Lee Daniels' The Butler (2013)

  This didn't get nominated for a single Oscar.  But Bad Grandpa did.  Just keep that in mind.

Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) grew up in Macon, Georgia on a cotton farm.  After seeing his father (David Banner) killed by the landowner (Alex Pettyfer) for making eye contact, young Cecil is taken to the house to be trained as a server.  He runs away as a teenager and ends up working at a hotel in North Carolina.  From there, he moves to the Excelsior Hotel in Washington, D.C.  He meets his wife, Gloria (Oprah Winfrey), and has two children, Louis (David Oyelowo) and Charlie (Elijah Kelley).  Life is going as well as he could have ever expected, until he gets a phone call from the White House.  Cecil joins the staff as a butler during the Eisenhower (Robin Williams) Administration.  He sees first-hand the way civil rights are discussed among the highest echelons of government.  Meanwhile, his son Louis is involved with sit-ins in Tennessee and then joins the Freedom Riders.  Their worlds couldn't be more different and still be working for a common cause.  Through Kennedy (James Marsden), L.B. Johnson (Live Schrieber), Nixon (John Cusack), Ford, Carter, and Reagan (Alan Rickman), Cecil does his own part to slip a quiet word in the ear of the most powerful man in the world.

This movie had so many stars in it, it's worth a look just for that.  Besides the people mentioned, there was Mariah Carey, Vanessa Redgrave, Terrence Howard, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Lenny Kravitz, and Jane Fonda.  We are talking Oscar-bait of the highest order.  If 12 Years a Slave hadn't come out three months later, this one would have been the one everyone talked about.  There are various speculations about why this was totally snubbed, from "it peaked too early" to "the Academy is only comfortable with one black drama at a time".  This might be one that people revisit in years to come as a misstep in the Oscar history.

Let's talk about the makeup jobs.  All the Presidents looked at least marginally like their real-life counterparts with some notable stand-outs.  John Cusack would not have been my first pick for Nixon, but he nailed the oily, scheming nature of the man.  Minka Kelly looked so much like Jackie Kennedy in profile that it raised the hair on my arms, even if James Marsden doesn't even superficially resemble JFK.  Alan Rickman did his best, but doesn't really give off that Reagan vibe.  Still, everyone involved in this did an absolutely amazing job.