Oscar '85: Best Picture

The Best Picture nominees of 1985:

Oscar '85: Steven Spielberg, Sydney Pollack, and Best Director

The nominees for Best Director this year do not include Steven Spielberg for The Color Purple. It's a significant point, for two reasons. Number one: The Color Purple led with eleven nominations, and while Picture and Director are rarely a five-for-five deal (even these days with the expanded lineup in the former, lone directors such as Thomas Vinterberg still pop up), one would think that the most-nominated film of the year would have the director who brought it all together lauded. Number two: not only was he nominated for the Directors Guild Award - against Huston, Pollack, Weir, and Cocoon's Ron Howard - he won the damn thing. In the 38 years of the DGA Awards, Spielberg was the first to win without even being nominated for the Oscar, a "feat" that's only been accomplished twice more: Howard for Apollo 13 in 1995 and Ben Affleck for Argo in 2012. Frankly, I think the Academy's directors branch got it right: I like The Color Purple, but I think some of Spielberg's choices are to its detriment. But even if he had been nominated at the Oscars, could he have forestalled the inevitable?:

Probably not. A sweep is a sweep is a sweep. What a tough choice to make, though! Look at the contenders:

Day Four: Best Director, 1969

Fifty years ago, when Best Picture was still only five-wide, it was common to see a marked difference between that category and the Best Director lineup - 1969, for instance, is only three-for-five. While it's rarer nowadays, it occasionally happens - just this past year, Pawel Pawlikowski was nominated for Cold War, which did not get a Best Picture citation. Rarer still than the Lone Director Nominee is the Best Director Orphan, in which the nominated helmer is the sole representative of their film. This was more common in the early days of the Oscars, but has since, become the kind of phenomenon trivia buffs love to bring up - David Lynch has been the Director Orphan twice (Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr.), Martin Scorsese once....

But I think only Arthur Penn can boast of not just being a Best Director Orphan, but of being the only person nominated for a film based on a song. Alice's Restaurant is based on the Arlo Guthrie song-story of the same name, and if you've ever listened to the radio on Thanksgiving Day, chances are you've heard it. I believe one station - can't remember if it was my own South Florida or another or many - even played the song on repeat, non-stop, until they hit a particular number in their pledge drive. Annually.

So yes, that's an Oscar-nominated story! Did Penn do it justice? A look at his work and his fellow nominees, after the jump...

It Might Be You: Best Picture, 1982

We make a big deal of "precursors" in today's awards landscape, with a full nine awards ceremonies to go before we get to the Oscars: the BAFTAs, the Golden Globes, LAFCA, NYFCC, National Board of Review, National Society of Film Critics (NSFC), Critics' Choice Awards, SAG Awards, PGA Awards....and that's just if you're following Best Picture! To try to predict how this year's Oscars may turn out, those of us obsessed with awards look to these nine bodies to help us see which way the wind is blowing. In a year like 2017, that's proving especially difficult.

Here, let's look at the nine films currently nominated for Best Picture, and see which ones have already won a Best Film prize:

Call Me By Your Name: LAFCA

Darkest Hour 

Dunkirk

Get Out

Lady Bird: Golden Globes (Musical/Comedy), NSFC, NYFCC

Phantom Thread

The Post: National Board of Review

The Shape of Water: Critics' Choice Awards, PGA Awards

Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri: BAFTA Awards, Golden Globes (Drama), SAG Awards (Ensemble, which many consider the Best Picture equivalent at SAG)

It's a much bigger spread than usual. Compare that to 1982. Back then, there were only six awards besides the Oscars competing for attention - no PGA, no SAG, no Critics' Choice - but they all still played before the Academy Awards. No one dare compete outright with The Big One. Here's how things went then:

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: Golden Globes (Drama), LAFCA

Gandhi: BAFTA Awards, Golden Globes (Foreign Film - they used to put the Brits in this category and it's bonkers), National Board of Review, NYFCC

Missing

Tootsie: Golden Globes (Musical/Comedy), NSFC

The Verdict

It also looks fairly spread out, but Gandhi has the edge, having won over the British Film Academy, the Hollywood Foreign Press, the National Board of Review, and the New York Critics. And of course, what wound up happening Oscar Night?

A different time, but now, as then, people like to make a statement with their vote. Obviously you have to like the film, but as Attenborough and Kingsley averred in their speeches, a vote for Gandhi is a vote for world peace. What is the equivalent in 2017? What film not only represents the best in filmmaking, but the best of intentions? And will that combination result in an Oscar win?

We'll find out March 4th. Until then, let's look at the Best Picture lineup of 1982. After the jump...

The Unexpected: Director, 1982

"I was certain that not only would E.T. win, but that it should win. It was inventive, powerful, wonderful. I make more mundane movies." Words famously uttered by the very honest Richard Attenborough, reacting not just to Gandhi's win for Best Picture, but to his own triumph in being named Best Director.

I have a great many friends who would agree with Attenborough's self-assessment, but we'll talk more about that later. I do wonder, though, what the late Attenborough would think of this year's Best Director lineup. Who among them is putting out inventive, powerful, wonderful work - and who is more mundane? Who are the Attenborough and Spielberg and etc. of 2017?

I think the Attenborough of 2017 is Dunkirk's Christopher Nolan - and no, it's not because of any mundanity. It's because we have a fixture of the cinema being given his due by playing to his strengths for a passion project 20 years in the making. For Attenborough, his British sensibilities and historical epics experience employed for a biopic of Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi. For Nolan, his unorthodox approaches to blockbuster storytelling enhance what could have been an otherwise straightforward telling of the evacuation of Dunkirk.

Who is the Sidney Lumet of 2017, the one making films for grownups? I should think that's obvious: Paul Thomas Anderson, whose Phantom Thread manages to be much larger than its intimate focus on a complex relationship would suggest. Inversely, Lumet takes a big underdog-vs.-Archdiocese courtroom thriller like The Verdict and never loses sight of the fact that, at heart, it's an intimate recovery drama. These are men who can focus on the macro and the micro in a single shot.

Whither the Wolfgang Petersen, rarely misstepping despite the unique challenges of his film, with an ear for surprising humor and a real sense of claustrophobia? Specific, yes! And also - that man is Jordan Peele, who makes social satire within a horror framework look as easy as a sprawling epic set within a submarine. You laugh, but you also can't escape a sense of dread, thanks chiefly to the sound design: Get Out with its spoon hitting the teacup, Das Boot with its propellers churning overhead.

How about a Sydney Pollack, so good with actors, maybe not offering the most visual pizzazz, but showing that directing is more than flash and dollies and whatnot, that performances and chemistry and a consistent handle on a tricky tone are just as important. Duh, Greta Gerwig; Lady Bird, like Tootsie, is hilarious and emotional and realistic, with a looseness belying its sturdy structure.

Which means the Spielberg equivalent is Guillermo del Toro, who also made a fantasy drama unapologetic in its sweetness, one that not only wears its cinematic influences on its sleeve, but recreates indelible moments from those films to further its sense of wonder.

Whew! The nominees of 1982, after the jump....