The 20 greatest Oscar snubs ever – Ranked!

1. Alfred Hitchcock

And the Oscar goes to … the wrong film or person, most of the time. This we know. But for proof of the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between quality and the Academy Awards, try this: Alfred Hitchcock never got his mitts on a best director prize. He came within sniffing distance on five occasions. And while it would be unfair to cry foul over the award going in 1961 to Billy Wilder for The Apartment rather than Hitchcock for Psycho (they were both masters of the darkly bitter comedy, after all), it is harder to argue for the superiority of Leo McCarey, who won in 1945 for Going My Way, when Hitchcock was in contention for Lifeboat. He did eventually get a statuette for lifetime achievement but it might as well have had “too little, too late” engraved next to his name. Still, Hitchcock gave it the acceptance speech it before leaving the stage.