Since LotR can win it, SW OT should also win one, as movie it's greater than all the other movies at that time.
well to be honest the oscars are snobbish. They'd have seen star wars as a childish, somewhat weird film for kids and sci-fi nerds nowadays they are a bit more "edgy" and are trying more to "recognise the independent film" they are also pretentious "lets give an oscar to a modern day silent film"
So? All that would really suggest is that Shakespeare in Love is the best movie of 1998 according to the voting panel. If you really take so much issue with Oscar then why do you care whether or not Star Wars should have got one? It's not as if the original trilogy is going to be up for another shot at winning best picture.
I wouldn't take the Academy Awards so seriously -- they represent the opinions of only the voting panel which can be bought and bullied and which is influenced by the elite. Citizen Kane springs to mind as an example where I don't lend much credence to its lack of awards considering how contentious the circumstances were. Plus, it's always seemed pretty clear to me that the Academy is biased against science-fiction and fantasy films. Lord of the Rings, I imagine, won in large part due to having the prestige and pedigree of being adaptations of Tolkien's work.
Star Wars has had the most cultural impact of any of the nominees that year, but it's not the sort of film the Academy likes. A lot of important sci-fi films (including 2001: A Space Odyssey) didn't even get nominated.
And The Thin Red Line is at least 10 times better than Saving Private Ryan, but I digress. The first Star Wars didn't win because the academy couldn't take it seriously at the time, TESB didn't win because it wasn't a complete story, and ROTJ didn't win because even though it's my favorite because of the way it ties up the story, objectively it just isn't as good as the other two. Incidentally, Annie Hall is a great movie and just as revolutionary as SW in it's own way, albeit with far less pop culture relevance. Unfortunately, both films IMO have had a negative effect on the cinematic landscape, but that's probably a discussion for another time.
It took a while for the Academy to completely warm up to LOTR... FOTR won for cinematography, makeup, visual effects and score but didn't sweep like ROTK did.
Yeah, they eventually realized that it was in fact based on books and wasn't the work of sheer original creativity they were initially worried it was.
