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Is there a more thrilling awards-season possibility than the Oscars upset?
Sometimes a steamroller of a performance gets nipped at the last second.
Sometimes a Hollywood legend loses out to an upstart whose acceptance speech is 70 percent stunned silence.
Sometimes the favorite to win loses out to, well,The Favourite.
These upsets shock, disappoint, and exhilarate us, sometimes all at once.
Over the last 25 years, nine upsets in the Oscar acting categories have stood out as particularly stunning.
Here they are, ranked in order of how unexpected each win was heading into the big day.
Handing a Supporting Actor Oscar to the old, broken-down boxer was a coda fit for a movie itself.
Rylance didnt even recite a poem, as he does whenever he wins a Tony Award.
Voters were split between them all season.
Day-Lewis took the SAG and the BAFTA.
Nicholson triumphed at the Golden Globes and with the prestigious AARP Movies for Grownups Awards.
The two mentiedat the Critics Choice Awards.
Oscar prognosticators advised us to flip a coin to guess the winner.
But thats the funny thing about awards math.
But industry respect had eluded her in those years, which yielded her not even a single nomination.
(Or rather, it might have been had anybody been talking aboutPollockat all.)
Nobody seemed to really love the movie, even those who enthused about Closes performance in it.
Well never know for sure if this is why she lost.
Then, in early February, came the release of Murphys latest film,Norbit.
As the legend goes,Norbitso turned off Oscar voters that they ran to the next-best choice.
Whatever the reason, Bosemans posthumous defeat left that Oscars Night feeling frustratingly incomplete.
