James L. Brooks beltway masterpiece is an honest, humane, and hilarious workplace love triangle.

And that triangle falls apart without Hunter as its exasperated fulcrum.

I dont have any issue with that win.

Holly-Hunter

Kerry Hayes/20th Century Fox/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock; Everett Collection

He totally deserved it.

(But Jimmy Stewart took the honors that year; more on that mistake in a minute.)

Yet that only emphasized that Polanski’s Oscar was, in essence, a symbolic gesture.

Paul-Newman

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Smith Goes to Washington.

(The Oscar went to the wrong good actor, Robert Donat, inGoodbye, Mr. OG

5.

(But that was the year Al Pacino… more on that soon.)

On Golden Pond, Henry Fonda | When Henry Fonda won his 1981 Oscar for his Very Special Oldie role as a bitter coot of a father in On Golden Pond ,

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4.

As it happens, he wasn’t even nominated for it.

OG

3.

Roman Polanski | Twenty-five years after he fled the country on a sex charge, Roman Polanski was chosen as Best Director for The Pianist , an impressively moody

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And in 2004, they pushed again forThe Aviator.

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2.

(She’s been showered with six in all.)

Sidney Poitier | At his best, Sidney Poitier could be a ferocious actor (‘‘They call me Mr. Tibbs!''), but Hollywood, always profoundly uneasy about how, exactly, to cast

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Winslet should have claimed the prize and been crowned Queen of the World forTitanicin 1997.

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Jimmy Stewart | Even Jimmy Stewart didn’t vote for Jimmy Stewart to win the 1940 Oscar for Best Actor for his work in The Philadelphia Story ; he

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Jessica Lange | She actually gives a potent performance as a veteran military wife whose unstable emotional extravagance keeps spilling over the boundaries of her life. Yet when

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Malcolm X, Denzel Washington | 2001 was a great year for African-American movie actors: Halle Berry won Best Actress for Monster’s Ball and Denzel Washington won Best Actor for playing

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John Wayne | As the fat, raspy, one-eyed trigger-happy old lawman Rooster Cogburn, John Wayne seemed to be doing a comic riff on his entire career. And so

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Martin Scorsese | Consolation Oscar Syndrome caught up with Martin Scorsese in 2007 when the acclaimed director won his first and only statuette for The Departed . Five

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The Reader, Kate Winslet | Kate Winslet is in the Oscar record books for having received five nominations by the time she was 31. (She’s been showered with six in

Melinda Sue Gordon

Dog Day Afternoon, Al Pacino | How could Al Pacino finally win a Best Actor award for a performance so operatically florid, so hambone shameless, that it’s basically full of, well,

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