Took a lot to get all my thoughts and other elements organized - plus I forgot my charger at work for a few days - but now we're back on.
As mentioned, 61 films were watched during this Retro tribute to 1983. And many of them had elements worth reading - so many, in fact, that a good half of those films screened are nominees here.
I had hoped to do this in three parts, but due to time running out...all 18 categories will be announced within this single post. Beginning with two that were not in play at that year's Oscars, Best Ensemble and Best Makeup.
Best Ensemble
The Big Chill
Wallis "Wally" Nicita, casting director
2. Fanny and Alexander; 3. Flashdance; 4. A Christmas Story; 5. Streamers
The cast of The Big Chill really feels like a solid group of friends with 20 years of history together. Likewise, Fanny and Alexander feels like a genuine family unit, Flashdance feels like a makeshift family, A Christmas Story feels like a family in a small town, and Streamers...Streamers is just great, man.
2. The Hunger 3. The Evil Dead 4. Fanny and Alexander 5. Krull
Krull boasts a wizened seer, dirty vagabonds, and an actual cyclops. Fanny and Alexander is my hat-tip to those difficult hairstyles of the early 20th-century, and the pale sweat of mortal illness. The remaining honorees are of the horror genre: the gallons of blood and rotting Deadites of The Evil Dead, the mummified corpses, sickly Susan Sarandon, and glamour queen beauty of Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger. But above all the rest? City of the Living Dead, with its decayed corpses, disembowelments, guts spewed out the mouth, brains ripped from skulls. Great fun.
It's the new guy versus the vets in the battle for Best Director.
Well, OK, the new guy was James L. Brooks, and while Terms of Endearment was his first film, this was hardly amateur hour: he was the writer-producer who brought us TV shows like Mary Tyler Moore and Phyllis and Taxi. He had even dipped his toes into film producing with Starting Over, which received two Oscar nominations years before.
Bruce Beresford, surprisingly enough for the director of a Texas-set, country music-concerned film like Tender Mercies, was an Australian filmmaker! He had been nominated for his Breaker Morant screenplay just three years earlier - he also has the rare honor of having directed a Best Picture-winning film (Driving Miss Daisy)...without being nominated himself.
Yates also directed Krull in 1983
Peter Yates was back making films like The Dresser in his native England, having been nominated four years earlier for directing and producing the American bicycle dramedy Breaking Away. He performed similar double-duty with The Dresser.
Mike Nichols was back in the game after more than a decade of nada, following his Oscar win for The Graduate. Silkwood was less obviously stylistic, but brought him back and served as his first collaboration with Meryl Streep. The two would later team up for Heartburn, Postcards from the Edge, and the HBO mini-series Angels in America.
And then there's Ingmar Bergman, with his own spotty record of Academy love. The most revered of Swedish filmmakers, Bergman's previous efforts had been relegated to either Foreign Film (this was the third of his films to win the category) or Original Screenplay (curiously, a common place for foreign auteurs to find their work honored - A Separation, anyone?). Fanny and Alexander proved to be his most Oscar-friendly work since Cries and Whispers in 1973, though like Scenes from a Marriage, it was a mini-series edited down to feature-length.
Beginner's luck: Brooks won. And it's interesting: he would be back twice as the producer-writer of Broadcast News and As Good As It Gets, but this proved to be his only at-bat for Directing. Good thing he got it, eh?
I know I should probably make an overall post about Original Screenplay, but let me raise a glass to the ladies. Because 2/5 of the films nominated here were written by women, and I love that.
Frances Marion
Much is made of the few nominations received by female directors - four in total, right, including winner Kathryn Bigelow? But screenplay has been much kinder, it's true! The Second Academy Awards saw two women nominated for Best Screenplay: Josephine Lovett, for the provocative Our Dancing Daughters, an original work; and Bess Meredyth, for both A Woman of Affairs and Wonder of Women, both based on novels. The very next year, Frances Marion became the first woman to actually win the Best Screenplay Oscar, for her original screenplay The Big House.
Lovett, Meredyth and Marion were solo acts - the three ladies nominated here in 1983 had partners.
Barbara Benedek was mostly a television writer, married to Peter Benedek, who would later found UTA. She had written a number of unproduced plays and other scripts, one of which Lawrence Kasdan got a hold of; they collaborated on the screenplay for The Big Chill. No surprise that she nails the insecurities of these 30-somethings so truthfully: she was a psychiatric research assistant before entering TV.
Ephron with husband Carl Bernstein
Silkwood is a woman's story - who better than Alice Arlen and Nora Ephron to script it? Perhaps writing is genetic: Ephron's parents were the writers behind Carousel and Desk Set, and before Silkwood, she had already published a book of essays and a novel, Heartburn. Her friend Arlen was likewise blessed, a female journalist whose mother was a female journalist, and whose mother before her was a female newspaper publisher. The two would later re-team for Cookie; Arlen also wrote the screenplay for Helen Hunt's directorial debut, Then She Found Me, while Ephron...well, hello? Ever hear of Julie & Julia, You've Got Mail, When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle....
Meanwhile, Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes were up for a teen thriller - they would be nominated again years later, but as producers for Best Picture nominee Awakenings. And Ingmar Bergman was up for a television mini-series he had whittled down to feature film length, his fifth screenplay nod.
Horton Foote won the Oscar for Tender Mercies, his first time writing an original work for the screen. He previously won Best Adapted Screenplay for To Kill a Mockingbird. Fun fact: he was nominated last year at the Primetime Emmy Awards for writing Bessie...six years after his death. Hollywood!
And should Foote have won? Find out, after the jump!
Ah, Cinematography - painting with light, they say. And certainly the artists nominated in 1983 found new ways to paint with tried-and-true subjects.
Sven Nykvist makes a dream out of the domestic drama. Don Peterman brings heat and sex to the dance-ical/musical. Caleb Deschanel gives the American epic an almost sacred feel. William A. Fraker's teen adventure is haunted by the glow of technology. And Gordon Willis, on his first nomination (you think the DP of The Godfather would have more under his belt), brings verisimilitude to the mockumentary.
Nykvist won his second Oscar here - let's talk about that and more, after the jump.
I love this category - it's always a great mixture of Best Picture nominees, Best Picture also-rans, period pieces, and sci-fi.
Fanny and Alexander and Yentl fill the period piece slots, and given the number of nominations they accumulated, plus the buzz at the time, I think it's safe to say each came this close to a Best Picture nomination. Return of the Jedi is the obvious sci-fi/fantasy set -- spaceships, mythical setting specific to a weird creature, the usual-usual. The Right Stuff combines the fascination with space tech -- something that would also benefit Gravity, The Martian, and Inception -- with the period trappings of the 60s.
And then there's Terms of Endearment, the extremely rare contemporary entry that I can't imagine being anything other than a coattails nod, especially since it means ignoring the specificity of The Dresser or the wonder of Krull.
Fanny and Alexander won -- let's see if it should have. After the jump.
