As a critic I have three separate observations about the Academy
Awards during the 1970s, considered by aficionados and observers as one of the
greatest decades for film in history.
The first is that, by and large, I think the Oscars has one of the
best track records when it comes to nominations and actual wins for major
awards then it does in most decades collectively. There were blips to be sure
- the nominations for films such as Airport
and The Towering Inferno for Best Picture are the most obvious
example – but overall the Oscars did a superb job in a decade filled with masterpieces. One can
quibble about who actually ended up winning, but this decade is the rare one
where there were very few poor choices in any of the major categories and I
doubt that would brook much debate.
The second is surprising given what was being made during the decade
but perhaps not given the belief in nostalgia: during that period the reaction
of many critics and people in the industry was that the quality of movies in
general and the nominated movies was subpar compared to the past. Assessing the
quality of movies in 1975 Variety, still the bible of show business said: “It
wasn’t a bad year for movies, it was a terrible year.” We are now about to
celebrate half a century since the Oscars nominated for Best Picture: Barry
Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Nashville,
each directed by one of the greatest directors in history and each
considered among the greatest films of all time. Among the other major films
that year up for consideration were Hal Ashby’s Shampoo which earned an
Academy Award for Lee Grant for Best Supporting Actress and the rock opera Tommy.
This was hardly a year of mediocrity.
And this leads to the third fact about the Oscars during the 1970s.
Perhaps at no time in the Academy’s near century of existence have the majority
of the nominated actors in particular thought so little of the Oscars. In the
past they had considered them an inconvenience and of little relevance; but in
the 1970s by and large the performers thought being nominated was something of
a degradation.
During this decade as fans are aware, two veteran actors George C.
Scott and Marlon Brando declined to accept their Academy Awards for Best
Actor. Scott made it clear that in the lead up to the awards that if the Oscars
honored him for Patton not only wouldn’t he be there to receive it, they
could essentially keep it. Marlon Brando, more infamously, sent a proxy named
Sacheen Littlefeather to give a speech on his behalf in which he would state
his views on the mistreatment of what were then known as Native Americans and
that he refused his Oscar in protest. (In keeping with the tradition of Hollywood
both Scott and Brando were nominated for Best Actor the year after they
declined it: Scott for Paddy Chayefsky’s black comedy The Hospital and
Brando for Last Tango in Paris.)
Yet these two veterans were only the most obvious example of
performers who increasingly seemed to think the Oscars were barely worth their
time. Al Pacino was nominated five times during the 1970s for some of his most
iconic roles and didn’t show up on Oscar night for any of them. Robert DeNiro
wasn’t present when he was awarded his first Oscar for The Godfather Part II
and didn’t officially attend a ceremony until he was nominated for Raging
Bull. When he was nominated for Best Actor for his work in Lenny (the
same year DeNiro received his Oscar) not only did Hoffman say he wouldn’t
attend, he was very vocal on the fact that he considered the Academy Awards ‘an
obscene evening.” And not only did Woody
Allen not show up to accept any of his Academy Awards for Annie Hall (the
start of what would be a tradition lasting a quarter of a century) he made it
very clear in the aftermath of his wins that he didn’t think the Oscars meant
that much to him or in general.
Perhaps that is one of the reasons why, despite the fact that
attendance among British actors and actresses was no better than it had been in
the previous decade, this was not commented on as excessively as it had been in
the 1960s by Hollywood critics. Given how ungrateful so many of the current
American actors were acting there was something to be said for politely
declining to show up year after year. Although in one critical case, Hollywood
really wished one particular British winner had decided to stay in England.
I should mention that many of the great British actors of the previous
decade and before were still getting nominated and still not showing up:
Laurence Olivier was nominated for Sleuth and Marathon Man and
bypassed both ceremonies and Alec Guiness stayed home for his nominations for
his most famous role as Obi-Wan Kenobi for Star Wars. (Guiness
notoriously hated his work there.) However both men had mellowed enough to show
up to accept Lifetime Achievement Awards in 1978 and 1979, respectively.
Olivier gave a speech that has gone down in Oscars history for sounding
impressive but ultimately signifying nothing while Guiness simply said: “I’m
getting out of here when the getting’s good,” and left the stage. And in a way
Albert Finney’s simple decline to attend for his nomination for playing Poirot
in Murder on the Orient Express in 1974 seemed far less of an offense
than the attitude nominees like Hoffman showed that year. (To be fair to
Hoffman, he mellowed and has been present for all of subsequent nominations.)
