In 1984, I didn’t think any of the fifteen people or films deserved a nomination. This scathing indictment will certain stop the Awards from happening in 1985. (Narrator: They didn’t)
Best Actress
Their Pick: Sally Field, Places in the Heart
Nominees: Judy Davis, A Passage to India; Jessica Lange, Country; Vanessa Redgrave, The Bostonians; Sissy Spacek, The River
My Pick: Karen Allen, Starman
Nominees: Genevieve Bujold, Choose Me; Linda Hamilton, The Terminator; Frances McDormand, Blood Simple; Kathleen Turner, Romancing the Stone
The 1984 Best Actress nominees and winners favored a stately, familiar bunch. Three nominations (Field, Spacek, Lange) were about women working the land in movies that had vaguely feminist bonafides but that were directed by men. The other two were adaptations of literary masters Forster (Davis) and James (Redgrave). I admit I haven’t seen the latter two – I’ve always wanted to read A Passage to India before confronting David Lean’s well-regarded adaptation – but the others are fine, solid, unglamorous, but occasionally showy performances in movies that haven’t made good endured their big contemporary reputations. Of the nominees, I like Spacek in The River the best, and that’s probably the worst of the nominated movies.
Meanwhile, here are a bunch of actresses you’d want to high five after seeing their movies that I haven’t included in my nominations (sadly, none of them women of color, as it was a bad year for high-profile roles in a typical year of 1980s exclusion.)
- Jodie Foster, The Hotel New Hampshire
- Melanie Griffith, Body Double
- Darryl Hannah, Splash
- Heather Langenkamp, Nightmare on Elm Street
- Elizabeth McGovern, Racing with the Moon and Once Upon a Time in America
- Helen Mirren, 2010
- Molly Ringwald, Sixteen Candles
- Theresa Russell, The Razor’s Edge
- Lily Tomlin, All of Me
- Rachel Ward, Against All Odds
- Lesley Ann Warren, Choose Me
- Debra Winger, Mike’s Murder
- Miss Piggy, The Muppets Take Manhattan (her best performance, IMHO)
Dame Vanessa Redgrave had been honored before and would be honored again. Molly Ringwald and Theresa Russell never were.
(Later addition: A Redditor share this excellent list from the Chicago Cinema Circuit which shows so many of the movies I overlooked)
But I’m pretty pleased with my top 5, which honors Linda Hamilton for her gutsy, career-making badassery; Frances McDormand’s similar breakthrough as a noir heroine whose victimization leads her to agency; Kathleen Turner’s dowdy romantic novelist turned jungle warrior; and the constantly underrated Genevieve Bujold as the sexy, weird talk radio host in Alan Rudolph’s hazy and romantic Choose Me (my runner-up). But my award goes to Karen Allen for Starman, as a grieving woman who encounters, sympathizes with, and ultimately loves an alien.
As a blank but friendly ghost in the machine, Jeff Bridges gets most of the credit for John Carpenter’s extra-terrestrial romance. But it’s really Allen who gives the movie its emotional weight, responding to this strange creature with an initial skepticism that grounds Starman in reality. Under Carpenter’s excellent direction, Starman works as both a ghost story and an alien fantasy. It depends on the same toughness and humor that Allen showed in Raiders of the Lost Ark as a wounded woman who is taken on a journey and constantly has to assert herself and proves worthy of challenges. Falling in love with Jeff Bridges at the height of his mid-period hunkiness doesn’t seem like a great challenge, but Allen never makes us feel anything but deep understanding for her desire.
The recent news about Harvey Weinstein’s conviction reminds us all of actresses like Mira Sorvino, Uma Thurman, and Ashley Judd, who were shut out of prominent roles as they aged out of their initial stardom. After her Raiders breakthrough at 31, Allen enjoyed a period of stardom of only four years or so before being vanquished to supporting roles and B-movies – she’s fun in 1989’s Scrooged as Bill Murray’s long- suffering girlfriend, but after that she’s far down the cast list. Producers failed to honor her obvious talent and charisma, and I imagine a lot of viewers of Raiders look at her and think “She’s great! Why isn’t she in more big movies?” I think I have an answer for that.
