What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1968

The Year: 1968
What the Nominees Were: Funny Girl; The Lion in Winter; Oliver!; Rachel, Rachel; Romeo and Juliet
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: 2001 and Planet of the Apes in America. Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses, Bergman’s Shame and Leone’s Once Upon A Time in the West overseas.

What Did Win: Oliver! (That’s their exclamation point, not mine)
How It’s Aged: Terribly. Oddly chipper given the downbeat subject matter, this is the movie people are referring to when they say they just don’t believe that people would break out into song in musicals.

What Should’ve Won: 2001: A Space Odyssey
How Hard Was the Decision: The Lion in Winter is great, but c’mon, everybody agrees that 2001 is one of the all-time great films, and it’s often cited as a baffling Oscar snub.

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writers: Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke
Stars: Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood

The Story: At the dawn of Man, a monolith appears to some ape-men and suddenly they can make weapons from bones. In 1999, astronauts find another monolith buried on the moon. In 2001, they have followed a signal from that monolith to another orbiting Jupiter. After dealing with a pesky malfunctioning AI named HAL 9000, astronaut Dave Bowman has a freak-out at Jupiter.

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Best Special Visual Effects, but lost Director, Original Screenplay and Art Direction.
Why It Didn’t Win: Famously, at a Hollywood screening, Rock Hudson stood up halfway through and walked out, grumbling “What is this bullshit? Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?” Hollywood just wasn’t ready for this. It also doesn’t help that it didn’t make a lot of money at first (until stoners started coming back to watch it every day.)

Why It Should Have Won:

1. The term “art-movie” got tossed around a lot from the 60s to the 90s, but this is one of the only movies I’ve seen that genuinely feels like a piece of capital-“A”-Art. Maybe more art than movie, in fact. It’s long, it’s glacially slow, and it has very little dialogue (The first 25 and last 25 minutes have no words). You have to be willing to toss aside many of your expectations of what cinema is or should be and just let this movie overwhelm you with its enormity.
   
2. Andrew Sarris famously panned the movie and then was told to see it again stoned, which he did and issued a revised review saying it was great. I’ve never done drugs, so perhaps I’ve never fully appreciated this film, but the visuals alone are enough to make you feel like you’re tripping on something. The way-out final twenty minutes only makes any sense if you open your mind as far as it will go (zonked out or not) at which it becomes very beautiful and profound.
   
3. It cannot be overstated how shocking and monumental Douglas Trumbull’s astronaut special effects were in this movie. In our era of CGI, nothing impresses us anymore, but if you can get into a 1968 headspace, you will just keep saying, while your jaw is on the floor, how did they get that shot?? Everything just feels so real, which, given the subject matter, is extraordinary. This is outer space. We are living in the future.
   
4. In Dr. Strangelove, both America’s bomber plan and the Soviets’ doomsday weapon were designed to deploy even when nobody wanted them to, because the human element had been intentionally stripped out of the system. This movie takes the theme of dehumanization to the next level. The AI, which is touchy, sensitive, and ultimately homicidal, has the only real humanity in this movie. The astronaut that kills it is the real machine, not even reacting when HAL kills his co-pilot. When Kubrick looked at our space program, he wasn’t afraid of the aliens we might encounter, he was afraid of John Glenn’s terrifying lack of affect.
   
5. The sequel 2010, not made by Kubrick, is all about American-Soviet relationships, but of course there was no Soviet Union by 2010. This movie never mentions other countries so it’s aged better than that one, but the one thing that badly dates the movie is that women are strictly stewardesses. Even Planet of the Apes had a woman in the crew (who they kill off right away) Perhaps Kubrick didn’t want to imply that anything might have gotten better in his chilly vision of the future.

Ah, 1968: I grew up on Swanson and I can taste every one of these.