February's gone - let us end our look at the year 1976.
We're going out with a bang, Googie.
We talked to my parents about their memories, my mother sounded off on Best Supporting Actress and Best Supporting Actor, many took an interest in Best Adapted Screenplay (thanks to Nathaniel of The Film Experience for linking, truly unexpected!), and of course, we talked Best Picture.
But those were Oscar's picks. What of my own? The full list of the 61 films eligible have been named already; now it's time to talk my personal favorites of 40 years ago.
These are the Retro Hollmann Awards of 1976.
Best Adapted Screenplay
All the President's Men
William Goldman
from the book by Carl Bernstein / Bob Woodward
2. The Man Who Fell to Earth (Paul Mayersberg); 3. Carrie (Lawrence D. Cohen); 4. Buffalo Bill and the Indians (Robert Altman / Alan Rudolph); 5. The Shootist (Scott Hale / Miles Hood Swarthout)
Of All the President's Men, I said already that "there's a lot of information...But every detail is clear, the suspense is genuine, and each character vividly realized." The Man Who Fell to Earth's gradual meting-out of information, its slide from possibilities to a squander of them, is haunting. Carrie is earnest and completely its own, so you can buy into its crazy. Buffalo Bill and the Indians is a typical Altman: wincingly funny. The Shootist may be cynical about progress, but it doesn't let its hero off scot-free - a complex heart-tugger.
17 more categories, plus the full top ten, after the jump...
The moment you've all been waiting for. Well, the moment you would have been waiting for 40 years ago. Before we see who the Academy honors as the Best Picture of 2016 tonight, let's take a trip back to 1977, and the Best Picture of 1976:
With two nominations here, Network becomes the rare film to get five acting nods (Mrs. Miniver, All About Eve, From Here to Eternity, On the Waterfront, Tom Jones, Bonnie and Clyde are the others). Sylvester Stallone is the first since Charlie Chaplin to be up for both Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay without a co-writer! Giancarlo Giannini is only the third male actor ever nominated for a foreign language performance - funnily enough, the second was fellow nominee Robert De Niro (The Godfather: Part II). And all three were in Italian!
Oh, and of course, Peter Finch becomes the first posthumous acting winner:
Back when I did the 1971 Retrospective, I compared all of that year's nominees to the corresponding Oscar Year - 2014. And I haven't really done that, mostly because I don't find a lot of parallels. But in this category? Honey, this category is always dependable.
If you want a Gallic beauty who surprises even herself with her reaction to a disrupted home life, watch Isabelle Huppert in Elle...or Marie-Christine Barrault in Cousin cousine.
If you want a devoted lover, quiet yet strong, more steel-willed than she seems, who knows what she wants when she knows it, and adores the man who is her other half, watch Ruth Negga in Loving...or Talia Shire in Rocky.
If you want a lady of status that men don't know what to expect from, who is primarily obsessed with crafting a narrative with a specific audience in mind, watch Natalie Portman in Jackie...or Faye Dunaway in Network.
If you want someone whose dreams and fears have way too much influence on her life, yet finds a breakthrough with the help of a new man in her life, watch Emma Stone in La La Land...or Liv Ullmann in Face to Face.
If you want an underestimated force, mocked by people around her, striving to be adored, who absolutely slays when she hits a stage, watch Meryl Streep in Florence Foster Jenkins...or Sissy Spacek in Carrie.
But who will really be this year's Faye Dunaway?:
And who will be this year's...not Faye Dunaway? The nominees, after the jump.
History was made on nomination morning. Once again, a bunch of white men were up for Best Director. But for the first time ever, a woman's touch was finally felt in the category. That was the Italian filmmaker Lina Wertmüller, up for her study of an asshole in fascist Italy, Seven Beauties, which she also wrote. Wertmüller came from the theatre, where she met her future muse Giancarlo Giannini; they not only collaborated on Seven Beauties, but also Swept Away, The Seduction of Mimi, and Love and Anarchy. Her entry into film was be as assistant director on Fellini's 8 1/2.
Wertmüller broke through the boys' club, though it would be another 33 years before a woman actually won the damn thing. But that's not to dismiss the actual winner of the 1976 Oscar:
I mean, have you seen Rocky? It's pretty freeking great.
Spoiler alert: I love Paddy Chayefsky. I love that he was the first screenwriter to win three Academy Awards. I love that he wrote in multiple genres, in every format possible, that he was stylized yet human, serious and hilarious. The Hospital - not a fan, regrettably. But this win was well-earned!
