What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1985

The Year: 1985
What the Nominees Were: The Color Purple, Kiss of the Spider-Woman, Out of Africa, Prizzi’s Honor, Witness
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Albert Brooks’ Lost in America and Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo are great films. For that matter, Back to the Future is a better movie than Out of Africa. Outside of America there was Kurosawa’s Ran and another great Japanese film, Tampopo.

What Did Win: Out of Africa
How It’s Aged: Not well. Generally considered one of the worst Best Picture winners, this lovingly-shot travelogue is more of an advertisement for going on safari than a meaningful motion picture. The actual story is terribly un-involving.

What Should’ve Won: Ran
How Hard Was the Decision: Hard. I love Witness and Lost in America, but put them head-to-head against Ran, and they just get blown out of the water, so once again, I had to invoke “The Parasite Rule” which states that, very rarely, when everything goes exactly right, a foreign film can win Best Picture. (So far, I’ve only invoked this rule once, for another Kurosawa film, High and Low, but we will see it again.)

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Writers: Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, and Masato Ide, based on “King Lear” by William Shakespeare
Stars: Tatsuya Nakadai, Akira Terao, Jinpachi Nezu, Daisuke Ryu, Mieko Harada, Peter

The Story: Aging warlord Hidetora decides to divide up his kingdom amongst his three sons, but keep his own army. His younger son tells him he’s a fool and gets banished in return. The older sons quickly turn on Hidetora, and each other, and the kingdom falls into warfare.

Any Nominations or Wins: Kurosawa had fallen out of favor in Japan, which didn’t even submit the film as their entry for Best Foreign Film. Nevertheless it was nominated for four awards. It lost for Director (the only time Kurosawa was ever nominated), Art Direction, and Cinematography, but won for Emi Wada’s stunning Costume Design.
Why It Didn’t Win: After Japan snubbed the film, Sidney Lumet took it upon himself to campaign for the film to get other nominations. The fact that it got a Director nomination is an indication that the Academy took it seriously, but foreign films always face huge hurdles, and no one was particularly surprised this one couldn’t mount them, even in the face of weak competition.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. How do you adapt one of the greatest plays of all time? Step one: fix its flaws. “Lear” is great, but its biggest weakness is that its Gloucester subplot is too similar to its main Lear plot (both about foolish fathers bestowing their lands on the wrong children). This movie eliminates the subplot entirely, but then, ingeniously, it takes some of the evil done by characters in that subplot, and attributes that evil to the main character instead. There’s still a character with eyeballs gouged out, but now it was Hidetora himself who did the gouging, in his younger days. This whole saga is not just punishment for being a vain fool, as Lear was, but the consequences of a lifetime of hideous violence. The story is much stronger when it’s about chickens coming home to roost.
2. Kurosawa’s greatest previous masterpieces were done in black and white, and his color films to this point had not exceeded those, but finally with this film he proved that he could compose symphonies of color, beginning with roiling green fields under an expanse of blue sky, then with the clashing primary-colored banners of the sons, which eventually get covered in just one color: red. (As with any production of Lear, he gets to have great fun with the storm as well.)
   
3. One of the odder things about this adaptation is that it changes the daughters to sons, presumably because it just wouldn’t happen with daughters in Japan, but surely Kurosawa was aware that primogeniture was just as much of a thing in England as it was in Japan and the whole point of the original was how unusual (and, in Shakespeare’s view, foolish) it was to pass your land on to your daughters. Ultimately, this revision works and we do get one great female role, with Mieko Harada as the bloodthirsty powerbroker who engineers the entire tragedy as righteous revenge.
   
4. Nakadai’s performance as Hidetora was partly inspired by Noh Theater (as you can tell from his stagey-make-up) which can be a bit alienating to American viewers, but Kurosawa was always a westerner at heart, and when the arrows start flying and (thousands of) horses start galloping, all stagey-ness falls away and this becomes a David-Lean-style epic for the ages. One of the best things about writing this series is that I get to rewatch these movies that I had only seen before forty years ago pan-n-scan on VHS. This movie demands better than that.
   
