Who should have won: Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull)

Who won: Robert Redford (Ordinary People)

For many years the Academy’s catholic tastes struggled to catch up with Martin Scorsese, before he was eventually collared in 2006 and breathlessly handed a gong for a movie that if we’re honest, wasn’t as good as the Hong Kong film it remade, let alone his earlier work. Like, for instance, Raging Bull. How this majestic, black-and-white biopic of boxing’s lost soul missed out to Robert Redford’s debut feature is anyone’s guess.

Not that Ordinary people was in any way ordinary – it wasn’t – merely that Raging Bull offered voters something they hadn’t seen before: a bruiser of a movie with the grace of a ballerina. To add to the slight, it’d be the first of two occasions Scorsese would miss out to a debut director – Kevin Costner repeated the trick ten years later. Go figure. As Clint Eastwood gruffly observed when asked about Scorsese’s chances for The Aviator: “He should have won for Raging Bull”.