Paddy was up against his fellow Americans and two European films - France's Cousin cousin, and Italy's Seven Beauties. A different time indeed - from 1945-1980, a 35-year period, 38 foreign language films were nominated for Best Original Screenplay! That's at least one a year, and then some. After that, though, it starts to get more scarce - a Life is Beautiful here, a Barbarian Invasions there - until A Separation becomes the most recent foreign language nominee in this category...and that was already five years ago.
What will the future bring? Maybe more like this year's Oscars, where foreign writers are nominated for English-language works, such as The Lobster's Greek filmmakers Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou. But I do hope that, eventually, we can get back to an international lineup.
If we look at the other awards ceremonies that we now call The Precursors, we see that, then as now, this race was over from the start. Oh sure - Marathon Man's Laurence Olivier won the Golden Globe for his role as the Nazi who comes out of seclusion for the sake of diamonds, but they're always a little perverse, aren't they? BAFTA had different qualifying dates for Network and Rocky, and so neither film was nominated at that event until a year later - and even then, the former's Ned Beatty and the latter's Burgess Meredith and Burt Young were left out in the cold.
No, friends, only one nominee in this category was also nominated for the BAFTA Award and Golden Globe, and had already won the National Board of Review and New York Film Critics Circle awards. And that man wound up winning the Oscar:
And as if all that weren't enough, Jason Robards wound up winning the year after, too, for Julia! But we'll get to that when we cover 1977. Until then, a closer look at this year's nominees
It's all-star lineup of Cinematographers for 1976, with three former winners and two previous nominees - and many of them faced off against each other before.
Just the year before, in fact, Haskell Wexler's co-DP'ing of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest faced off against Robert Surtees' solo work on The Hindenburg. Both had won previously, but they both settled for bridesmaid status - John Alcott's work for Barry Lyndon went home with the Oscar. Surtees already had three to his name, and Wexler already had one. Soon to be two:
In 1973, Surtees was once again up for the award, this time for Best Picture Oscar Winner The Sting. His competition? The Sting's only real rival for the Big Prize, The Exorcist, photographed by Mr. Owen Roizman. They lost to Sven Nykvist's Cries and Whispers, which made it the second time they'd both competed and lost - in 1971, Roizman was up for the first time in his career for The French Connection, whileSurtees had a two-for-one special in The Last Picture and Summer of '42. The Oscar went to Oswald Morris for Fiddler on the Roof.
Ernest Laszlo met none of these men on the battlefield when he won for Ship of Fools. And indeed, he didn't meet them the year after, either: his Fantastic Voyage work was nominated in the Color category, while Wexler's winning work for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? won in the Black-and-White category. By the following ceremony, there was no separation, so that the black-and-white In Cold Blood competed with Surtees' work on both Doctor Dolittle and The Graduate, as well as first-time nominee Richard H. Kline for Camelot.
What I'm saying is, some categories tend to have the same names batted around. It's probably why the Class of 2016 is such a breath of fresh air - Rodrigo Prieto is the one previous nominee of the bunch, and his only other nomination was 11 years ago.
The nominees and rankings of 1976, after the jump.
So begins our descent into the madness of 1976...with the best category in almost every Oscar year, Best Supporting Actress.
Rare as it is now, there were times in the past when a supporting actress category was undeniably full of actual supporting actresses, no debate about it. Nowadays, people can't decide what category Viola Davis belongs in (I have my opinion, but I confess it's a borderline case) - or they give the prize to the damn lead of the movie - or have the audacity to say, "But they were only in the minutes of the movie!", as though a supporting role should take up half the runtime. Wasn't always the case. Time was, when you only had to show up for six minutes to make this happen:
Beatrice Straight's Network performance, as the wronged wife of is the shortest win in Academy history. The bulk of it is one scene, where she reacts to husband William Holden leaving her for Faye Dunaway. But one look and there's no arguing that she earned her place on the ballot.
The other nominees this year weren't much longer. Jane Alexander, as someone who could make the connection between the Watergate break-in and All the President's Men, has two scenes and a total of 5 minutes and 40 seconds. Lee Grant gets twelve minutes for the almost three-hour Voyage of the Damned, as one of many Jews bound away from Nazi Germany towards Cuba. Jodie Foster's iconic teenage prostitute in Taxi Driver barely passes the 15-minute mark; Piper Laurie's fanatically religious matriarch is the closest to a co-lead as we get, taking up 20 minutes of Carrie.