   
   
5. The fool is a great character in Shakespeare’s play, but isn’t there for the beginning or end of the story, presumably because Shakespeare intended for him to be doubled with the actor playing Cordelia. Here the fool is present throughout (beautifully played by a non-binary one-namer named Peter) as both comic relief and existential conscience of the film. (His outfits are the one thing in the movie that make me say, “Oh, right, it was the ’80s,” though I suspect that was intentional. He has the perspective of the 20th century.)
   
   
   

Ah, 1985: The politics here are fascinating...

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1984

The Year: 1984
What the Nominees Were: Amadeus, The Killing Fields, A Passage to India, Places in the Heart, A Soldier’s Story
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: It’s crazy that Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America wasn’t nominated. Sayles made his greatest film, Brother from Another Planet. Germany’s Wim Wenders showed he could also master American cinema with Paris, Texas. Over in China, the so-called “fifth generation” of filmmakers began to explode with Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: Amadeus (a third year in a row in which I’m not changing the winner!)
How Hard Was the Decision: Very hard. I dearly love Once Upon a Time in America, Brother from Another Planet and Paris, Texas. But they just couldn’t dethrone Amadeus.

Director: Miloš Forman
Writer: Peter Shaffer, based on his play (which was inspired by Alexander Pushkin’s 1830 play “Mozart and Salieri”)
Stars: F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge, Simon Callow

The Story: Italian composer Antonio Salieri, working at the Austrian court, becomes wildly jealous of new wunderkind Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and eventually falsely blames himself for Mozart’s death. Many years later he “confesses” all to a priest visiting his insane asylum.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It won Picture, Director, Actor for Abraham, Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction, Costume Design, Makeup and Sound. It lost Actor for Hulce, Cinematography and Editing.
How It Won: It was a bit of longshot win over Places in the Heart. The Academy loves bio-pics, but this is something altogether weirder than that (focused just as much on Salieri as Mozart.) The strong list of nominees split the major awards, and somehow this movie slipped in as winner.

Why It Won:

1. I took away Forman’s Oscar for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest but this one has aged much better. His persistent theme, going back to his early Czech masterpieces, is anarchy breaking forth into a world of respectability, and Mozart, more even than Cuckoo’s McMurphy, is his ultimate avatar
2. Yes, you may say, but Tom Hulce (best known outside of this for Animal House) is no Jack Nicholson, and that’s true, but I still think he does a great job. Forman cast mostly-unknowns in the leads so that star wattage wouldn’t distract from his story. One can’t help but wonder what if would have been like if they had stayed with the Broadway cast, with Ian McKellen as Salieri and Tim Curry (!) as Mozart, but we got what we got and I won’t get upsot. Hulce wins me over with his high-pitched alarm-blast of a nervous laugh.
   
3. Twyla Tharp does the choreography for the recreated operas and found that she couldn’t go over-the-top enough for Forman (as she lays out in the excellent making-of doc on the Blu-Ray). This doesn’t feel like a stuffy period piece at all, its portrait of Vienna decadence feels altogether more phantasmagorical.  In the doc, Forman talks about being forced to watch Soviet-approved biopics of Russian composers and swearing he would never do anything like that.  He didn’t. 
   
4. I have generally tried to avoid Director’s Cuts for this series, preferring to review the print that actually won, but the original of this one seems to be lost media, so I watched the expanded version, bumped up from 161 to 181 minutes. My wife knows the film much better than I and she confirmed my impression that the extra 20 minutes were not essential but also not extraneous. The main difference is that we hear more of Mozart’s music and that can’t be a bad thing.
5. Salieri is angry at god for giving more talent to Mozart and the film creates many very human moments that drive that home, such as when Mozart takes the welcoming piece Salieri has written for him and improves on it. I’ve been humiliated by colleagues more talented than me. The idea of devoting an entire play-turned-movie out of such jealousy-turned-rage is inspired.

