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Every year, a handful of movies take home Academy Awards. If your film happens to be one of the lucky five to be nominated (this coming Oscars will feature a big change, so that there will be ten Best Picture nominees), there's a pretty good chance that you probably deserved to win for whatever award you're up for. Of course, there are also times when the most deserving winner of an Academy Award isn't even nominated (my heart of stone precludes me from thinking that Slumdog Millionaire was half as good as The Dark Knight). However, this week's A-List is about highlighting five films that were nominated for an Oscar, should have won, but lost.

There are some obvious choices here (if you're at all familiar with the films of 1980, you can probably take a wild guess and know exactly which of the Best Picture nominees will show up), and some that are just movies I can't believe didn't get the golden boy on Oscar night. In some ways, this A-List is easier to narrow down than one about all the many films that should have been nominated, but didn't even get that honor. This is a list for those films that only had the honor of being nominated for Oscars, for the people who had to smile politely when their names weren't called and pray for the cameras to stop filming them so they could curse under their breath. There have been over 80 Academy Awards ceremonies, so there's no shortage of losers.

Of course, another A-List could delve into the many, many people who have fallen under the Oscar curse, also known as the Cuba Gooding Jr. effect. Sure, Gooding Jr. won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his work in Jerry Maguire, but...what else has he done? No, I'm not forgetting such timeless classics as Snow Dogs or Chill Factor (and I have seen the latter film, so I know of what I speak). The Oscar gives a person prestige, but only for so long, and only if they choose to capitalize on it correctly. Doing a movie with wacky Alaskan huskies doesn't get the job done. Who could have won instead of Gooding Jr.? Who had to lose? Let's get to the list.

Raging Bull

As I mentioned above, anyone who knows anything about the 1980 Oscars knows that Raging Bull was shafted. Ordinary People, directed by Robert Redford, may be a perfectly good movie (I say "may" because it is on my ever-growing list of movies I need to see), but it's almost universally agreed that Raging Bull, the biography of boxer Jake LaMotta, is not only one of the best films of 1980, but potentially the best film of its decade; yet, when it came to the Academy Award for Best Picture, Martin Scorsese had to sit by and lose yet another Oscar to another actor-turned director; in 1976, his Taxi Driver lost out to Rocky, written by Sylvester Stallone; the latter is an arguably entertaining, crowd-pleasing hit, but the former is...well, it's Taxi Driver.

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