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…

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1978

The Year: 1978
What the Nominees Were: Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, Heaven Can Wait, Midnight Express, An Unmarried Woman
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: How did Days of Heaven not get a nomination?? Blue Collar would have been an interesting choice.

What Did Win: The Deer Hunter
How It’s Aged: The scenes in America are very well done, but the movie’s portrayal of the people of Vietnam is certainly problematic. A great cast, put to good use, but ultimately a bit of a tonal mish-mash. Not a movie I ever intend to rewatch. The thing this movie does the best, a certain lyrical quality, is done much better by…

What Should’ve Won: Days of Heaven 

How Hard Was the Decision: A fairly easy choice. Coming Home and An Unmarried Woman are both excellent films, but Days of Heaven is one of the all-time greats.

Director: Terrence Malick
Writer: Terrence Malick
Stars: Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard, Linda Manz

The Story: After accidentally killing his foreman in a fight at a steel plant, a young man named Bill goes on the run with his little sister Linda and a girlfriend named Abby, who he pretends is also his sister. Picking wheat on a Texas farm, a supposedly-dying farmer falls in love with Abby, so Bill encourages her to marry him and inherit the farm. Soon, a love triangle develops, that ends tragically for most people involved.

Any Nominations or Wins: It deservedly won for Néstor Almendros’s (and Haskell Wexler’s) Cinematography, but lost for Sound, Costume Design and Ennio Morricone’s haunting score.
Why It Didn’t Win: The movie was a box-office bomb, which didn’t help, but The Deer Hunter didn’t light the world on fire either. Ultimately, to fail to even give this a Picture nomination is a baffling choice.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. I first discovered this movie through the wonderful documentary Visions of Light, where they make a convincing case that it’s the best looking movie ever made. Almendros (and Wexler who took over after Almendros had to leave to shoot another movie) shot a lot of the movie at magic hour, just after the sun has gone down but before night has fallen (but Almendros would complain that it was actually “magic 15 minutes.”) On the Criterion commentary track, they talk about how only Malick understood what images you could capture with the film using no lights, more than Almendros, more than Wexler (who was convinced that many of the scenes he was shooting would end up blank) even more than the Kodak corporation, who made the film stock. The result is the lushest, most hypnotic movie ever made.
   
2. Over the course of the two-year editing process, Malick gradually decided to cut out most of the dialogue (we never know what the opening fight in the steel mill is about, for instance). At one point, Bill asks Abby, “Do you love him?” As a screenwriter, what’s the best response you can write to that? Well, you can write all day, but the best reply is nothing, which says it all, and that’s what’s left in the movie.
   
3. Malick found 15-year old Manz living nearly homeless in a laundromat with an abusive mom and quickly realized she was a brilliantly instinctive actress. Even better, they realized she was a writer. Gere says on the DVD: “she was such a, kind of a unique eccentric wild animal of a teenager that some extraordinary jewels came out of her.”
4. So instead of dialogue, they decided a year into the editing to add an improvised voiceover by Manz. (Malick knew he could make it work because he’d done something similar on his earlier film Badlands.) Sometimes they would watch a scene and have her sum it up in her inimitable way, or they would tell her the story of The Book of Revelation one night and have her try to remember it the next day, and sometimes she would just say bizarre non-sequiturs (“I been thinking what to do with my future. I could be a mud doctor, checking out the earth, underneath.”) They recorded her for 10 hours and then cut 15 minutes of it into the movie. It’s the best voiceover in the history of cinema, as far as I’m concerned.
   
5. Joining in the commentary is casting director Dianne Crittenden, who offers excellent insights. It would be fascinating to see the film with the original intended cast for the men, John Travolta and Tommy Lee Jones, before that casting fell through.
6. Some of the majestic shots were made using old-fashioned movie magic: In order to get a stunning shot of a swarm of locusts rising out of a wheat field, they had helicopter drop maple tree seeds and all of the actors acting in reverse, then ran the film backwards.
   

Ah, 1978: I’m not sure that’s going to be a long-lasting career…

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1977

The Year: 1977
What the Nominees Were: Annie Hall, The Goodbye Girl, Julia, Star Wars, The Turning Point
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: How on earth did Close Encounters of the Third Kind not get a nomination??

What Did Win: Annie Hall
How It’s Aged: Look, what can I say here? It’s undeniable that Annie Hall is absolutely brilliant. Very funny (I quote it frequently), beautifully shot, and one of the best actress showcases of all time. But…

What Should’ve Won: Star Wars
How Hard Was the Decision: Choosing between Annie Hall and Star Wars is very hard, but choosing between the filmmakers is easy, so I’ll give it to Lucas. You might think that, after I passed over Jaws and Rocky, I just don’t think the Oscar should go to popular movies, but in this case the most popular choice was also the best. (I did consider Close Encounters, but c’mon, Star Wars is literally the most rewatchable movie of all time.)