Ah, 1984: McDonald’s famously lost a bunch of money on this when the communist countries boycotted and the US won everything (which was later parodied with Krusty the Clown on “The Simpsons”)

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1983

The Year: 1983

What the Nominees Were: The Big Chill, The Dresser, The Right Stuff, Tender Mercies, Terms of Endearment
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Sayles’ Baby, It’s You, Allen’s Zelig, and Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: Terms of Endearment
How Hard Was the Decision: Very hard because Terms of Endearment is not an all-time classic, but it was a weak year. It came down to this or Tender Mercies, so I just watched both, and I surprised myself by picking this one. Tender Mercies is very good, and Robert Duvall gives a legendary performance, but the movie just felt too slight compared to this.

Director: James L. Brooks
Writer: James L. Brooks, adapted from the novel by Larry McMurtry
Stars: Debra Winger, Shirley MacLaine, Jack Nicholson, Danny DeVito, John Lithgow

The Story: Houston teen Emma Greenway gets away from her hyper-critical mother Aurora and marries hapless English professor Flap Horton, moving first to Iowa then Nebraska. They raise three kids, but eventually Emma dies of cancer and Flap agrees to have Aurora raise the kids back in Houston. (Aurora also has an fling with the astronaut next door.)

Any Other Nominations or Wins: MacLaine and Winger went up against each other for Best Actress and MacLaine won. Nicholson and Lithgow went up against each other for Supporting Actor and Nicholson won. It also won Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay. It lost Art Direction, Editing, Score and Sound.
How It Won: The movie was a surprise hit (second only to Return of the Jedi at the box office), the Academy loves a good whole-tissue-box tearjerker, and, let’s face it, the picking were slim.

Why It Won:

1. I’ve recently took away the Oscars of two other family-drama tear-jerkers, Kramer vs Kramer and Ordinary People. This movie isn’t as good as those two, but I’m letting it keep its Oscar because the competition is weaker. Of course, I didn’t rewatch those movies, and maybe I was scared to, trying to protect myself emotionally. This time I had no choice but to rewatch, and it wrecked me. I hadn’t seen it since I had cancer and I had kids (not at the same time, thankfully). This time, the movie’s sentimentality felt well-earned, closely-observed, and emotionally-devastating.
   
2. Duvall is great in Tender Mercies, but this one has not one but two all-time-great roles for its two lead actresses, creating a tragic circumstance where only one could win Best Actress. For the record, they got it wrong. MacLaine is deeply moving as a problematic mother turned middle-aged lover, and she was overdue for an Oscar, but Winger is called upon to show more emotional range. She proves that she was one of the great actresses and her too-short period of getting great roles (though she has continued to work in minor roles) seems like a tragedy.
   
3. I reluctantly passed over The Last Picture Show, which was also based on a Larry McMurtry novel (and also featured Polly Platt as more-than-just Production Designer). And “Lonesome Dove” was a miniseries, not a movie, so this is my one remaining chance to honor him. The fact that one person could turn out three such wildly different versions of Texas’s story (rural, urban and inbetween, historical to modern-day, male-led and female-led) and break your heart with all three, shows a massive talent.
4. James L. Brooks was a master television maker (from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” to “Taxi” to “The Simpsons”) making his film debut here as both writer and director. He brings some TV habits over (the heart-tugging score is laid on a little thick) but he proved that he could do great work in this medium as well. He maintains his special gift for making you laugh and cry (and before you claim “The Simpsons” doesn’t make you cry, remember the note saying “You are Lisa Simpson.” Tearing up, aren’t you?)
5. When Emma tells her mom she’s marrying Flap, her mom tells her “You are not special enough to overcome a bad marriage.” It is to Brooks’ and MacLaine’s great credit that they can still get us to root for her after that and other criticisms. Acid-tongued characters are frequently compelling, and they can even become sympathetic if handled with great delicacy. 
   
6. Emma keeps catching herself starting to do the same things to her kids that her mom did to her. I’ve never seen a movie better at showing how much work it is to police yourself from doing that, something I know something about.

Ah, 1983: An iconic ad for a truly crappy product. I grew up in the cassette era, which was the worst recorded music ever sounded.

