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 edit, 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”)