And there were starting to be signs of the British character. When he
was nominated for Best Actor for his incredible work in Sleuth Olivier,
knowing that Brando was likely to win declined with humor: “My face will not
look better with egg on it.” Michael Caine, who was also nominated for Sleuth
that year, did show up and had some choice words to say about how little
class Brando had shown when he won. “If a man makes $2 million for a movie, he
might want to give some of that to the Indians instead,” he pointed out
shrewdly.
Perhaps the strangest contradiction during that decade was held by one
of the most awarded performers. In Neil Simon’s California Suite (which
I will be discussing below) Neil Simon has an English Actress say: “Glenda
Jackson never shows up and she’s nominated every goddamn year.” It was very
close to the truth: Jackson received four Oscar nominations for Best Actress
between 1970 and 1975 and two Academy Awards for two very different roles:
Gudrun Brangwyn in Ken Russell’s controversial Women in Love and Vickie
in Melvin Frank’s Touch Of Class.
Few actresses were busier during the 1970s than Jackson who in 1971
alone had roles in Russell’s The Music Lovers and The Boy Friend, John Schlesinger’s groundbreaking Sunday
Bloody Sunday (a British film that deal with a love triangle involving a
bisexual man), the title role in British TV’s Elizabeth R (she received
an Emmy for that) and then played Elizabeth I again in Mary Queen of
Scots which earned five Oscar nominations including Vanessa Redgrave in the
title role. (Redgrave was pretty busy herself during that period as we’ll see.)
She received her Oscar nomination for Sunday Bloody Sunday that year and
later received a fourth in 1975 for the title role in Hedda. And she
never showed up for any of them. You got a since with Jackson that she had no
time for the foolishness of awards: when she showed up to present the Best
Actor in the 1975 ceremony, she said with no smile at all: “Thank you, thank
you twice in fact, now let’s move on.”
Jackson never placed much value
on celebrity or fame in America but England loved her unconditionally. She
would eventually be named commander of the British empire, prominently became
an opponent of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party and eventually ran
for Parliament. She would be a Labour Party activist but may have been too far
left for England, which meant she probably would fit in with Hollywood around
that time, particularly considering the political nature of so many of the
actresses.
This was clear of Redgrave in particular who was becoming known as one
of the more outspoken actresses of her time. When she chose not to attend the
Oscars after being nominated in 1972 Hollywood was relieved but not that much,
mainly because Jane Fonda had also been nominated for Best Actress for Klute
and by comparison to anyone in Hollywood or England at the time, Redgrave
would have Queen Victoria. When Fonda did win that year she was, for once,
modest: “There’s a lot to be said right now, but that is for another
time.” One could almost hear the
collective sigh of relief in the theater in studios across the nation.
Julie Christie was among the more active performers during the 1970s,
known mostly for the films she made with Warren Beatty, her lover at the time.
Christie was nominated for her work in the classic Robert Altman film McCabe
& Mrs. Miller – the only nomination the film received and oddly enough
the only nomination Christie herself received during the 1970s, despite having
the lead female role in such classic movies as Don’t Look Now, Shampoo (for
which she received a Golden Globe nomination) and Heaven Can Wait. After
that she slowed her acting pace considerably and didn’t work more frequently
until the 1990s.
It should also be mentioned that, with the notable exception of
Jackson, the majority of the British actors and actresses who were nominated
and winning Oscars during the 1970s were primarily doing so for American
movies. John Mills would win Best Supporting Actor for David Lean’s Ryan’s
Daughter but the film was a critical and box office disaster for Lean and
did much to scorch his accomplishments in Hollywood to that point. Ken Russell
was nominated that year for Best Director for Women In Love but it was the only nomination he would ever
receive in that category; by and large the movies he made were too
controversial to have crossover appeal (and in truth, had difficulty finding
acceptance even in Britain at the time) John Schlesinger would be the filmmaker
who had the most acceptance from the Oscars during the 1970s; Sunday Bloody
Sunday and his adaptations of Nathaniel West’s Day of The Locust and
Marathon Man would all receive Oscar nominations for their acting and
Schlesinger would be nominated for Best Director for Sunday. But by and
large this was an outstanding decade for American directors and the nominations
throughout the 1970s demonstrated that. (It was also a great decade for
international films, but that’s another story.)