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1982

The Year: 1982
What the Nominees Were: E. T. the Extra Terrestrial, Gandhi, Missing, Tootsie, The Verdict
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Sophie’s Choice, The World According to Garp and Victor/Victoria come to mind. Not much going on overseas (the various New Waves had all crested.)

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: Gandhi
How Hard Was the Decision: It was hard. All five of these movies are very good, and Gandhi has not aged perfectly. They cast an actor who was only half-Indian and had to put brown make-up on him, which is a major mark against the movie.  (Ben Kingsley’s birth name was Krishna Bhanji, and he was from the same province as Gandhi, but he’s very fair-skinned without the makeup.)  It was very tempting to give this Oscar to Tootsie, which is great, but ultimately not as momentous as Gandhi.

Director: Richard Attenborough
Writer: John Briley
Stars: Ben Kingsley, Candice Bergen, Edward Fox, John Gielgud

The Story: Mohandas Gandhi gets thrown off a train in South Africa in 1893, so he becomes a civil disobedience leader, first in Africa and then back in India. Eventually he secures independence for his country, only to be assassinated by a fellow Hindu for being too conciliatory to the Muslim minority.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It won Picture, Director, Actor, Original Screenplay, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, and Editing. It lost Makeup, Original Score and Sound.
How It Won: E.T. had already become the most successful movie ever made by the time the awards rolled around, and was considered a juggernaut, but bio-pics are famously Oscar-bait. Ultimately E.T. and Tootsie split the “popular movie” vote and Gandhi was able to squeak out a win with its “serious movie” vibes.

Why It Won:

1. Kingsley is miscast in that he has the wrong skintone, but his performance is incredible and he deservedly won Best Actor (even though Paul Newman for The Verdict was overdue to win). Actors love to play enigmatic characters, and Gandhi will frequent respond to serious questions with just a shrug and a change of the subject. Gandhi is forced to give a few speeches, but his devastating actions always speak louder.
   
2. David Lean was still alive and making movies, but Attenborough had realized that Lean was never going to turn his eye to this particular subject, so it was up to him to make the best Lean movie that Lean never made. Ultimately, Attenborough lacks some of Lean’s cinematic artistry (who doesn’t?) but he matches his scope. Gandhi is the genuine revolutionary that T. E. Lawrence only imagined himself to be and this is the epic he deserves.
   
3. Briley wrote very little else, but deserves his Oscar and a place in film history for this sensitively observed and stirring script. Gandhi is valorized but it’s also clear that he was such a martyr (sometimes needlessly) that he drove everyone around him crazy.
4. This movie is three hours and eleven minutes long, but not a moment seems slow or wasted. I wouldn’t want it to be a moment shorter. Some subjects deserve this treatment. If we saw an achievement of this scale (the freeing and tragic partition of a country) play out in less time, we would feel cheated.
5. Indian filmmakers were upset that the Indian government invested millions of dollars into this production, understandably insisting that this was an Indian story that should have been told by Indians, but no one can accuse Attenborough of favoring the British, who look terrible here. This is a movie about a great evil and Attenborough shows that unreservedly.
   
6. It is to this movie’s enormous credit that it didn’t create one British person to be a nemesis that kept recurring throughout Gandhi’s long struggle. That’s not how life works and it would have been reprehensible to pretend it did. Instead he faces a steady procession of bureaucrats over many years, some more canny than others.

Ah, 1982: E.T. in a beer ad? It was a slippery slope from here to the point where the Lorax was selling SUV’s.

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1981

The Year: 1981
What the Nominees Were: Atlantic City, Chariots of Fire, On Golden Pond, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Reds
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Lumet’s underappreciated gem Prince of the City and Malle’s brilliant talk-fest My Dinner with Andre

What Did Win: Chariots of Fire
How It’s Aged: The first weak winner since Oliver back in 1968. The Academy had its act together for a long time (even though they didn’t recognize the very best movie in most of those years), but things began to slip again here in the ‘80s. This movie is an adequate exploration of a very dull topic: An Olympic runner who doesn’t like to run on Sundays. Most famous for its very anachronistic synthesizer score.