Director: George Lucas
Writer: George Lucas
Stars: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Peter Cushing, Alec Guinness

The Story: Luke Skywalker, a farmer on a distant planet, comes into possession of two droids with plans to blow up a planet-destroying weapon called the Death Star. Luke joins forces with a mystic hermit, a rogue pilot and a spunky princess to save the day.

Any Nominations or Wins: It lost Picture, Director, Supporting Actor for Guinness, and Original Screenplay, but it won just about all the technical awards: Art Direction, Costume Design, Editing, Score, Sound, Visual Effects and a special Scientific and Engineering Award.
Why It Didn’t Win: To this day, there are many who look down on the artistic merits of this movie, and they were legion in 1977. It was a box office phenomenon, but it just didn’t feel like an award-winner. Remember that even 2001 wasn’t nominated, because science fiction (or, in this case, science fantasy) wasn’t remotely considered to be a respectable genre.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. It’s almost impossible to grasp how good John Barry’s production design is. Why is this movie so cool and timeless, while Zardoz and Logan’s Run are so lame and dated? There’s just one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment that shows us what could have been. Originally, Luke’s vehicle was just a normal car with decals on the hood, before they all decided they could do better. But the original car shows up in this one shot. Look at this car. This is what this movie could have been, if Lucas and Barry hadn’t been so visionary.
   
2. I have no patience for those who carp about the quality of the movie’s dialogue. In retrospect, Harrison Ford’s infamous on-set complaint (“George, you can type this shit, but you sure as hell can’t say it”) probably refers not to overly simplistic lines, as is generally implied when that quote is cited, but to all of the bizarre unexplained specifics that the actors were expected to casually sell to the audience (“Nerf-herder!”). Those specifics are the heart of great dialogue!
3. Probably the most brilliant moment in this movie is the opening title card. Let’s go back in time and change just one thing. What if, instead of “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” the opening crawl had started with the line: “It is the year 25,172!” Even if the rest of movie had stayed the same, I doubt it would have been as big of a success. That opening line is brilliant. It de-fangs the audience. It says, “Hold on there, buddy, this may look like science-fiction, with space ships and lasers and robots, but it’s not. It’s a fairy tale. So don’t expect a lot of time-travel paradoxes or super-computers. Instead, you should expect princesses and swords and magical mentors.” Lucas was managing our expectations. He was establishing a certain tone, before we in the audience could start making false genre assumptions that would have just left us frustrated.
   
4. If you want to hear more about this movie, go back and listen to all 48 episodes of “The Secrets of Story Podcast”, because James Kennedy and I ended up mentioning the movie in almost every episode, as an example of good writing. James’s theory of “The Holy Moment” (where he talks about how many movies end with a “let go and let God” sequence) owes a lot to this movie, and there are many episodes where we talk about how many movies have a “Snake in the Basement”, which this movie may be the ultimate example of.
   
5. Infamously, this movie has never been released on DVD or Blu-Ray, meaning that you have to go to Bit Torrent to watch it, which is (kind of) illegal, but there are no other options. If you decide to sail the pirate seas, you might as well go all the way and also download the documentary “Star Wars Begins” while you’re there, which is the best place to see all of the fascinating deleted scenes. As is so often the case, the scenes were deleted with good reason, but they also include much crucial information (such as why Luke wants to join the air force of an empire he hates).
   
6. As with 12 Angry Men, this movie is another great example of how heroes, no matter how morally pure they are, get what they want through tricks and traps. Luke uses a lot of indirect and manipulative dialogue, in an admirably crafty way. We think of Han as the slick one, but he’s actually transparent and plainspoken, while Luke is far more wily, and more likely to wrap Han around his finger. This culminates in the finale, when Luke finally convinces Han to totally betray his own self-interest by hitting him below the belt one last time: “Well, take care of yourself, Han... guess that's what you’re best at, isn’t it?” Han just can’t stay away after that. Obi Wan isn’t the only one who knows how to play mind tricks!
   
7. And finally, as I was writing this piece, the real hero of this movie, editor Marcia Lucas, died. Everybody hated the rough cut of the movie and she moved heaven and Earth to make it come to life, rewriting the movie on the fly. Lucas would not be the only director who relied heavily on the efforts of his first wife and, once they divorced, never matched the work he did with her.

Ah, 1977: This is what fashion looked like at the time, which makes it all the more amazing how timeless the movie looks.