The three major British winners all occurred in consecutive years,
starting in 1976. The most well-known is Peter Finch and its worth describing
his career prior to that point
Finch had been acting in British movies since he was 19 and for the
majority of his career had very little crossover appeal to the American
audiences. He’d work with Michael Powell in the late stages of that director’s
career, had appeared in The Nun’s Story alongside Audrey Hepburn, had
been noticed in such films as The Pumpkin Eater and Flight of the
Phoenix which received Oscar nominations. He was cast as William Boldwood
in John Schlesinger’s Far from the Madding Crowd and five years was cast
in the role of Daniel Hersh, a lonely male doctor having an affair with a young
make artist who was also involved with a female office worker.
Finch may have been the first actor to be nominated for an Oscar for
playing a gay man, which in 1971 was incredibly controversial and still would
be twenty years later. He would win the BAFTA prize for Best Actor and the
National Society Film Critics Award for that same portrayal and was in a dead
heat with Gene Hackman for his work in The French Connection until
Hackman went ahead after multiple ballots. Many were impressed by Finch’s work
in the film and he had been a major contender for the Oscar only to lose to
Hackman. Few doubted the logic behind it: The French Connection was also
a classic and won Best Picture and Director for William Friedkin.
Finch then did much to torch his career by appearing in the fiasco
musical remake of Lost Horizon, one of the biggest critical and box
office bombs of the 1970s. Then he was cast to play Howard Beale in Network,
a film that even among a decade of classics ranks as one of the greatest
films ever made. (It ranks #235 on imdb.com.).
During the Oscar race of 1976, Network was the dominant
contender among four master classes: All The President’s Men, Rocky and Taxi
Driver. With an all star cast the studio aimed to accomplish something
unparalleled in Academy Award history: to win all four acting awards. In large
part the studio’s argued that Finch should allow his name to submitted as
Supporting Actor and let William Holden compete for Best Actor on his own.
There was some merit to this: during the awards season Holden and
Finch had been competing against each other among the critics and Best Actor
was going to Robert DeNiro for Taxi Drive because they kept splitting
the vote. (I’ll acknowledge DeNiro’s work might have played a slight factor
in that.) Finch adamantly refused: “Howard Beale was not a supporting role!” he
demanded.
That’s as may be but in all honesty compared to not only the other
performances in Network – particularly Holden but also Faye Dunaway and
Robert Duvall – and the other nominees such as DeNiro and Stallone – Howard Beale is far less of a developed
character than any of the others. He is seen almost exclusively in front of the
camera delivering (admittedly brilliant and intense) monologues and is given
little character development outside of it. Beale is clearly the impetus of the
entire film but much of the brilliance of Network is how everyone at UBS
talks about his actions rather than anything he actually does. For all
the intensity and extraordinary ability Finch gives him, his character has very
little dimension and seems almost passive when he’s off camera. That is one of
the points of Chayefsky’s extraordinary screenplay but its also a good argument
that Beale was a supporting performance.
In the intensity of the publicity tour for the film, Finch would
suffer a massive heart attack and die on January 14th 1977. William
Holden would later joke “If that son-of-a-bitch hadn’t died, I might have won
my second Oscar.” There is an argument for that fact: Holden was the comeback
story for his work as Max, the producer of the news who finds his career and
personal life run roughshod because of how UBS tosses him aside for Beale. And
his character is the only one in the film with a moral conscience about what
the network is doing to his friend and who eventually realizes the affair he is
having with Faye Dunaway is more about him and that she is incapable of
emotion.
Whether or not that would make a difference will never be known: Finch
would win the Golden Globe posthumously, become the first Actor nominated
posthumously since James Dean for Giant
and on Oscar night his award would be accepted by Finch’s widow. (This was
against the show’s wishes: they had insisted Chayefsky accept if Finch had won
and he had basically invited his widow on stage in the aftermath.)
Network came close to its acting sweep, with Faye Dunaway
winning Best Actress and Beatrice Straight winning for her brief – but still
memorable – as Supporting Actress. The Oscars that year were essentially
divided between Network, All The President’s Men and Rocky, with
the latter winning Best Picture and Director. Momentum had been solidly on the
classic film for a while; it had already won Best Picture from the Golden
Globes and Best Director for John G. Avildsen.)
