SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The great Katharine Hepburn once said the right actors win Oscars, but for the wrong roles. This week's Oscar nominations announcement made NPR's Neda Ulaby wonder about the Academy's history of rewarding stars for quasi-celestial performances.
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: The nominations left a lot of people scratching their heads - over the snubs for "Selma," for example, and this nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
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UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Robert Duvall in "The Judge."
ALYSSA ROSENBERG: I think most people hadn't even heard of "The Judge" before that nomination.
ULABY: That's Alyssa Rosenberg, a cultural columnist for The Washington Post. She says most critics were not impressed by this movie about a judge who's aging, cranky and hates his new dependence on his criminal lawyer son.
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ROBERT DUVALL: (As Judge Joseph Palmer) I put a roof over your head, money in your pocket, clothes on your back, food in your mouth. Who paid for that college education - your mother?
ULABY: Now, let's just be clear - Rosenberg loves Robert Duvall.
ROSENBERG: He is wonderful, but it's not a particularly notable performance. It's weird. It's like they woke up and said, you know who hasn't had a statue in some time?
ULABY: ...Robert Duvall since 1983 in "Tender Mercies." Rosenberg says recognizing actors because of a sense they're overdue is an Academy tradition that goes back to at least 1935.
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BETTE DAVIS: (As Joyce Heath) You dare feel sorry for me - you with your fat, little soul and your smug face.
ULABY: 1935 was when Bette Davis won her first Oscar for a thoroughly mediocre movie called "Dangerous." The Academy ignored her incandescent performance the year before as a manipulative waitress in the film "Of Human Bondage."
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DAVIS: (As Mildred) You hounded me and drove me crazy. And after you kissed me, I always used to wipe my mouth - wipe my mouth.
ROSENBERG: It's using the awards to back up and say, we know you're good; really, we know you're good, even if we missed it before.
ULABY: That's what happened, says Rosenberg, in 1960 to a certain violet-eyed 28-year-old.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Elizabeth Taylor.
ULABY: Taylor went unrewarded by the Academy for "National Velvet" and "Giant" and "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof" and "Suddenly, Last Summer." She won for "BUtterfield 8," a movie she herself called a stinker. But Taylor's third husband had recently died in a plane crash six months after the birth of their daughter.
ROSENBERG: People felt bad for her.
ULABY: Alyssa Rosenberg says other consolation Oscars might include Denzel Washington's in 2001 for playing a vicious cop in the movie "Training Day."
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DENZEL WASHINGTON: (As Det. Alonzo Harris) You're lucky I don't have more pressing business.
ULABY: Critics preferred Washington in an earlier movie, "The Hurricane," not to mention in "Malcolm X." Or Dame Judi Dench winning not for her layered performance of Queen Victoria in the movie "Mrs. Brown" in 1997, but instead, the next year. Dame Dench had a sense of humor about accepting her Best Supporting Actress statuette for her eight-minute appearance as Queen Elizabeth in "Shakespeare In Love."
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DAME JUDI DENCH: I feel for eight minutes on the screen, I should only get a little bit of him.
ULABY: Sometimes it takes a little while for a great performance to sink in. Sometimes a field is too crowded with too many great performances. And it's not just "The Oscars." Playwright Edward Albee did not win the Pulitzer Prize in 1963 for "Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?" because it was seen as too controversial. A few years later, the Pulitzer committee basically backtracked, rewarding Albee for another play, "A Delicate Balance."
ROSENBERG: If you want people to take your award ceremony seriously as an arbiter of artistic quality, these are strange decisions.
ULABY: Far better, says Alyssa Rosenberg, if the cultural horse races that are award shows were guided not by sentimentality and nostalgia, but singularity and guts. Neda Ulaby, NPR News.