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We all make mistakes. From leisure suits in the ‘70s, to “hypercolor” clothing in the ‘80s, to rat tail haircuts anytime, we Americans are notorious for making choices that seemed like good ideas at the time. Despite our less-than-stellar judgment, we tend to demand more of our finest institutions. In particular, we expect our most prestigious award-givers to choose the right winners. Is that too much to ask? Take the Academy Awards (please!). Today, we thought it might be fun to go back through history and point out the most obvious mistakes in the history of the Oscars. Focusing on past recipients of the three major awards (Best Picture, Actor and Actress), we’ll identify the times when Oscar really fell down on the job. And, sad to say, it’s happened more than once.

Though we live in the era of the multi-hyphenate and multi-tasker, we still get a boot out of personalities we know for one function, showing up in a totally unexpected context, and in doing so revealing an otherwise hidden side—and hidden talents.  When a non-actor appears on-screen there is a moment of held breath. Will he or she be…good? After all, acting is hard. Acting takes sweat and years of training, whether in techniques by Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, or doing improv on weeknights for decades, with no break in sight. And yet, from out of the blue, a soccer star, jazz musician, or gossip columnist will cruise onto the set and turn in the performance of a seasoned vet.

It was Hollywood in early 1950, and legendary director Billy Wilder had a big problem. In two weeks, shooting would start on his next film, “Sunset Boulevard,” and his mercurial young star, Montgomery Clift, had just backed out of playing the lead.

Those who remember her only from those endless grocery store checkout line-stories on her health problems, fluctuating weight, friendship with Michael Jackson & Bubbles, or impressive eight marriages (she wed Richard Burton twice), pay attention. Today, we celebrate the film career of a legendary beauty, prodigious talent, and a big personality, Elizabeth Taylor.

With streaming, you get that thing we all crave: immediate gratification. Complete spontaneity, no need to plan ahead. And that’s a big deal over the holidays, when we’re all over-stressed, overbooked, overloaded. Who has time to think about what to watch on Christmas Eve before you’re actually there?

An opening scene of a movie is like a cinematic thermometer. You take a movie’s temperature by that first scene. It holds you, intrigues you, grabs you — or it doesn’t. Though it’s true that plenty of great movies take their time building up our involvement, obviously they can’t take too long. Then there are those others that start off with a bang. It’s this latter group we’re celebrating today. Here are fifteen of our favorite movie openers, covering seven decades of filmmaking: