The 1970 Retro Hollmann Award Nominees

After the jump, my nominees for the best of 50 years ago. Refer to my Top Ten for further favorites...

Top Ten of 1970

As I mentioned Friday while discussing the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture, 1970 presented an abundance of great films - even the not-so-good movies are great entertainments! So how does one make a Top Ten? After narrowing the 74 films screened down to 18 based on feeling, I had to consider not only what I would gladly watch again, but what I would have people prioritize. "Oh, you have to see [x]!"

So, due apologies to Alex in Wonderland, The Aristocats, The Boys in the Band, Cherry, Harry and Raquel!, Girly, The Out-of-Towners, Patton and The Traveling Executioner, but these are my Top Ten Films of 1970, in alphabetical order:

1970, Day Twelve: Best Picture of the Year

This has been one of the more interesting retrospectives for me. It's the first time in a while that I've disagreed with all but one of Oscar's choices (though it was close for some of them!). I've liked more movies than I've disliked, many of them equally, so that making a Top Ten and deciding a winner here have been equally frustrating tasks. I'm sure it was the same for the Academy 50 years ago; only the National Board of Review agreed with their pick:

Unless...I agree, too? Oh, ho-ho, read on, my friends...

1970, Day Eight: Adapted Screenplay

A film whose creators insisted was mostly improvised took the award for writing, something even credited scribe Ring Lardner, Jr., was surprised by:

The winner is the only one based on a work I've never been exposed to. The original MASH is a novel credited to Richard Hooker, the joint pen name of former military surgeon Dr. H. Richard Hormberger and journalist w.C. Heinz. The 1968 best-seller was followed by a series of sequels and inspired a stage play, a television series, and, of course, the movie. But I've never read it! I've read the play andf watched the show, but those are my only other MASH frames of reference.

The other nominees? I know them. I own copies of both Airport and Women in Love and read the original stage versions of I Never Sang for My Father and Lovers and Other Strangers in high school. Did the movies honor the source material? Who cares, it's cinema, they need to do their oWn thing. Did they accomplish that? Let's see!

1970, Day Seven: Director

Last week, we discussed both supporting acting categories, all three music categories, plus a grab bag of nominees honored for other disciplines. Today, we look at the nominees for Best Director.

Of the four first-timers, three weren't just helming Best Picture nominees: they made the biggest hits of the year. Only Airport outgrossed MASH and Patton; Love Story topped them all.

The other first-timer was Ken Russell, director of the D.H. Lawrence adaptation Women in Love, about two sisters whose lives become entwined with a pair of best friends - one a teacher, one heir to the mining company their town runs on - and the various thrills, sexual and otherwise, that come about because of it. Russell would go on to make several films that showcased, as women in Love star Glenda Jackson put it, sexual neuroticism, often through biographies of composers like Tchaikovsky (The Music Lovers) or Liszt (Lisztomania). He also directed one of my all-time favorites, The Devils.

The fifth nominee was Federico Fellini, up for the third time for Fellini Satyricon, an extremely sweaty adaptation of the ancient work by Petronius. The film follows a gay youth's travels through society as he searches for his young lover: he goes to bath houses, experimental theatre, bacchanals, even faces off against a minotaur. A sweaty, erotic, very gay, dreamlike film, the nomination must have come as a surprise for...well, many, especially considering it's the film's only nomination!

The eventual winner was Franklin J. Schaffner, director of such films as The Best Man and Planet of the Apes, honored for his work on the #4 film of the year, Patton:

A closer look:

1970, Day Three: Supporting Actress

Of the five nominees for Best Supporting Actress, four came from Best Picture nominees. The one exception is Lee Grant, nominated for The Landlord, the film's only representative at the Academy Awards. 

The directorial debut from In the Heat of the Night's Oscar-winning editor Hal Ashby, The Landlord is a comedy about a wealthy white boy who buys an apartment building in the predominately black NYC neighborhood of Park Slope with the intention to gut and renovate it, but finds his efforts thwarted by the tenants. Perhaps a wee long, it's still a funny, thoughtful, impactful film. 

Grant was lucky, as any of the film's female ensemble could've been nominated: Pearl Bailey as the shotgun-toting ambassador of the building's residents, Diana Sands as the beautiful downstairs neighbor, Marki Bey as the mixed race dancer who starts to date the landlord, Susan Anspach as the landlord's vaguely liberal sister. Not entirely surprising that the film only garnered one nomination - due to the Academy's relative conservatism, not due to the quality of the film; after all, it took them another 13 years to honor the cinematographer Gordon willis, whose work on The Landlord is...so...good.

The rest, as I say, came from Best Picture-nominated films. Let's talk about all of them:

In the Months Ahead...

Powering down in September to focus on back-to-back retrospectives.

In November, we'll look at the films of 1970, featuring these Best Picture nominees:

But first, in October, it's the cinema of August 1, 1931-July 31, 1932 - the Fifth Academy Awards - featuring these Best Picture nominees:

See y'all in October!

You May Also Enjoy:

ZergNet

Like us on Facebook