Stanley Kubrick Won An Oscar - Just Not For Best Director

Although Stanley Kubrick was well-respected in his time, he didn't win as many Oscars as you'd probably think. Sure, he received Best Director nominations for "Dr. Strangelove," "2001: A Space Odyssey," "A Clockwork Orange," and "Barry Lyndon," but he didn't win any of those. One of his most acclaimed movies, "The Shining," didn't even receive any Oscar nods at all. (The Razzie awards, on the other hand, were happy to "honor" the film, which says more about the Razzies than Kubrick's horror classic.)

Kubrick's only Oscar win was for Best Special Visual Effects for his 1968 sci-fi film, "2001: A Space Odyssey." The movie competed against "Ice Station Zebra," an espionage thriller starring Rock Hudson that released to mixed reviews and a middling box office performance. If the Academy had some sort of grudge against Kubrick, as some fans of his suspect, they still couldn't deny that "A Space Odyssey" deserved the win here; even more than half a century later, the movie looks fantastic.

What must've sealed the movie's win in this category was the Star Gate sequence in the final act, where David (Keir Dullea) witnesses a nine-minute sequence of trippy lights. To make this scene work, Kubrick's "2001" collaborator Douglas Trumbull had to invent a special "slit-scan" machine, which would later be used in shows like "Doctor Who" and "Star Trek." With a sequence this visually stunning, there was simply no way the Academy could avoid recognizing the movie in this category.

"2001" was also nominated for Best Original Screenplay, but lost out this time to Mel Brooks' "The Producers." I think this decision's pretty understandable, given how dialogue-light Kubrick's film was compared to "The Producers," but not everyone agreed. Critic Giles M. Fowles wrote in the ceremony's aftermath, "I can think of only one all-out travesty — the selection of 'The Producers' as best original screenplay. It was a very funny sketch, but clumsily ill-suited to its medium."

Meanwhile, Kubrick lost that year's Best Director race to Carol Reed, who won for "Oliver!" (the British period musical drama based on the Charles Dickens novel, "Oliver Twist"). "Oliver!" also won Best Picture that year, a category "2001" was excluded from entirely. In hindsight, this seems like the obvious wrong choice, given how much more widely "2001: A Space Odyssey" is remembered today. But even at the time, some critics seemed pretty disappointed by this outcome. As Giles M. Fowles wrote in an article after the ceremony:

"Perhaps the worst blow from my standpoint, was the choice of Carol Reed as best director. Reed cannot be faulted for his work, which was excellent, but he did not approach the stunning inventiveness of Kubrick in '2001.' [...] I hereby swear not to give the Academy awards another thought or watch them again, ever. Until next year."

Kubrick himself never seemed to care much for awards, however. When he won his Oscar for the visual effects in "2001," he wasn't even there at the ceremony to pick it up. Fans can debate what movie Kubrick deserved to win the Best Director Oscar for, but the actual filmmaker simply never put a lot of stock into how his pictures were received in the period immediately after their release. As he once put it during an interview with film critic Michel Ciment:

"From the very beginning, all of my films have divided the critics. Some have thought them wonderful, and others have found very little good to say. But subsequent critical opinion has always resulted in a very remarkable shift to the favorable. [...] But, of course, the lasting and ultimately most important reputation of a film is not based on reviews, but on what, if anything, people say about it over the years, and on how much affection for it they have."