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The Breakfast Club star Molly Ringwald has “reevaluated” the Eighties films she starred in as a teenager in the wake of the #MeToo movement and didn't like the result.
Ringwald, now 50, decided to revisit the 1985 John Hughes film after her 10-year-old daughter asked to watch it and described her findings in a piece for The New Yorker .
“I worried she would find aspects of it troubling. But I hadn't anticipated that it would ultimately be most troubling to me,” she wrote, highlighting the character of John Bender - played by Judd Nelson - as a particular issue.
“At one point in the film the bad-boy character, John Bender, ducks under the table where my character, Claire, is sitting, to hide from a teacher,” she writes. “While there, he takes the opportunity to peek under Claire's skirt and, though the audience doesn't see, it is implied that he touches her inappropriately."
She adds: “Bender sexually harasses Claire throughout the film. When he’s not sexualising her, he takes out his rage on her with vicious contempt, calling her 'pathetic' “.
While praising Hughes' “sensitivity,” she questioned how he was able to possess “such a glaring blind spot,” adding: “Back then, I was only vaguely aware of how inappropriate much of John’s writing was.” She acknowledged that his writing “could also be considered racist, misogynistic, and, at times, homophobic."
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best PictureShow all 23 1 /23Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Citizen Kane (1941) Long revered as one of the greatest films ever made, Orson Welles' debut – a film following newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane – was just another nominee back in the day, losing out to How Green Was My Valley.
RKO Radio Pictures
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture The Searchers (1956) The Searchers may be considered John Ford's greatest film, but it was not treated as such back in the 1950s. In fact, the western starring John Wayne failed to earn a single nomination. Around the World in 80 Days turned out to be more the Academy's cup of tea.
RKO Radio Pictures
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Vertigo (1958) Not only did Alfred Hitchcock never win an Oscar (save for his memorial award in 1968), but neither did any of his films – one of which is Vertigo, a classic that won Sight & Sound's once-a-decade greatest films of all time poll in 2012. If it had been nominated, it would have faced stiff competition in the form of eventual winner All About Eve.
Paramount Pictures
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture The Graduate (1967) One of the films that kickstarted the New Hollywood Cinema era, The Graduate may have won director Mike Nichols an Oscar, but it ultimately lost out to Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night.
United Artists
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi classic remains one of the most influential pieces of cinema there is. The Academy didn't agree. The Academy nominated Kubrick for Best Director and awarded the visual effects in favour of considering 2001 for Best Picture (it didn't even get nominated). That year's winner was Oliver!, the musical by Carol Reed.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Taxi Driver (1976) Despite Taxi Driver's failure to win the main award, its nomination in four categories showed the Academy had good intentions. That All the President's Men and Network also lost out to eventual winner Rocky shows that, ultimately, it never really stood a chance.
Columbia Pictures
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Apocalypse Now (1979) Francis Ford Coppola's ambitious Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now received a grand total of eight nominations, but only went home with two prizes (for cinematography and sound) losing out to drama Kramer vs. Kramer.
United Artists
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Raging Bull (1980) Of all the Oscar blows dealt to Martin Scorsese over the decades, none landed harder than Raging Bull losing out to Robert Redford's weepie Ordinary People, an oversight many consider one of the Academy's most egregious.
United Artists
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Blade Runner (1982) Another sci-fi classic overlooked by the Oscars was Blade Runner, which didn't even get nominated in the Best Picture category (Gandhi ended up winning). Ridley Scott's The Martian went on to receive seven nominations in 2017 – evidence, perhaps, of the Academy taking responsibility for its past errors.
United Artists
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Do the Right Thing (1989) Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing failing to win Best Picture at the 1990 Oscars is one thing – losing out to Driving Miss Daisy is another thing altogether.
Universal Pictures
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Goodfellas (1990) Having awarded both The Godfather Part I and The Godfather Part II Best Picture in 1972 and 1974 respectively, the Academy seemed destined to appreciate Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. But no – Kevin Costner's directorial debut Dances with Wolves was the most appealing choice for voters.