1977 was a wellspring for Hollywood with the release of Star Wars but
no one could see the future as to what that would mean. It was the fiftieth
anniversary of the Oscars and everyone was hoping for a show to remember. It
was – though not for the reason the Academy had hoped.
One of the most nominated films of the night was Julia, a film
based on a novel written by one of the most well-known and controversial
playwrights of all time: Lillian Hellman. The year before she had addressed the
Oscars and argued that she remembered a time: “when the bosses of the studios
stood up to the government with all the force of a bowl of mashed
potatoes.” Julia was based on Pentimento,
a non-fiction novel which told of the relationship between Hellman and a
childhood friend she knew from during World War II known only as Julia.
One of the coups for director Fred Zinneman had been the casting of
two of the most outspoken actresses at the time in the two major female roles:
Jane Fonda as Hellman and Vanessa Redgrave in the title role. The film received
a total of eleven nominations, tying it with Star Wars and The
Turning Point for the most nominations of any movie.
Even before that night Redgrave was already under opposition. That
same year she had produced and starred in The Palestinian, a film which
followed the activities of the PLO in Lebanon. Multiple Jewish groups
criticized it for its perceived anti-Israel slant. When Redgrave was nominated
members of the JDL burned effigies of Redgrave and picketed the Oscar to
protest against what they saw was her support for the PLO.
As is the tradition of the Oscars Best Supporting Actress was one of
the first awards given on Oscar Night 1978. She chose to take that moment to
challenge the structure, thanking Hollywood for:
“having refused to be intimidated by the threat of a small bunch of
Zionist hoodlums – whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over
the world and to the great and heroic record of struggle against fascism and
oppression.”
There were gasps and boos while she spoke. Later that night, in
presenting the Oscar for screenplay Paddy Chayefsky himself called her out to
tremendous applause. In the interviews in the aftermath almost to a man
everyone present excoriated Redgrave for using her platform in that way, some
using more derogatory language then other. Alan King not there actually said:
“It’s a good thing I wasn’t there. I would have gone right for the jugular.”
Redgrave received enormous backlash from the press and Hollywood and as a
result for years and even decades to come her career would suffer immensely
though eventually she would find redemption in the mid-1980s. (I’ll get to that
in the next piece.)
During Oscar night on Herbert Ross, who had two movies competing for
Best Picture that night (The Turning Point and The Goodbye Girl)
took the opportunity to film some stock footage for his next movie. He was
currently filming an adaptation of Neil Simon’s California Suite, a film which told the story of four
different small stories that take place in a hotel room in LA. Among the
stories being told was that of Diana, a British actress who is attending the
Oscars after being nominated for ‘a nauseating little comedy’. Accompanying her
is her former lover who is now out of the closet.
In the movie the two are played by Maggie Smith and Michael Caine and
the two of them were filmed going into the theater as they presented an award. California
Suite turned out to be a box office hit with most of the critical attention
going to Caine and Smith for their superb comic and wry performances. Smith won
several critics awards, including the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a
Comedy, tying with Ellen Burstyn for her work in Same Time, Next Year. In
what was already looking like a crowded category – Jane Fonda was up again for Coming
Home – Smith did was Finch hadn’t been willing to do and had her name
submitted for Best Supporting Actress.
California Suite was nominated for three
Academy Awards, including Smith. (Nominated in that same category for the first
time was a 29 year old named Meryl Streep for The Deer Hunter.) Smith
ended up prevailing on Oscar night and graciously thanked Michael Caine: “I
share this award with him and it should be divided in half.) Smith became the
third actress in the 1970s to have won Oscars for both Best Actress and
Supporting Actress. In 1970 Helen Hayes had won Best Supporting Actress for her
work in Airport and Ingrid Bergman had won Best Supporting Actress for
her work in Midnight on the Orient Express. As of this writing three
other actresses have joined Smith in this small group, including Renee
Zellweger, Jessica Lange – and Meryl Streep.
The changes in Hollywood began to be felt across the board by the end
of the 1970s but it would also usher in a new age of recognition for British
actors and creative forces that essentially began the ‘special relationship’ In
the conclusion to this series I will deal with how so many of the films and
filmmakers in the 1980s officially commenced the relationship between Hollywood
and British films that it enjoys to this day.
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