The Academy Awards are coming up on 27 February. While not the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs or the Genies, The Oscars possess a certain pomp and circumstance not found in other awards ceremonies. And of course, sometimes the Academy and their expert accountants get it woefully wrong.

Disagreements over whether or not a certain actor, actress, director, or film should have won an Academy Award over another are commonplace. And here are a couple of huge oversights that left many agape.

Denzel Washington winning a Best Actor Oscar for 2001’s Training Day. This 2001 film followed two LAPD narcotics detectives (Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke) over a day-long patrol in South Central and East Los Angeles. Denzel did not fall into his usual audience-friendly performance in Training Day, and put on a fantastic performance as Alonzo Harris, a dirty cop on the take and looking out for his own interests. But seriously, was his performance better than Russell Crowe’s portrayal of John Nash in A Beautiful Mind? Better than Sean Penn playing a developmentally disabled, but sweet natured father to then newcomer Dakota Fanning in I Am Sam? Or even Will “The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air” Smith taking on the titular, real, larger than life character of Muhammad Ali in Ali? Not a chance.

Here’s why I think it went down the way it did. Washington should have won the Best Actor Oscar for 1999’s The Hurricane, when he played boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. The film biography of Carter’s life being wrongly accused of multiple homicides and his eventual redemption was stunning to watch, and Washington’s portrayal far and away surpassed eventual Oscar winner Kevin Spacey’s performance in American Beauty. However, the film was criticised for being inaccurate; the New Yorker magazine’s film critic David Denby called The Hurricane “False, evasive and factually very thin – a liberal fairytale,” and many believe that the controversy cost Washington his Award. As a result of all this mess, the Academy decided to right the wrong two years later.

The second film is widely regarded as the Greatest Movie Ever Made: Citizen Kane. It has consistently been ranked #1 according to the American Film Institute, the UK’s Sight & Sound Magazine along with Editorial Jaguar, FIAF Centenary List, France Critics Top 10, Cahiers du cinéma 100 films pour une cinémathèque idéale, Kinovedcheskie Russia Top 10, Romanian Critics Top 10, Time Out Magazine Greatest Films, and Village Voice 100 Greatest Films. Roger Ebert called Citizen Kane the greatest movie ever made.

This 1941 masterpiece is loosely based on the life of media tycoon William Randolph Hearst, and it’s production has itself been chronicled in its own film (RKO281 starring Liev Schreiber as Orson Welles, Roy Scheider as studio head George Schaefer, and James Cromwell as William Randolph Hearst). The biography of Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) from small child to media mogul to wealthy recluse is a powerhouse of celluloid from the first frame to the last. Shot in black and white and directed by Welles, by all rights Citizen Kane should have won an Oscar in every category for which it was nominated. (And then, they probably should have invented more categories for the film to win.) Instead, of the staggering nine nominations, the film only yielded one win: Best Writing (Original Screenplay) for Orson Welles. It lost all of the following:

Outstanding Motion Picture, Best Director, Best Actor – Orson Welles, Best Art Direction (Black-and-White), Best Film Editing, Best Cinematography (Black-and-White), Best Music (Score of a Dramatic Picture), and Best Sound Recording.

The reviews of Citizen Kane were positive. Kate Cameron, in her review for the New York Daily-News, said that Kane was “one of the most interesting and technically superior films that has ever come out of a Hollywood studio”. John O’Hara, in Newsweek, called it “the best picture he’d ever seen” and Bosley Crowther writing in The New York Times wrote that “it comes close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood”.

So why then the snub at the Oscars? Well, back in 1941, William Randolph Hearst was arguably the most powerful man in the media; with the ability to influence millions upon millions. In fact, he touted that his 28 newspapers were read by over 20 million Americans in key cities, including two papers in New York, two papers in Los Angeles, two papers in Chicago, and others in 15 other cities. Needless to say, Hearst was not at all happy that his life was the basis for a Major Motion Picture. He not only banned reviews and even ads for the film from appearing in his newspapers, but had his journalists libel Welles, and sought to have MGM buy RKO Pictures in order to burn all the prints of the film, and even allegedly set Welles up to be photographed with a naked, underage girl (Arena Magazine, 1982). The modern day equivalent would be if Rupert Murdoch of NewsCorp ordered a film blacklisted. That was the kind of clout Hearst had in 1941.

A few the films that did win Oscars in categories that Citizen Kane was nominated that year are below, as a test of longevity and proving that hindsight is 20/20, let’s see how many we recognise. 1941 Academy Award Winners: Best Picture: How Green Was My Valley, Best Actor: Gary Cooper in Sergeant York, Best Director: John Ford for How Green Was My Valley. While I’m sure How Green Was My Valley is a good film, you don’t see its title being as common as Citizen Kane. And while I think Gary Cooper is fantastic, once you view Welles as Kane, I’m sure you’ll feel his performance eclipses all others.

In closing, most of the time the Academy Of Motion Picture, Arts, & Sciences get it right. Let’s hope they do this year.