Yes, these were true supporting performances, and in such disparate films. Voyage is an all-star disaster movie with a social conscious (and a terrible bore), All the President's Men, Network and Taxi Driver are bleak depictions of America Now, and Carrie is a female-focused horror movie. Not too many of those getting Oscar traction, now are there?
(Personally, too, I think Talia Shire should have been campaigned as Supporting for Rocky, and part of me believes she could have won the category and given the movie its only acting triumph. We'll never know for sure)
Nashville is my favorite movie, bar none. But sometimes there's a difference between your favorite movie and what you consider to be the best movie. Ask me what I consider to be the best movie ever made, and I'll tell you Gone with the Wind. Ask me to name the second best movie ever made, and I'll say Network.
Written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet, Network is a dark satire on the television industry. It's one of the classics, famous for the lines "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore" and "It's a big, fat, big-titted hit!" With each year, it becomes more and more relevant. Take the absurd idea of a reality show based around the actions of political terrorists. The idea does not seem so silly now: even A&E is mostly reality programming now, and there is an increasing number of shows focusing on outcasts, addicts and prisoners. The news has become a farce; what can you say when the most reliable reporting comes from Comedy Central, when the "anchors" of today are loud-mouthed puppets of one political party or another, when Nancy Grace has her own show?
Network is about the end of an era and the beginning of another. "Mad prophet" Howard Beale is a sick man, an anchor of the old school whose ratings are failing, a man who goes off the deep end and rants on air about truths best left ignored. Naturally, instead of anyone taking heed, his madness becomes an entertainment, making his show Number One in the country. But Beale is just one member of an ensemble that includes an old-school news president, a cold-hearted entertainment producer, an urban terrorist organization, and businessmen threatening to take over the studio.
The film was a critical and commercial hit. Looking at it now, its success during awards season was inevitable. The film garnered ten nominations, including Editing (Alan Heim, losing to Rocky), Cinematography (Owen Roizman, losing to Bound for Glory), Supporting Actor (Ned Beatty, losing to Jason Robards in All the President's Men), Actor (William Holden, losing to Peter Finch), Director (Sidney Lumet, losing to John G. Avildsen for Rocky) and Picture (losing to Rocky).
What it did win, though, it fucking earned: Peter Finch beat out co-star Holden for Best Actor, the first actor to win posthumously; he had died two months earlier. Faye Dunaway won her first and only Oscar for Best Actress, beating out Talia Shire, Liv Ullmann, Marie-Christine Barrault, and the great Sissy Spacek in Carrie. Beatrice Straight won for Best Supporting Actress the shortest performance to do so, at five minutes and forty second. This three-category acting victory was the last time such an event occurred, and ties A Streetcar Named Desire for most acting wins for a motion picture. Finally, Paddy Chayefsky won his Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, making it Number Three for America's greatest dramatist.
The idea of a remake is certainly intimidating, but it is not a completely foreign concept. George Clooney planned a live, made-for-TV movie after the release of Good Night, and Good Luck. Well, he talked about wanting to do one, at least, but it never seemed to get past the "now there's an idea" stage. The point is, the idea has come up before, and I think if one respects the original source material, it could be some pretty prescient stuff. Then again, the original already is, so why broke what ain't fixed?
It doesn't matter. Sometimes, it's just fun to fantasize.
THE GREAT AHMED KHAN Who is He: The leader of the Ecumenical Liberation Army, an urban terrorist organization who film their acts of anarchism. They soon become the subject of a reality series called "The Mao Tse-Tung Hour".
Originally played by: Arthur Burghardt ("Transformers", "G.I. Joe")
My Choice: Alexander Siddig (Kingdom of Heaven, The Nativity Story) The role of Khan is a silent one. He must clearly be the man in charge, and act with his eyes. Siddig's eyes have expressed love and deceit, sincerity and sardonic...ity. He's not so well-known that he would be distracting, either.
LAUREEN HOBBS Who is She: A radical who acts as the vessel between Diana and Ahmed Khan. Despite proclaiming herself to be a "bad-ass commie nigger", she is not above making business deals with UBS.
Originally played by: Marlene Warfield (The Great White Hope, Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling)
My Choice: Academy Award/Golden Globe/SAG Award Nominee for Best Supporting Actress and SAG Award Nominee for Best Ensemble (Doubt), Indie Spirit Nominee for Best Supporting Female (Antwone Fisher) Viola Davis (Disturbia, State of Play) Oh, I just love her. I want an actress who I know could do it, has a commanding presence, but whose presence would not take anyone out of the movie. Viola Davis has done three films since her Oscar nomination, but unless you're "in the know", no one is distracted by her brief roles.
LOUISE SCHUMACHER Who is She: Max's wife of twenty-five years. Her big scene comes when she learns of his affair with Diana.
Originally played by: Academy Award Winner for Best Supporting Actress (Network) Beatrice Straight (Poltergeist, Two of a Kind)
My Choice: Joanna Gleason (Crimes and Misdemeanors, Boogie Nights) This Tony-winning actress is one of "those". You swear you remember her from something, but you just can't quite place it. But she's wonderful in everything I have seen her in. She looks like your everyday kind of woman, and she could sell that monologue.
ARTHUR JENSEN Who is He: The CEO of Communications Corporation of America, the company that happens to own UBS. When Beale denounces CCA's merger with a Saudi Arabian conglomerate on air, Jensen stops Beale with a wrath worthy of God.
Originally played by: Academy Award Nominee for Bets Supporting Actor (Network), Golden Globe Nominee for Best Supporting Actor (Hear My Song) Ned Beatty (Nashville, Silver Streak)
My Choice: Michael Cerveris (The Mexican, "Fringe") This role is a one-scene spectacular with a monologue delivered as a sermon. I needed someone with a voice equal to that of a revivalist minister's. Is it any wonder that I chose Cerveris, he who won a Tony for playing John Wilkes Booth in Assassins and was nominated for the revival of Sweeney Todd?
NELSON CHANEY Who is He: God, believe me, I don't remember his exact job. I know he tries to fight the exploitation of Howard Beale, works with Max on the news team, and is only briefly seen before he is booted out of UBS and the film. But his is an important role, one of the first who appear conscious-driven.
Originally played by: Wesley Addy (Tora! Tora! Tora!, The Verdict)
My Choice: Golden Globe Nominee for Best Supporting Actor (Ghost World), Indie Spirit Award Winner for Best Supporting Male (Reservoir Dogs, Ghost World) Steve Buscemi (Fargo, Monster House) A bigger character, a bigger name. While mostly known for his more skeezy roles, Buscemi's a versatile guy. When considering him for Chaney, I thought about The Messenger and Monster House. They're the types of roles he does not usually get, but pack a whallop in their brevity. Hopefully, Buscemi can create a more memorable Chaney than Addy. Seriously, what does he do?
FRANK HACKETT Who is He: The head of UBS, an opportunistic, excitable bastard whose worries are ratings. He appears soulless, firing members of the old guard while approving the exploitative ideas of the new.
Originally played by: Academy Award/Golden Globe Winner for Best Actor [in a Drama] (Tender Mercies), BAFTA Award/Golden Globe Winner for Best Supporting Actor (Apocalypse Now), Indie Spirit Winner for Best Male Lead and Best Director (The Apostle), SAG Award Winner for Best Supporting Actor (A Civil Action) Robert Duvall (True Grit, Crazy Heart)
My Choice: Academy Award/BAFTA Award/Golden Globe/SAG Award Winner for Best Actor [in a Musical/Comedy] (Ray), Indie Spirit Nominee for Best Male Lead (Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story) Jamie Foxx (Collateral, Dreamgirls) I know his post-Oscar career has not been stellar, but I liked Jamie Foxx for a while. He kind of sleep-walked through his similar role in Dreamgirls, but Hackett is not a role you can just roll through. I have no doubt that he could bring the greedy passion required for the character.
DIANA CHRISTENSEN Who is She: The cold head producer of UBS's entertainment programming. She is the one who sees the potential for a series based around Beale's ravings, and she is the one who comes up with "The Mao Tse-Tung Hour". Diana also begins an affair with news president Max Schumacher, while also coercing Hackett into putting news under the entertainment section, leaving her in charge of most network programming.
Originally played by: Academy Award/Golden Globe Winner for Best Actress [in a Drama] (Network), BAFTA Award Nominee for Best Actress (Chinatown, Network) Faye Dunaway (Bonnie and Clyde, Man of Faith)
My Choice: Academy Award/BAFTA Award/SAG Award Winner for Best Supporting Actress (The Aviator), BAFTA Award/Golden Globe Winner for Best Actress [in a Drama] (Elizabeth), Golden Globe/Indie Spirit/Hollmann Award Winner for Best Supporting Actress/Female (I'm Not There), Indie Spirit Winner for Best Ensemble (I'm Not There), SAG Award Winner for Best Ensemble (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King) Cate Blanchett (Notes on a Scandal, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) Because of everyone else in her generation, only she can bring both the hot and cold, the passion, the sturm und drang, the ruthlessness of someone like Diana. And she's not afraid to make a character believably unsympathetic.