Best Actor
Their Pick: F. Murray Abraham, Amadeus
Nominees: Jeff Bridges, Starman; Albert Finney, Under the Volcano; Tom Hulce, Amadeus; Sam Waterston, The Killing Fields
My Pick: Harry Dean Stanton, Paris, Texas
Nominees: Steve Martin, All of Me; Bill Murray, Ghostbusters; Eddie Murphy, Beverly Hills Cop; Prince, Purple Rain
F. Murray Abraham’s Oscar win for Amadeus in 1984 turned into a predictable “What Happened Next?” narrative. He went back to being a character actor best at small and unspectacular roles. Of the two performances in the film, I prefer Tom Hulce’s preening, batshit Mozart, but Abraham was given a moment to shine and he did it in the most rewarded and high-falutin’ movie of the year. I appreciate the accomplishment of both actors, but look at what we’re dealing with this year: two of the highest-grossing comedies of all time that made superstars out of their SNL-refugee leads Murray and Eddie Murphy. Steve Martin pulling off a gloriously goofy and physical performance. Schwarzenegger telling us, correctly, he’d be back. And Prince, captured in time at the peak of his odd beauty and charisma. I’m picking these iconic performances even ahead of deserving nominees like Bridges and Finney (who really nails Under the Volcano in one of his last great roles as a leading man). Also, I’m overlooking John Hurt in one of my favorites of his: The Hit.
It’s very hard for me not to pick Prince, whose movie career would shortly go off the rails perhaps because of his eccentricity. But if I’m going to do so, it’s got to be Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas, as he made the beloved Repo Man the same year and should have been Time Magazine’s Man of the Year. With his hang-dog face and skin nearly the texture of leather, Stanton finally got the chance to be at the center of a movie. Alongside a never better Dean Stockwell, Stanton’s near-mute amnesiac Travis is at once ordinary and mysterious: sort of like Starman or even E.T in one of the many 80s movies about mysterious strangers who cause those they encounter to re-examine themselves (see also: Howard the Duck). But Wim Wenders’ movie luxuriates in simple places and people who struggle, like Travis, to articulate what they want or where they’ve been. Stanton brings the soul of a Western hero to settings that are epically spare. Even if he often serves as someone to respond to, his aimlessness and confused identity haunts everyone around him and taps into something deep and primal about American experience. Stanton is a legendary presence who recently left the world to become, I hope, a luminous spirit who will imbue the universe with his ragged magnificence. Nowhere was that persona better on display than Paris, Texas.
Best Picture
Their Pick: Amadeus
Nominees: The Killing Fields, A Passage to India, Places in the Heart, A Soldier’s Story
My Pick: Once Upon a Time in America
Nominees: Blood Simple, Paris Texas, Stranger than Paradise, This is Spinal Tap
Based on Peter Shaffer’s play, Amadeus gave audiences a definitive, imaginative, opulent take on Mozart and the Viennese culture where he thrived. In winning his second Academy Award for Best Director, Milos Forman gave audiences the glimpse into the life of artists – great and mediocre – in telling a lush and long psychological epic about genius and rivalry. I like Amadeus – I have the soundtrack on vinyl and listen to it constantly. But the movie drags and sometimes sags under the weight of its own ambitions, so I’m going take yet another Oscar away from the venerable Forman. It made sense that this very big movie won the biggest award in 1984, but it’s pretty far down a list of movies that we remember and want to see again, that continue to find new audiences and grow in ardor every year. If Ghostbusters and Beverly Hills Cop and Gremlins and 2010 and Star Trek III and The Terminator and Repo Man don’t get nominations, I can’t really give one to any on the Academy’s list of conventional Oscar material.
So Mozart and the field gets snubbed by me in favor of one epic and four smaller movies that sort of define what’s good about underdog eighties films. This is Spinal Tap – maybe the funniest movie of the decade; Paris, Texas: Wim Wenders’ best American film; Stranger than Paradise – Jim Jarmusch defined independent filmmaking of the period here; Blood Simple – gave us the Coens and is the best of the eighties reimaginings of film noir. But my pick is Once Upon a Time in America, Sergio Leone’s masterful swan song, and it’s a controversial choice that – if this feature had more readers – might draw complaints because of what audiences actually saw in 1984.
When it was released, filmgoers saw a two- and a half-hour mess put together from the 229-minute cut that received raves at Cannes. Roger Ebert called the bowdlerized release a “travesty.” Audiences were unimpressed with the return of a filmmaker who had been mostly silent for ten years. But since this is a retrospective award, I’m going to follow my ruling on Brazil, also released in a form that went against the wishes of its director. Once Upon a Time in America is a darkly sentimental look at gangsters in America, by a director who was enthralled by American heroism but hated its mercenary capitalist system. In taking a surprising look at Jewish gangsters, this Italian looks back to the ghettos to show the way the hard-scrabble ingenuity of five young men could really only find an outlet in a life of crime. Leone’s Lower East Side is romanticized, but then shattered by stark violence. These moments are intercut by two other stories that I feel work together seamlessly – the rise of the four hoods led by Robert De Niro and James Woods, and De Niro’s return to Manhattan many years later at a mysterious bequest.
