9. Roman Polanski for The Pianist (2002)
Twenty-five years after he fled the country on a sex charge, Roman Polanski was chosen as Best Director for The Pianist, an impressively moody but also rather sketchy and remote drama of one lost soul (Adrien Brody) stumbling through the Holocaust. On Oscar night, all of Hollywood greeted this award as a kind of honorary, penitential homecoming for a great, exiled filmmaker (even though he literally couldn't come home). Yet that only emphasized that Polanski's Oscar was, in essence, a symbolic gesture. The movies he really deserved to win for were his earlier landmark masterpieces: the demonically brilliant spookshow Rosemary's Baby (1968) and the great, labyrinthine, dark-as-midnight mystery-thriller Chinatown (1974). —Owen Gleiberman
Image Credit: Everett Collection(3)
Oscars: 10 Deserving Winners (Who Should Have Won Sooner)
Lisa Schwarzbaum and Owen Gleiberman list honorees like Martin Scorsese, Kate Winslet, and Denzel Washington who got the nod as a ''make good'' after getting passed over for better work
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