boiler,” but I definitely miss more erotic thrillers popping up at the multiplex. These days, they’re largely consigned to streaming and don’t tend to have much of an edge, whereas Fatal Attraction had so much of an edge that it sparked a national conversation on a rather taboo topic. The story, about a man cheating on his wife and ending up with a homicidal stalker, has been done to death since, but Fatal Attraction wasn’t afraid to go there during an era where the anxieties of infidelity were being sidelined. This was also a career-defining performance from Glenn Close as the movie’s spurned lover – her final jolt back to life pulled “the killer coming back for one last scare” trope into the mainstream from its roots in the horror genre. The movie really excelled at blending those kinds of horror conventions into a marital drama and was perhaps the best to ever do it.MoonstruckIs this a more controversial alternate choice for Best Picture in ’88? Maybe. This could potentially be considered a “hear me out” situation, unless you’ve already seen and love Moonstruck, a genuinely sweet picture about a widow who falls in love with her fiancé’s older brother. It’s certainly a smaller movie – not a grand epic like Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor. Blending comedy, drama, and romance seamlessly, it nevertheless features some of the decade’s most memorable dialogue. Playwright-turned-screenwriter John Patrick Shanley’s script sparkles, so the stacked cast, which includes Cher, Nicolas Cage, Olympia Dukakis and Vincent Gardenia, gets to deliver lines like “I’ll say no more.” “You haven’t said anything!” “And that’s all I’ll say.” or “In time you’ll drop dead, and I’ll come to your funeral in a red dress.”At the end of the day, I reckon that a comedy with the intelligence and heart of Moonstruck is just as worthy of Best Picture recognition as a sweeping historical drama. And that’s all I’ll say.The post 10 Best Picture Oscar Nominees from the ’80s That Should Have Won appeared first on Den of Geek.