It’s hard to make a movie. Wait, no, that’s an understatement. It’s almost impossible. Even if you have a perfect script, there are almost infinite unquantifiable forces working against you, screwing up your vision, from problems with cast and crew to permit issues, weather, financing, and endless post-production delays. It’s a wonder any film is ever completed, let alone good enough to win an award. Hell, even if you manage to make an awards-worthy film, you have to make creative choices to get to the finish line. Such choices may include cutting cumbersome exposition, or simply throwing the audience into a world of absolutes, devoid of exposition. Despite the accolades, there are plenty of unexplained things in Oscar winning movies, a lot of which boil down to lapses in logic. Characters disappear or know things they shouldn’t, and sometimes, well, stuff just happens.
Academy Award movies with unexplained plot points aren’t new; they’ve been around since the little golden statues were first handed out. While it stands to reason Academy Award winners that probably didn’t deserve it would have purposeless scenes or characters who could suddenly connect the A and B plots, a lot of Oscar winning films with unexplained moments are considered to be among the best ever made. So why are they so confusing?
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Oscars: Best Original Music Score
The Problem: Everyone loves The Wizard of Oz, but it's got major problems with glossing over serious things the audience wants to know. First of all, Glinda waits until the end of the film to tell Dorothy she could have gone back to Kansas with her ruby slippers. Was she just using Dorothy to kill her rivals? Or is this a case of the movie not being possible if Dorothy goes home? Talk about narrative convenience.
Secondly, how does Scarecrow talk when he doesn't have a brain? He sings a whole song about it, and when Dorothy asks him how he can talk he responds, "I don't know. But some people do an awful lot of talking and haven't got any brains at all." That's a spectacular non-answer for someone without a brain.
Later in the film, Scarecrow is awarded a diploma by The Wizard, which isn't the same as a brain, but a representation of intellect that looks much less gross than a brain in a jar. This either means the Scarecrow had a brain the entire time or the whole thing is a poorly written metaphor.
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Oscars: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Visual Effects, Best Film Editing
The Problem: That's not his kid right? Or is it? Most sane people with things to do saw Forrest Gump once and never watched it again, but the question still lingers - is Jenny's kid Forrest's son?
In most films, this enigmatic ending would be perfectly fine, but Forrest Gump doesn't play with the rules of cinema, and its philosophy is straight forward. Jenny tells Forrest he is the father of her son, but she offers no proof. Still, Jenny wouldn't lie to Forrest, would she? Forrest Gump wears its heart on its sleeve, so if the producers wanted the audience to know Jenny's kid was indeed not Forrest's, they would have come out and said it, right? But for some fans, the question of whether or not Forrest is really the father lingers.
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Oscars: Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay
The Problem: The Silence of the Lambs is an excellent movie with outstanding performances; however, much of the film relies on the audience to ignore the fact that some of the major revelations happen because they have to happen. When Special Agent Jodie Foster consults Hannibal Lecter in order to gain insight into Buffalo Bill, it turns out Lecter knows who Bill is, and knows everything about him, because they worked together at one point. Talk about good luck.
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Oscars: Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Sound Mixing
The Problem: One of the most famous scenes in The Exorcist has Regan, a young girl possessed by a demon, spinning her head around, being spooky. It's great. You'll love it. But here's the problem. The end of the film hass a troubled priest make Regan's demon so mad it leaves her body and jumps into his. Then he jumps out a window, breaks his neck, and kills himself, sending the demon back to its one bedroom in Hell.
If the troubled priest had spooky demon powers when he jumped out the window, how did he break his neck? Shouldn't he have just been able to spin his head around and continue on with his spooky work? Was Regan able to spin her head around because she was going through puberty? Do you need to have a demon inside of you for a set number of days before you can spin your head around right round like a record baby?
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Oscars: Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, Best Makeup
The Problem: It's a fool's errand to parse science fiction logic, but as Shakespeare said, "James Cameron films sleep in a fool's ear." Everyone who has seen a Terminator film (let's all agree the Terminator franchise ends with Judgment Day) knows only organic material can travel back in time, unless you take a robot and cover it in skin. Fine. But if that's the case how do the machines send T-1000 back to kill John Connor? And why do they wait so long? Is time travel contingent on a certain amount of time passing between jumps? Judgment Day is fun, but its science nullifies its existence, relegating it to the realm of fan fiction. That's right, nerds. T2 never happened.
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Oscars: Best Visual Effects, Best Film Editing, Best Production Design, Best Sound Mixing, Special Achievement Award for Sound Effects Editing,
The Problem: For a certain group of cinephiles, Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the greatest films of all time. It awakened a sense of wonder inside them that's about to be crushed by a giant, rolling boulder of truth. Raiders is one of the most pointless films in history. Nothing in this movie needs to happen. Indy never needs to chase after the Ark because if the Nazis got the Biblical artifact back to Hitler, he would have opened it and melted his face off.
Keep in mind, this film takes place in 1936, close to five years before the Holocaust began in earnest. How many people would Dr. Jones have saved if he hadn't tried to put the Ark in a museum? Indiana Jones is truly history's greatest monster.
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