What Should Have Won, Part V: The 1970s

If the years 1932-1945 represent Hollywood’s Golden Age, then a case could be made that the 70s were the Silver Age of Hollywood. For five years after the record-breaking triumph of The Sound of Music in 1965, every studio in Hollywood tried to recapture its success with one expensive, bloated musical after another, from Star! (which reunited Julie Andrews with her Sound of Music director, Robert Wise) to Paint Your Wagon, in which Clint Eastwood proved to the entire movie going world that, as they say down South, he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.

On top of this disconnect, the country was changing and it was painfully obvious that Hollywood was behind the times. By the late 1960s kids were growing their hair, protesting the war in Vietnam and smoking pot like it was going out of style, and the men in suits running the studios were at a loss as to what the youth audience wanted to see at the movies. So they decided to gamble on a new, untested generation of young filmmakers, many of them right out of film school. By giving them artistic freedom, provided they stay under strict budgetary limits, they opened the floodgates to what became an extraordinary period in American film.

The Academy, on the other hand, was slow to embrace this new generation. Possibly because the average Academy voters in those years were older than The Three Stooges, and worked about as often, they were slow to realize what was happening under their noses. Nonetheless, in my opinion the Academy made more right choices in this decade than in any other – and at least one choice that was spectacularly wrong.

So let’s get started. Once again, a reminder of the rules: the film that I choose for Best Picture has to have been nominated in at least one category that year – it doesn’t matter which one.

1970

What film won Best Picture: Patton
What film should have won: M*A*S*H

Journeyman director Franklin J. Schaffner made a decent enough film about the eccentric WWII general, from a script co-written by future Godfather auteur Francis Coppola, but in retrospect it’s pretty obvious that the film of the year was Robert Altman’s breakthrough black comedy about army doctors in the Korean War, M*A*S*H. It was nothing less than revolutionary – from its mocking of religion to its completing the transformation of cinematic dialogue that Orson Welles has begun almost three decades earlier with Citizen Kane. Nothing would be the same after M*A*S*H, while Patton was just another war epic – albeit one with a masterful performance by George C. Scott. If you’re interested, the New York Film Critics Award that year went to the now badly dated Five Easy Pieces. The Golden Globes went to Love Story (Drama) and M*A*S*H (Musical or Comedy).

1971

What film won Best Picture: The French Connection
What film should have won: The Last Picture Show

This one is really a toss-up. I can’t argue that the Academy blew it, because if any two films ever deserved to be in a tie for Best Picture, it’s William Friedkin’s riveting crime drama and Peter Bogdanovich’s bittersweet ode to small-town Texas, from Larry McMurtry’s novel. If I give the nod to Bogdanovich over Friedkin, perhaps it’s because The French Connection has the same structural defect of the 1959 Ben-Hur – the biggest scene in the film comes two-thirds of the way into the story, making the climax somewhat anti-climactic. The Last Picture Show, on the other hand, just keeps getting better and better with the years. The New York Critics gave their Best Picture Award to Stanley Kubrick’s hateful A Clockwork Orange, and the Golden Globes went to The French Connection (Drama) and Fiddler on the Roof (Musical or Comedy).

1972

What film won Best Picture: The Godfather
What film should have won: The Godfather

People forget that The Godfather, while it did win Best Picture, wasn't the big winner at the Oscars that year. Bob Fosse’s Cabaret ended up winning eight Oscars to The Godfather’s three – and Fosse beat out Francis Coppola for Best Director (that was the year that Fosse won the triple crown – the Oscar, Tony and Emmy for directing – in the same year). James Caan, Al Pacino and Robert Duvall were all nominated for Best Supporting Actor – and all three of them lost to Joel Grey, who reprised his Broadway role as the emcee in Cabaret. But there’s little doubt that The Godfather is probably the greatest American film of the post-World War II period, so in the Best Picture category at least the Academy made the right choice. Ironically, the New York Film Critics blew off The Godfather on all the major awards – Best Picture went to Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, and Best Actor went to Laurence Olivier’s bravura performance in Joseph Mankiewicz's Sleuth. The Godfather and Cabaret both won Best Picture Golden Globes because they were nominated in different categories.

1973

What film won Best Picture: The Sting
What film should have won: The Exorcist

This might be the biggest injustice of the decade. It was a tight and crowded Oscar race that year, and a lot of worthy films weren’t even nominated for Best Picture – including Last Tango in Paris, The Last Detail, Serpico, Paper Moon and The Way We Were. The film that won was a fun, well-written comedy that had great star power in Newman and Redford and benefited greatly from being released at the height of the nostalgia boom of the early 70s, when people wanted to feel like they were living in pretty much any decade other than the one they were in. But the fact is that the film of the year was The Exorcist, and if it hadn’t been for the Academy’s bias against certain genres and the controversies about the film that flooded the press in the weeks before the voting (mostly concerning Linda Blair’s performance) it would have won Best Picture and probably an acting Oscar or two. The New York Film Critics gave their Best Picture Award to Truffaut’s delightful Day for Night (which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film) and the Golden Globes went to, respectively, The Exorcist and American Graffiti – which were exactly the right choices.