The movie offers scenes of uncommon beauty: as the young “Noodles” watches Jennifer Connelly dancing through a peephole; as the boys dance past the Manhattan Bridge to Ennio Morricone’s (I argue) best and most lyrical score; as Noodles attempts to forget himself in an opium den; and as the Beatles’ “Yesterday” plays over a train-station mural that seems frozen in time. But Leone pushes back against the romantic mythos of the gangster films like The Godfather perhaps affirmied. Noodles and his gang do terrible things, including sexual assault. These scenes are difficult to watch, but they remind us that criminals are violent, even the ones we’re asking to see as part of this rags-to-riches story. In this sense, they join the amoral heroes of Leone’s Spaghetti westerns who are driven to heroic acts more out of circumstance than some kind of hardened, virtuous code. They’re not anti-heroes; they’re criminals. And by revealing to us early that De Niro’s protagonist has betrayed his friends, the film insistently reminds us that even if he has lived a terrible life, his one principled action was in doing the thing most films’ moral economies would find cowardly.
It’s a great exclamation point for Leone’s visionary career. It’s a better opera than anything presented in Amadeus.
- Sergio Leone wins an Oscar for Best Director. Wouldn’t that be great? (I wouldn’t give Rob Reiner a Best Director nom for Spinal Tap, going with James Cameron for Terminator instead, but the other three nominees are the Coens, Wenders, and Jarmusch)
- Best Supporting Actor went to Haing S. Ngor, joining Pat Morita (Mr. Miyaga) as two Asian actors among the nominees. Enough has been said about Morita’s unnecessary pidgin accent (he’s fine), and Ngor is very good in The Killing Fields. But my award goes to M. Emmett Walsh for his diabolical oddball in Blood Simple. What a year! Harry Dean and M. Emmett taking home Oscars! Don’t you wish I controlled history? There also wouldn’t have been that fire in London in the 1660s! (My other nominees: Ngor, Dan Hedaya from Blood Simple, Richard Edson from Stranger than Paradise, and Harold Ramis for Ghostbusters)
- Best Supporting Actress went to Dame Peggy Ashcroft. I admit I’m at a disadvantage for holding off on A Passage to India, so that invalidates a lot of commentary, but this just seems a career award that she would receive if she were good or not. My pick is Leslie Ann Warren – a bit of category fraud because she’s kind of the co-lead in Choose Me, but I could also give her props for her great work in Songwriter the same year. Warren was a beautiful woman with a smart sensibility who, like Karen Allen, aged out of her best roles and who Hollywood forget. (My other four: Jennifer Connelly in Once Upon a Time, Ezster Balint in Stranger than Paradise; Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters; and Susanna Hamilton in 1984).
- I don’t know what to do with the cast of This is Spinal Tap, who were all equally brilliant. But they win the Best Original Screenplay award even if most of that movie was improvved. Tough choice over the Coens’ Blood Simple. Sorry Robert Benton and Places in the Heart.
- OK Amadeus, your consolation prize is Best Adapted Screenplay, the only award you win.
- Best score goes to Ennio Morricone. Seriously, this is one of my favorite pieces of music ever.
- Best Documentary goes to Stop Making Sense. I’m tempted to give it some Best Picture love, but it’s a concert film and I honestly don’t how that would figure into things. I mean, it’s my all time favorite band, okay?
- I really do like Chris Menges’ winning work for The Killing Field, but my pick for Best Cinematography is Tom DiCillo for his minimalist and highly influential black-and-white in Stranger than Paradise.
- A few quick thoughts on some of the films that were big that year. The Killing Fields is powerful, but it’s also polemical and falls victim to the white savior complex. It’s a true story, but the way it presents the horror of Khmer Rouge is often tempered by the need to show us how our American hero is responding to it. I realize it’s a true story, but the movie suffers when it’s about the saga of Sam Waterston’s liberal guilt.
- Here’s the way the Academy would pat itself on the back in the 80s: give a nomination to an African-American themed movie, but give it to the white producers and director (it only got a Best Supporting Actor nom). A Soldier’s Story is at times powerful, but it’s also stagy. If that movie works as well as they said it did, lead Howard Rollins Jr. should have received a Best Actor nomination. Instead, it was sort of a shallow gesture at inclusion.
- I’d love for someone to argue that Places in the Heart or Country hold up. Back when I worked at Blockbuster, I would go through the middle sections – the, er, “old releases” and would hunt down movies that had gotten nominations so I saw these too. They’re fine, and everyone is fine in them, but the movies I’ve selected have endured in ways they haven’t.
- I haven’t given De Niro a nomination for Once Upon a Time in America. I actually think he’s one of the movie’s few weaknesses, and a lot of it has to do with some unconvincing old-age makeup. He’s really more of a visual vessel for Leone’s vision, and good on him for letting Leone deploy him that way.
andytown 