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.