What Should’ve Won: Raiders of the Lost Ark
How Hard Was the Decision: This was another year with no strong choice. Raiders seems a little light to win, but Reds is a bit too ponderous, and Prince of the City would be too much of a longshot. I was surprised at how many nominations Raiders got, meaning it definitely could have won, and if it could’ve, it should’ve.

Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan, from a story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman
Stars: Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey, John Rhys-Davies, Denholm Elliott

The Story: Renegade archaeologist Indiana Jones chases the Ark of the Covenant all over the world.

Any Nominations or Wins: It lost Picture, Director, Cinematography and Original Score, but it won Art Direction, Editing, Sound, Sound Editing, and Visual Effects.
Why It Didn’t Win: It came shockingly close, winning five and being in the races for the big ones, but it would have been the only action-adventure movie to ever win, so it had little chance. Reds was considered the runaway favorite and Chariots of Fire was a big upset, but Raiders would have been the real shock.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Last time we covered what was possibly the greatest horror movie of all time, and here, just one year later, we have what may be the greatest action movie (I promise I’m not just being nostalgic for the movies of my youth.) The continuous action sequence that goes from escaping from the tomb, to the fight on the runway, to hanging onto the front of the trucks is so adrenaline-fueled that it practically gives me a heart-attack every time.
   
2. In lots of great movies, but especially movies with John Williams scores, there’s a snake in the basement. Star Wars has one. The Harry Potter movies definitely have one. Why? Well, you’ll have to page Dr. Freud for that one. This movie has the most snakes in the biggest basement, so it wins.
   
3. Harrison Ford has never won an Oscar, and he wasn’t even nominated for this one, which is insane. He is not only the living embodiment of charisma, but he subtly goes on a surprisingly large emotional journey from recklessness to reverence.
4. It’s always good to begin with a due-but-outsized humiliation, and it’s even better if it reveals the hero’s flaw. Indy begins by trying to replace a religious idol with a bag of sand, thinking that there’s no real difference, but the altar can tell, and it triggers all sorts of booby traps that delay him long enough for his rival to steal the idol. It’s not obvious to us or him at the time that this speaks to his overall flaw, his lack of respect for spirituality, but it subconsciously sets us up for the moment when he overcomes his big flaw to “win” at the end (simply by closing his eyes out of reverence.)
   
5. Lucas and Spielberg were trying to recreate the thrill of watching action serials they saw as kids, but this is the ultimate example of a simulacrum, a copy that captures the essence of something so well that it exceeds the quality of the original in every way.  Watching actual serials is dreadful these days, but the whole genre is worth its existence even if all it did was inspire these movies and (more indirectly) Star Wars.  

Ah, 1981: One of my favorite ads

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1980

The Year: 1980
What the Nominees Were: Coal Miner’s Daughter, The Elephant Man, Ordinary People, Raging Bull, Tess
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: John Sayles arrived on the scene with Return of the Secaucus Seven. Sam Fuller finally made his autobiographical magnum opus The Big Red One. Stanley Kubrick delivered The Shining. And of course we had one of the all-time great sequels: The Empire Strikes Back

What Did Win: Ordinary People
How It’s Aged: It’s a beautiful, tender, heartbreaking movie about survivor’s guilt, suicidal ideation and therapy. But…

What Should’ve Won: The Shining
How Hard Was the Decision: This should have been an easy decision. This is one of those years where everybody knows what should have won: Raging Bull. So I just rewatched that movie …and I just don’t like it very much. It’s beautifully shot and De Niro certainly puts the work on screen, but the problem is that I don’t find Jake LaMotta to be a very compelling character. He keeps beating the crap out of his brother and wife not out of some great tragic flaw, but merely because he’s a dumb brute. He’s not a raging bull, because bulls have dignity. He’s a raging louse. So that left me with a very hard decision? Stick with Ordinary People? (I feel bad I haven’t upheld a decision in a while.) Go for The Big Red One? And what about Empire?? That’s certainly my favorite movie of the year, after all. But Empire is also a mess in some ways. I decided that the closest thing to a perfect movie was The Shining.

