Our month-long celebration of the year 1983 nears its end. Beginning Wednesday, I'll begin naming my honorees in 18 categories for the Retro Hollmann Awards. But before I do - let's end the actual Oscar coverage the way all Oscars end, with Best Picture of the Year.
And what do all five nominees have in common? They are about people who need each other. Friends, lovers, business partners, researchers, family. These are stories of people who cannot survive without one another, for a whom a life without their community is a hollow existence. It's a sentiment at the core of The Big Chill - Glenn Close's Sarah believes she was at her best when she was with this formerly tight-knit group of college friends, and when one member of their group objects to the idea, Kevin Kline's wittily and sincerely observes, "How much love, sex, fun and friendship can a person take?" (It also became the movie's tagline)
Similarly is The Right Stuff about a family created out of circumstance. Only seven men are chosen to be the first Americans in space - they are each other's navigators, engineers, safety officers, communications liaisons. They depend on each other to make it back home, and they aren't home, their wives are keeping each other company.
The Dresser also has co-workers who depend on each other, in this case a little too much. Sir, the noted Shakespearean actor, not only depends on Norman to get him dressed and ready for each performance, he also depends on him to help maintain his sanity. Norman, himself dependent on the bottle, needs Sir just as much - he needs someone who needs him, he's dependent on dependency.
Just as wrapped around each other are Aurora and Emma, the mother-daughter duo at the heart of Terms of Endearment. Even though Aurora pursues her own romance, even though Emma moves out of state twice-over, even though they don't seem to get along for a good half of the movie -- they need each other. They constantly talk on the phone, they know everything about each other (even sex things!), one is the anchor for the other.
And then we come to the couple that saves each other. Mac Sledge is a former country-western star, a drunk. Rosa Lee is a widow, a single mother, making it on her own in a ramshackle motel/gas station. But when they meet, she gets him sober, he builds a life for her and her son, and they take care of the surrounding land to allow for a farm. And Rosa Lee thanks God for these Tender Mercies.
It's a strong lineup. Terms of Endearment came out on top, but maybe I have a thing or two to say about that. Maybe I'll say it after the jump.
I found the Best Actress nominees of 1983 difficult to write about, and I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's because what they all have in common is that they all did so well, so subtly well, so realistically. No matter the genre, no matter the circumstances of the character or the plot, all five performances were of people who exist in the real world: your mother, your sister, your neighbor, your co-worker. That's the story of 1983. Stories about people.
Three of those people are mothers - indeed, none of them seem to have a career outside of it! Jane Alexander is a mom struggling to survive in the aftermath of a nuclear war. Shirley MacLaine is a mother who cannot fathom her daughter's decisions, and isn't shy about saying so. Debra Winger is her daughter, but also a mother of three making the best of things in a marriage that has more than its share of ups and downs.
The other two are young women you underestimate at your own peril. Meryl Streep may seem like a mess - she's consistently tardy, she flashes co-workers, she chews gum on the job -- but she's the lone voice speaking out against what could be corporate corruption. And Julie Walters is under-educated, with a coarse manner of speaking, but when she sets out to better herself, she reveals an unpolished wisdom.
Shirley MacLaine won the Oscar -- which only seems fair. After all, she had been nominated in this category four previous times, with a fifth nod in Best Documentary for The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir. Meryl Streep was just coming off her second win for Sophie's Choice the year before, where she had defeated An Officer and a Gentleman's Debra Winger. Jane Alexander had been nominated thrice previously - she, too, had lost to Streep, when both were up for Kramer vs. Kramer. And Julie Walters was making her film debut.
I'm sick, I'm getting to this late, it's the nominees for Best Adapted Screenplay.
I will say this: notice something interesting about this year? Four of the five nominees are based on stage plays, three of which are British productions. I feel like the last time a play inspired a screenplay nominee, it was The King's Speech - and since that was unproduced and subsequently rewritten for the screen, it won Original Screenplay.
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've always found it a challenge to write about this category - it's to be heard, to be experienced. Though I suppose there is something to be said about this category having its favorites, as many do. It's how John Williams can get a third nomination for one series - of course, he would return for a fourth (The Force Awakens), and let us not forget that Jedi was his 19th overall nod....outof50.
Williams had wonOscars already -- but so, too, had fellow nominee Leonard Rosenman, though both of his were in the Adapted Score category (Barry Lyndon, Bound for Glory). Another two-time Oscar winner was Michael Gore, who won this category, and Original Song, just three years previously for Fame. Poor Jerry Goldsmith - the Under Fire composer only had one Oscar to console himself with!
The odd man out, clearly, was Bill Conti, who in years past had only been nominated for Best Original Song. The first time for Rocky, and yes, it is incredible that it was only nominated in Song, not Score. The second time was for the Bond flick For Your Eyes Only. The Right Stuff marked his third nomination, first Original Score nomination...and final time in the running for Oscar.
Fortunately for him, he won. Should he have? Let's investigate....
It's rare enough that a single film takes up two nominations in an acting category -- but in three of them?! Thus was the case in 1983, and while The Dresser is to thank for that occurring in Best Actor, Terms of Endearment had that on lock - two nominations in Best Actress, and another two here in Best Supporting Actor.
Jack Nicholson, who won the Oscar, plays former astronaut Garrett, who we glimpse throughout before he finally starts courting Shirley MacLaine's Aurora about halfway through (maybe more?) into the film. John Lithgow, nominated the previous year for playing a transsexual in The World According to Garp, here plays a lovestruck banker in a handful of scenes. One is coarse, the other more refined; one is single, the other married; both are lovers of the leads, but there's little hope for commitment there.
Another previous nominee: Charles Durning, here playing a Nazi officer in To Be Or Not To Be. The Mel Brooks comedy actually makes some poignant observations about Nazi-occupied Poland - but one of the film's great strengths is Durning's comic doofus, a man reveling in his authority, whose indulgences are a symbol of the excesses of the party. He's also quite funny.
But there was also new blood this year! Sam Shepard was an early front-runner thanks to his quiet performance in The Right Stuff, the epic about the beginning of the American space program. Shepard plays Chuck Yeager, the first to break the sound barrier. Much of his narrative encompasses the first 30 minutes of the more than 3-hour film, though we do check back in on him from time to time.
Also among the newbies: Rip Torn, nominated for Cross Creek, in which he plays a resident of the Florida swamps, a neighbor of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings...who would base the character of the father in The Yearling on him. He has a handful of children and a wife who used to entertain in town, before he wed her and took her to the swamp. Hard living, that is.
Nicholson won, as I said, and for many it was a no-brainer. But is it a no-brainer for me? Check 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.
The Cold War entered its 38th year (unofficially, though, for how does one keep track of an undeclared event?). Ronald Reagan was still in his first term, and while 1982 had witnessed an unemployment high unseen since the Depression, it began it's decline this year -- slowly, but surely. People were pensive about nuclear war, nuclear waste, nuclear meltdowns, with apocalyptic visions of the future taking over the airwaves. M*A*S*H ended, The Thorn Birds was our new obsession, and the end of the year brought the greatest gift we could ever receive: the music video for Thriller.
It's been too quiet for too long (not counting my And Then There Were None casting which you should take a peek at). Fret not -- we're back in business starting in May!
Throughout the month, we're traveling back to the 80s for a retrospective of the 1983 Oscars! Followed, of course, by own picks of the year, at the Retro Hollmann Awards.
The fun begins May 2nd.
Casting Coup Tuesdays will also return that month, as I re-cast all five 1983 Best Picture nominees! Join me, won't you?