2012 Getty Images
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Pulp Fiction (1994) New talent on the block Quentin Tarantino's second feature Pulp Fiction won him the coveted Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1994 – a success he failed to match back on home turf. While he won an Original Screenplay Oscar, his film was beaten by Forrest Gump...
Miramax Films
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture The Shawshank Redemption (1994) ...and it wasn't the only one. Frank Darabont's adaptation of Stephen King's prison-set novella The Shawshank Redemption also fell victim to Robert Zemeckis' Oscar-friendly Forrest Gump. We don't see that film sitting atop the IMDb top 250 though, do we?
Getty Images
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Heat (1995) If Heat was released today, there's no way it wouldn't be a Best Picture frontrunner. That it was completely ignored in favour of Braveheart is a huge travesty.
Warner Bros
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Fargo (1996) You may think it was remiss of the Academy to shun Fargo, but it did come pretty close to winning, its chances bolstered somewhat by seven nominations and two wins (Actress for Frances McDormand and Original Screenplay for the Coen Brothers). It lost out to The English Patient.
Gramercy Pictures
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Saving Private Ryan (1998) Having won Best Director five years previous for Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg was strongly expected to take home the top prizes for his Second World War epic. Cue Shakespeare In Love upsetting everybody.
Paramount Pictures
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture The Social Network (2010) David Fincher's Facebook drama got shunned in favour of British patriotism in an Oscar two-horse race for the ages that ultimately saw The King's Speech crowned winner.
Columbia
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) Lynne Ramsay has directed two films that would have been deserving of Best Picture: You Were Never Really Here and this, We Need to Talk About Kevin. It's easy to see why Hollywood was temporarily more charmed by The Artist, but it's clear which film will stand the test of time.
Oscilloscope Laboratories
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) It's almost unthinkable to recall that the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis only scored two Oscar nominations in the cinematography and sound mixing categories, respectively. In the ensuing years, the film has been hailed as one of the greatest of the 2010s, meaning that its no-show at the Oscars will go down as one of the Academy's biggest omissions. Still, it would have had a hard time winning over 12 Years a Slave.
CBS Films
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Boyhood (2014) For the 2015 Oscars race, you were either team Birdman or team Boyhood. Richard Linklater's labour of love, shot intermittently over 12 years, ultimately failed to win.
Universal Pictures
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture American Honey (2016) If there's any justice, Andrea Arnold will one day become an Oscar winner, but in a perfect world, she would have already won for American Honey, a drama deserving of Best Picture if there ever was one.
Universal Pictures
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Get Out (2017) Horror rarely gets recognised at the Oscars, but Get Out is the closest the genre had come in years. Jordan Peele may have taken home the Best Original Screenplay award, but the stars aligned for Guillermo del Toro's fantasy The Shape of Water instead.
Universal Pictures
Oscars: 21 great films that never won Best Picture Roma (2018) Roma was strongly expected to become the first ever foreign language film to win Best Picture. It had everything going for it, including a standout festival run and universal acclaim. But then Green Book snatched its trophy away in a late stage awards season twist that still seems too ridiculous to be true.
Netflix
The actor also highlighted several issues with Sixteen Candles (1984), namely the scene in which a boy named Jake gives his extremely drunk girlfriend to another man in exchange for underwear belonging to Ringwald's character.
“The Geek takes Polaroids with Caroline to have proof of his conquest; when she wakes up in the morning with someone she doesn’t know, he asks her if she 'enjoyed it.' (Neither of them seems to remember much.) Caroline shakes her head in wonderment and says, 'You know, I have this weird feeling I did.'
"She had to have a feeling about it, rather than a thought, because thoughts are things we have when we are conscious, and she wasn’t. She was basically traded for a pair of underwear. Ah, John Hughes.”
Hughes, who died in 2009 at the age of 59, was the director of such films as Weird Science and Ferris Bueller's Day Off as well as the writer of hits Home Alone and Pretty in Pink .
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