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writers: Kubrick and Diane Johnson
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers and Danny Lloyd

The Story: Frustrated novelist Jack Torrance takes a job as a winter caretaker of Colorado resort, along with his wife and psychic son. Ghosts (or is it all in his head?) torment him until he decides (like his predecessor) to chop up his family with an ax. Can they survive?

Any Nominations or Wins: None! But it did get Razzie nominations (an award for the worst films and performances of the year) for Duvall and Kubrick’s directing!
Why It Didn’t Win: So obviously, this was a movie that was pretty despised upon its original release, it’s only gradually that it’s come to be recognized as perhaps the greatest horror movie ever made. Nicholson and Kubrick were Academy darlings, but this movie inspired nothing but loathing from the Academy and general public at the time.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. I’ve skipped over some great horror movies, so why this one? Because it’s the scariest damn movie I’ve ever seen. It was the first movie I ever watched on laserdisc, at the home of a family friend, in a home theater system where I was sitting right next to the sub-woofer, which kept rattling my bones with the ominous Bela Bartok music on the soundtrack. By the time the movie ended, I was completely freaked out and frazzled, and had to rewatch Who Framed Roger Rabbit? to calm myself down. I’m still terrified of it to this day.  The twins!
   
2. Given the fact that I denied Oscars to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, you might think that I just don’t like anti-heroes, but I love them if they hit a certain sweet spot. Nicholson is absolutely captivating here as a weak man who gives in to his dark side with too little resistance. Unlike LaMotta, I find him utterly compelling.
3. But this is actually a fascinating movie, in that the role of hero is passed like a baton. First it’s Jack, as he makes a half-hearted attempt to better his life, then he gives up and it becomes Danny, investigating the secrets of the hotel, then he is traumatized, so then it’s Jack again, picking up the investigation, but he succumbs to the temptations of the ghosts, so then it’s Wendy who picks up the baton until she gets shut down, then it’s Scatman Crother’s character Halloran who comes to the rescue, but he gets killed, and finally it’s the no-longer-catatonic Danny who must step up and resolve the story once and for all. The movie gets extra points for making this bizarre structure work (and we don’t even notice how bizarre it is as we watch.)
   
4. I absolutely love the scene where Jack spills his drink on his shirt and goes to the bathroom to clean it off. An obsequious man in a tux is there to dab at the stain with a towel. Jack angrily grabs the towel to do it himself, saying “Mr. Grady, you were the caretaker here. You chopped [your family] up to bits, and then you blew your brains out.” Grady only smiles mildly and says, “I’m sorry to differ with you sir, but you are the caretaker, you’ve always been the caretaker. I should know sir, I’ve always been here.” Someone, after all, has to remove a lot of stains in this place. This is a classic example of a seemingly-innocuous exchange of an object that actually encapsulates the meaning of the scene. Jack thinks he’ll get a rise out of Grady by grabbing the towel away, but Grady only smiles: the towel has been passed on to his successor, in every sense. By grabbing it, Jack has admitted he will take up Grady’s (multiple) roles.
   
5. Are any of the crazed conspiracy theories in the documentary feature Room 237 accurate? For instance, was Kubrick encoding evidence that he had faked the moon landings throughout the film? Surely not, but it can’t be denied that he was enjoying packing the movie with complicated imagery open to many interpretations. He famously drove the cast crazy with his bizarre perfectionism, but the result is a movie dense with many meanings.
6. One thing I’ve been trying to do with these posts is highlight the forgotten female creators who have been essential to making the male-led movies. In this case, it’s not often acknowledged that Kubrick co-wrote the movie with novelist Diane Johnson. Kubrick had a hard time deciding whether to adapt King’s novel or Johnson’s own horror novel “The Shadow Knows”, so he decided to split the difference and hire one to adapt the other. Johnson (who would later go on to write the novel “Le Divorce”, which was turned into a Merchant-Ivory film) brings a sensitive eye to how marriages turn sour.