1974

What film won Best Picture: The Godfather Part II
What film should have won: The Godfather, Part II

This was a weird year for the Oscars. Although they picked the right film in a very crowded field for Best Picture, some of their other choices were downright bizarre. How can you explain the fact that The Towering Inferno got a Best Picture nomination? Or that in one of the most competitive Best Actor fields ever (Albert Finney in Murder on the Orient Express, Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, Dustin Hoffman in Lenny and Al Pacino in Godfather II), they went with Art Carney in the awful Harry and Tonto? They did get Supporting Actor right, though – even though three actors from Godfather II were nominated (equaling what happened with the original Godfather) Robert De Niro still won for playing the young Vito Corleone. Chinatown won the Golden Globe for Best Picture Drama (Coppola thought it would win the Best Picture Oscar), while the NY Film Critics gave their Best Picture Award to Fellini’s Amarcord.

1975

What film won Best Picture: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
What film should have won: Nashville

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ran the table at the Oscars – it became the first film since It Happened One Night to win all five major Oscars (Picture, Writer, Director, Actor, Actress). It’s hard for me to talk about because it’s one of the very few major films of that era that I didn’t see at the time – I didn’t catch up with Milos Forman’s film until thirty years later. But I think that the film of 1975, at least in retrospect, is Robert Altman’s Nashville (although Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon would come in a close second, and might have been my choice if Kubrick had only thrown away his zoom lens when he started shooting). The NY Film Critics gave their award to Nashville, while the Golden Globe went to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

1976

What film won Best Picture: Rocky
What film should have won: Taxi Driver

This was one of the toughest choices the Academy had to make in the last forty years – and they blew it. Three films nominated for Best Picture have become undisputed classics: Network, Taxi Driver and All The President’s Men. Choosing between them is almost impossible, and the idea of making it a threeway tie is very tempting. But the Academy chose to reward Sylvester Stallone’s personal Cinderella story of an aging boxer given one last chance (or so people thought that at the time – little did they know that no less than five sequels were in the offing!) at redemption. Any one of the three other films I mentioned would have been a better choice, but my vote would have gone to Martin Scorsese’s shattering vision of the underbelly of New York City, from a screenplay by future director Paul Schrader. If Woody Allen’s films provide us with a romanticized view of Manhattan, here Scorsese gives us the reverse side -- a bleak vision of Manhattan as Hell. Those of us who were around in the 1970s know that this vision wasn't all that far from the truth (God, I miss those days). Rocky won the Golden Globe (Taxi Driver didn’t even get a Best Picture nomination) and All the President’s Men won the NY Film Critics Circle Award (Robert DeNiro won Best Actor for Taxi Driver).

1977

What film won Best Picture: Annie Hall
What film should have won: Annie Hall

Woody Allen’s bittersweet romantic comedy almost became the third film in the history of the Oscars to pull off a sweep. Annie Hall won Best Picture, Woody won Best Director, Woody and Marshall Brickman won for Best Original Screenplay and Diane Keaton won for Best Actress. Only the fact that Richard Dreyfuss (for The Goodbye Girl) beat out Woody for Best Actor kept Annie Hall from winning all five of the major Oscars (collectors of injustices, however, will note that Gordon Willis was not even nominated for his cinematography). Irate science fiction geeks will take solace from the fact that Star Wars actually won more Oscars than Annie Hall did – if you count the Special Achievement Award to Ben Burtt, George Lucas’s space opera won seven awards to Annie Hall’s four. Annie Hall won Best Picture from the NY Film Critics, and the Golden Globe went to The Turning Point (Drama) and The Goodbye Girl (Comedy or Musical). Annie Hall wasn't even nominated in either category. To paraphrase the young Alvy Singer: What assholes!

1978

What film won Best Picture: The Deer Hunter
What film should have won: Days of Heaven

What an irony it was when the terminally ill John Wayne (he would be dead from cancer two months after the ceremony) presented the Best Picture Oscar to Michael Cimino’s anarchic Vietnam epic. It was a popular choice at the time, and it could be argued that the film suffers only when seen from the perspective of Cimino’s plummeting reputation in the wake of the whole Heaven’s Gate debacle, after which people would take a scathing revisionist look at his previous success. But I would assert that the clear winner this year is Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. It won Best Cinematography, and was nominated in other categories as well, but it was not a Best Picture nominee. Almost 30 years after the fact, though, it’s pretty obvious that Malick’s poetic epic was the best film of the year. Days of Heaven was nominated for a Golden Globe but lost to Midnight Express. The NY Film Critics gave their award to The Deer Hunter (although Malick won Best Director for Days of Heaven – explain that if you can).

1979

What film won Best Picture: Kramer Vs. Kramer
What film should have won: All That Jazz

Francis Coppola and Bob Fosse were both in their great periods at exactly the same time, and it seemed that they always went head-to-head when they had films out in this decade. Fosse beat Coppola in 1972, Coppola beat Fosse in 1974. But in 1979 they both lost – to Robert Benton’s adaptation of Avery Corman’s novel of divorce, Manhattan-style, Kramer Vs. Kramer. At the time people chuckled that Academy voters couldn’t identify with self-destructive choreographers or dazed and confused soldiers slogging their way through the jungles of Vietnam – but they could all identify with going through a messy divorce. In retrospect, though, Benton’s low-key drama, even with impressive performances by Dustin Hoffman and Merlyn Streep (the latter won her first Oscar for her relatively small role), doesn’t live up to the competition. The Oscar should have gone either to Coppola’s monstrous Vietnam epic or Fosse’s scathing personal vision. Although it’s a tough call, because of the trouble with Coppola’s ending (or lack of such) I would go with Fosse. The New York Film Critics gave their award to Kramer Vs. Kramer, as did the Golden Globes. They were all wrong.

Tom Moran