MAX SCHUMACHER Who is He: The president of the news division at UBS. Schumacher is of the old guard, a friend of Howard Beale's. He begins an affair with Diana, falling in love with her. At the same time, however, he is morally opposed to UBS's exploitative use of Howard Beale's insanity as a ratings booster. Really the lead of the story.
Originally played by: Academy Award Winner for Best Actor (Stalag 17), BAFTA Award Nominee for Best Actor (Network) and Best Foreign Actor (Picnic) William Holden (Sabrina, Love is a Many-Splendored Thing)
My Choice: Academy Award/BAFTA Award/Golden Globe/SAG Award Nominee for Best Actor (Frost/Nixon), Indie Spirit Nominee for Best Male Lead (Starting Out in the Evening), SAG Award Nominee for Best Ensemble (Good Night, and Good Luck, Frost/Nixon) Frank Langella (The Twelve Chairs, The Box) He really doesn't seem like he's over 70. Langella has a great voice, so one would expect him for Howard, but no. He is at his best, I feel, when he is stoic and calmer, the way Max Schumacher is. And if Diana's going to have an affair with an older man, it's going to be someone sexy. Like Frank Langella.
HOWARD BEALE Who is He: The mad prophet of the airwaves. Given his two weeks notice due to declining ratings, Beale starts going on mad rants about the manipulations of television, the corruption of corporations, the bastardizing of the American dream. His breakdown is the catalyst for the film's events, yet it is also not completely mad: all that he says is devastatingly true, but all the people hear is entertainment.
Originally played by: Academy Award/BAFTA Award/Golden Globe Winner for Best Actor [in a Drama] (Network), BAFTA Award Winner for Best Actor (Sunday Bloody Sunday) and Best British Actor (A Town Like Alice, The Trials of Oscar Wilde, No Love for Johnnie) Peter Finch (Far from the Madding Crowd, The Nun's Story)
My Choice: Academy Award/Golden Globe Winner and BAFTA Award Nominee for Best Supporting Actor (Adaptation.), Indie Spirit Nominee for Best Male Lead (Lone Star), SAG Award Winner for Best Ensemble (American Beauty) Chris Cooper (Seabiscuit, Where the Wild Things Are) While known for his quieter roles in films like Capote, October Sky and Married Life, Cooper proved in Adaptation that he brings a lot more to the table. His voice certainly helps with the air of divinity surrounding his speeches. He's younger than Langella, but not so much so that their friendship is unbelievable. The role would eb different for him, but he has the power to pull it off.
THE NARRATOR What is It: A dry, sardonic voice that takes note of the events with statistics and impassivity.
Originally played by: Lee Richardson (Prizzi's Honor, The Exorcist III)
My Choice:
Bob Schieffer Schieffer was a year-long replacement for Dan Rather on The CBS Evening News. His real claim-to-fame, however, is as the host of Face the Nation on CBS. The original team wanted Walter Cronkite to play Howard Beale; Cronkite turned it down. But the idea of using an authoritative voice, a news anchor, as one of the players in this drama is intriguing. And what better role for a news reporter than the narrator? I rarely watched Dan Rather, but I always tried to catch Schieffer, for I loved his voice, the Southern richness of it. Truth be told, though, if Walter Cronkite were still alive, this would be his role.
I tried my best. Was it good enough? Can you think of more suitable actors? Or is the whole idea just bullshit? Sound off in the comments!
Casting Coup Month begins tomorrow! The Academy Award Winners up for recasting this week are:
The Little Mermaid (1989) Best Original Song, "Under the Sea" Best Original Score, Alan Menken
Death on the Nile (1978) Best Costume Design, Anthony Powell
Network (1976) Best Actor, Peter Finch Best Actress, Faye Dunaway Best Supporting Actress, Beatrice Straight Best Original Screenplay, Paddy Chayefsky
Cabaret (1972) Best Director, Bob Fosse Best Actress, Liza Minnelli Best Supporting Actor, Joel Grey Best Cinematography, Geoffrey Unsworth Best Editing, David Bretherton Best Art Direction, Rolf Zehetbauer/Hans Jurgen Kiebach/Herbert Strabel Best Music, Original Song Score and/or Adaptation, Ralph Burns Best Sound, Robert Knudson/David Hildyard
Goldfinger (1964) Best Effects - Sound Effects, Norman Wanstall
Tune in tomorrow as we go "under the sea" -- wink. Nudge.