Ah, 1980: When I read this ad in 1980 I wanted all of these

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1979

The Year: 1979

What the Nominees Were: All That Jazz, Apocalypse Now, Breaking Away, Kramer Vs. Kramer, Norma Rae 

Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Those are five great movies! This was one of the best years for American film. Amazingly, there were more great films, including Being There, The China Syndrome and, of course, Alien.

What Did Win: Kramer Vs. Kramer
How It’s Aged: It’s deeply moving, the all-time great movie about divorce, and the performances from Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep both richly deserved their Oscars. But…

What Should’ve Won: Breaking Away
How Hard Was the Decision: I truly love Kramer vs. Kramer, but it’s a very strong year.  I was going to give it to Apocalypse Now, which is an amazing film, but I was sort of dreading rewatching it, and so I eventually decided to go with my heart and award it to one of my all-time favorites instead.

Director: Peter Yates
Writer: Steve Tesich
Stars: Dennis Christopher, Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern, Jackie Earle Haley, Barbara Barrie, and Paul Dooley

The Story: After the quarries close, the sons of stonecutters have no idea what they’re going to do with their lives. Dave decides to be a star bicycle racer and imitates his Italian idols. Only when he meets them and finds out they are cheats does he admit his own problems, especially with his father. He eventually realizes that he should go to college.

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Original Screenplay. It lost Picture, Director, Supporting Actress for Barrie and Score.

Why It Didn’t Win: I can’t blame the Academy for giving it to Kramer vs. Kramer, which was more “of the moment,” addressing one of the most painful issues facing America at the time. Breaking Away, on the other hand, is more gentle and timeless, and giving it an Oscar (other than original screenplay) must have felt less urgent.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Yates didn’t make any other films this good, nor did Tesich, nor did Christopher, making this one of those great one-offs where the right elements all came together in some bizarre alchemical concoction that could never be repeated.
2. But Christopher has one of my favorite line readings. Dave’s father runs a used car lot and rips off the local college kids. Dave rejects his family and chooses to idolize Italian bike racers instead. His dad tries to break him of this mania and forces him to take a job on the lot. One day, some kids his dad ripped off try to return their car and Dave naively gives them their money back. His father tries to physically block them from pushing the dead car back onto the lot, almost killing himself with a heart attack. Dave runs off to join a race with his Italian idols, but they betray him too, cheating and running him off the road. Dave returns home tearfully to his dad and bitterly laments, “Everybody cheats. I just didn’t know.” He can no longer hide behind the imaginary heroism of the Italians, which means he must accept his father’s wickedness. It’s just about one of the most devastating moments in any movie I’ve seen.
   
3. The movie has an seemingly-cuttable silent scene that manages (as I’ve pointed out before) to be a perfect one-scene encapsulation of the plot and everything the movie has to say. Practicing his racing along the side of the highway, Dave ends up racing against a truck advertising Italian Vermouth, while an Italian opera plays on the soundtrack. The trucker ends up getting pulled over by a cop, so Dave wins, racing by a sign that says “Now entering Bloomington, Home of Indiana University.” Dave doesn’t realize that his Italian fantasy is harming others, and he doesn’t realize that he’s been heading towards his real goal this whole time: the university.
   
4. I’ve said before that in the best sports movies the hero either wins by losing (Rocky) or loses by winning (Downhill Racer). This movie is a great sports movie, but it’s an exception because the hero wins by winning, and that’s fine. Dave resolves all of his issues with his dad, his girlfriend, and his friends, and then begins the triumphant final bicycle race, which is a bit of an afterthought. The result is an exhilarating stand-up-and-cheer triumph, but it’s still packed with irony: Dave gets to defeat the university kids one last time, but only after admitting that he needs to join the enemy and enroll at the university himself.
5. Steve (ne Stoyan) Tesich was a Yugoslavian immigrant who came to Indiana University on a wrestling scholarship, where he decided to switch to screenwriting and wrote two unrelated scripts, one about a bike race and another about ex-stonecutters, but Yates had the great idea to combine them. Sometimes writers don’t know what they have until a clever director leads them there.
   

Ah, 1979: The 80s were on their way…