What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1969

The Year: 1969
What the Nominees Were: Anne of a Thousand Days; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; Hello, Dolly!; Midnight Cowboy; Z
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: It was an excellent year for American film. Five alternate nominees could have been Alice’s Restaurant, Medium Cool, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, The Wild Bunch and They Shoot Horses Don’t They? In addition to Z (which got nominated!), My Night at Maud’s was great overseas.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: Midnight Cowboy
How Hard Was the Decision: Sort of hard. I was also drawn to The Wild Bunch and Z. Of course, the big knock against Midnight Cowboy is that it seems like the sort of movie that could never win an Oscar, but somehow it did win, and who am I to disagree with this daring pick?

Director: John Schlesinger
Writer: Waldo Salt, based on the novel by James Leo Herlihy
Stars: Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, Brenda Vaccaro, Sylvia Miles 

The Story: Texas stud Joe Buck moves to Manhattan to become a gigolo, but instead becomes a homeless bum, befriending a consumptive scrounger named Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo. When Ratso is nearing death, they try to escape to Florida but arrive too late.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: In addition to Picture, it won Director and Adapted Screenplay. It lost twice for Actor (Hoffman and Voigt were pitted against each other, but both got shot down by John Wayne), Supporting Actress for Miles, and Editing.

How It Won: Hollywood could only suppress the youthquake for so long. Academy president Gregory Peck had been aggressively recruiting younger Academy members for years, and here they finally asserted their power, anointing an X-rated and utterly scuzzy film. Wayne would make fun of the New Hollywood at the ceremony, “I’m an American movie actor. I work with my clothes on. I have to. Horses are rough on your legs and your elsewheres.” But Wayne’s win aside, things were changing fast.

Why It Won:

1. The bond between Joe and Ratso is one of the most intense ever put on screen, not exactly gay but not not-gay either. Joe never stops razzing Ratso (including calling him Ratso) until the moment of his death, only to discover then that this was the only love he has ever known (and probably will ever know.)
   
2. The blacklist was well and truly over by now, allowing ex-communists like Salt to write with impunity, and bring the wounds of that time along with them. Ratso is constantly afraid that Joe is going to turn him in (Salt himself was named by the friend who had been best man at his wedding.)
3. Joe is often consumed by nightmarish flashes of his traumatic Texas past, but Salt points out in the Criterion documentary, “There was no flashback that took place in the past. Every flashback took place in that moment in his head. A flashback is only valid if it’s a flash-present.” This is a good way to write flashbacks, and can be seen in many of the British New Wave films that launched directors like Schlesinger. Because the flashbacks are so brief, we never get a full picture of Joe’s traumas, but we get enough.
   
4. Voight, as he became more villainous in his offscreen life, was consigned to villain roles in later life (and has a lot of fun with them) but he was astounding in his brief period as a leading man, bringing an intense empathy to his characters (the kind that he himself would later lack.)
5. When I moved to NYC from the south, I found that there were four stages of being acclimatized: First, being confused when people don’t say excuse me, then realizing that they’re actually offended when you say it to them, then you stop saying it, then finally you start taking offense when others say it to you. Like me, Joe realizes around that point that he has to get out. (I ended up moving there and away three times)
   

Ah, 1969: