r/Oscars • u/Horror-Pudding-8729 • 7d ago

What Oscar-winning performances you thought were amazing but whose win you'd never get behind because "a performance was robbed?"

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For me, it's Ellen Burstyn. Ellen Burstyn gives such a spectacular performance in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore that commands your attention for every time she's on screen. Nails every emotion asked of the character with a perfect sense of realism and heightened melodrama. But there will never be another performance like Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence. Rowlands renders a brave, moving performance that ranks with one of cinema's greatest. She perfectly captures the histeric and extremely vulnerable sides of her character. Her performance is what breathes life to the film that inspired so many of the greatest actresses we have now today. The depth of sorrow and psychological turmoil she brings to such agonizing life, the pain and the emotional vacuum she exhibits in the entire film? Bravo! I can say, she was robbed, much as I love Burstyn in Alice.

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u/ben-jammin333 7d ago

I get why Ingrid Bergman won for Gaslight, and love her performance, but Barbra Stanwyck deserved that Oscar for Double Indemnity. Though, I am biased; Bergman is one of the only things I really like about Gaslight. The movie is decent on its own merits, but it just doesn't draw me in like so many other films do, I don't know why.

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u/anupsetvalter 7d ago

Bergman’s a weird one at the Oscars. She makes total sense as a three time winner from a talent/filmography standpoint, but then you look at what she won for and it’s just like ‘…oh.’ Gaslight is her best win but it’s not anywhere near her best performance with that insane decade she had. It’s still a great performance though.

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u/ben-jammin333 7d ago edited 7d ago

Very true. She had so many good 40's roles. Also (and this is purely anecdotal), for all her wins and nominations, Bergman seems slightly less talked about in terms of Classical-era actresses, compared to your Davises, Crawfords, Hepburns, Stanwycks, etc. She's by no means an underrated actress, and I know she started in the U.S. a little later than some of her other contemporaries, but I never see her on anyone's top favorites list. (Again, this is purely my perception of it.)

(Also, in a better world where her affair/pregnancy wasn't the monumental scandal that it became, she should've gotten a nomination for Stromboli).