Foreign Film Directors and The Oscars, Part 2: The 1970s

 

An interesting article – maybe even a book – could be written about the New York Film Critics Awards and their relationship with the Academy Awards. Established in 1935, they were the first critics organization of any kind to give awards to films.

During the first thirty-four years of their existence the New York Film Critics more or less stuck to given their awards to Hollywood’s product and by and large the Academy was more than willing to nominate, if not always give awards, to their major contenders films, directing, and both acting categories. (The New York Critics didn’t create Supporting Actor and Actress awards until 1969.) The Oscars were fine even when New York was giving a lot of awards to British films and actors from Olivier and his Shakespearean adaptations to Tom Jones and the second wave. Indeed there are precious few occasions in the history of the Oscars from 1935 to 1970 when they excluded a major winner from that category among their nominees. There’s a good chance, for example, that Kim Stanley and Edith Evans earned Best Actress nominations in the 1960s entirely because of the awards they received from New York; it’s hard to imagine Séance on A Wet Afternoon and The Whisperers registering on the Academy’s radar otherwise.

The trouble began in 1969 when the New York Film Critics chose, for the first time in their history, Best Picture to a film not made in America Z. As I mentioned in the previous article the Academy went along with it. But in hindsight it was the start of a period that has never truly ended when it came to New York’s critics and their awards: an increasing willingness – almost stubbornness – to recognize movies and actors that had an international flavor more than Hollywood. And it’s particularly striking in the 1970s that during a period when Hollywood was going through one of its greatest creative periods in history the New York Critics were giving the majority of their awards for Best Picture and Director to movies that were not being made in America.

The first example of this occurred in 1972. This was the era The Godfather exploded onscreen and changed Hollywood forever. In the eyes of the New York Film Critics, however, it barely existed. The only major award it won from them was Best Supporting Actor for Robert Duvall. As far as they were concerned the Best Film of the year was Cries and Whispers.

Bergman, one of the greatest directors of all time had already been making movies for thirty years and while the majority of his early work -  The Seventh Seal, The Magician, Persona – had been ignored by the Academy even when it came to nominations for Best Foreign Film – it was not as though his work was entirely being ignored. He had been nominated for Best Original Screenplay for Wild Strawberries, Through A Glass Darkly had won Best Foreign Language Film in 1961 and he had been nominated for Best Screenplay the following year and he had won the Irving Thalberg Award in 1971 – a rarity for an award traditionally given to American producers.

But Cries & Whispers to put it extremely mildly was not the kind of film the Academy recognized. One of the grimmest films ever made by a man already known for his tone of grimness, the film dealt with a woman dying of cancer, being visited by her two sisters and how not even death seems to make it possible for them to redeem her. Bergman showed the long slow agony of dying in great detail and its emotional violence was just as revelatory as that of The Godfather’s physical violence.

The film won Best Picture, director and screenplay for Bergman and Liv Ullmann took the Best Actress prize, in conjunction with her other Swedish films The Emigrants. The Emigrants had actually been nominated for Best Foreign Film the year before from Sweden and would in fact be nominated for four Academy Awards in 1972. Ullmann was actually a heavy favorite that year for Best Actress in a Drama but not long after the nominations came out the fiasco Lost Horizon debuted and it pretty much torched any chance Ullmann had for a Hollywood career. (Bette Midler famously said: “I never miss a Liv Ullmann musical!”)

Because of eligibility requirements Cries & Whispers was not eligible for Best Foreign Language Film in 1972. However like The Emigrants it would be eligible for Oscars in every major category the following year.  The Emigrants was basically lost in the Oscar sweep for The Godfather and Cabaret (Ullmann lost Best Actress to Liza Minelli) but there was question whether Cries & Whispers would be remembered long enough to be recognized for Oscars by the time the nominations for 1973 came along.

It turned out the answer was yes. Cries & Whispers received five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Bergman’s first nomination for Best Director. He was also nominated for Best Screenplay for the third time. It would only win one Oscar – Best Cinematography – but no one truly objected that much as the majority of the Oscars went to The Sting or The Exorcist.

By the time of the 1973 nominations, however, the New York Critics once again had decided that the Best Film of the Year was neither of those movies, nor Last Tango in Paris or The Last Detail or any of the other American films. They had moved to another brilliant international director.

Francois Truffaut had established himself as one of the screenwriters of French cinema, writing such masterpieces as The 400 Blows, Breathless before he exploded on to the screen with Jules and Jim. He had received an Oscar nomination for writing 400 Blows in 1960 and had worked in America as much as he had France but he had never had the kind of crossover appeal of directors like Fellini or Bergman when it came to the Oscars. That changed with Day for Night one of his very best films, a film about the struggles of a director trying to make a film.

It was the biggest winner of the New York film Critics winning Best Picture, Director for Truffaut and Best Supporting Actress for Valentina Cortese. The movie won Best Foreign Language Film that year (the only movie Truffaut made that won an Oscar) but everyone would have to wait and see if it could do the same in 1974.

Things didn’t go quite as well for Day For Night as they did for Cries and Whispers; the film wasn’t nominated for Best Picture in 1974. (That said, considering one of the five nominated films was Irwin Allen’s The Towering Inferno, it’s a lot harder to say the Academy was right nominating that movie alongside The Godfather II, Chinatown, Lenny and The Conversation.) Truffaut was, however, included among the nominees for Best Director and the movie was nominated for Best Original Screenplay as well. Valentina Cortese was nominated that year for Best Supporting Actress.

Truffaut chose to stay in Paris on Oscar night, as did his fellow directors Bob Fosse and Roman Polanski. Cortese did show up only to end up losing to Ingrid Bergman for Murder on the Orient Express. Bergman used her time to make it very clear she believed Cortese should have won. “Please forgive me, Valentina,” she implored. “I didn’t mean too.” Cortese was seen on camera blowing kisses to Bergman.

By that point the Oscars had just through another controversy involving the most recent Bergman and Ullman collaboration that was again at the center of the New York Film critics’ awards. The major winner that year was Frederico Fellini’s Amarcord which had won Best Picture and Best Director. That film was eligible for Best Foreign Film and it won that award. (I’ll pick that up in a minute.) The other major contender was Scenes from A Marriage which had been the major contender for most of the awards and had won Best Screenplay and Best Actress for Liv Ullman. The difference was this film was actually an edited version of the iconic miniseries that Bergman had gotten to much acclaim the previous year.

This was a rule that the Academy refused to bend on when it came to Oscar consideration and they ruled it ineligible to compete any category. Many were upset in particular about the exclusion of Ullman for Best Actress, and many major forces in Hollywood campaigned for the Oscars to breaks its rule – including some of the very actresses who would be contending against her such as Ellen Burstyn, the eventual winner for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. The Academy stood firm and while I fundamentally am in disagreement with many of their decisions, here I believe they absolutely made the right call.

The New York Film Critics basically didn’t cause any more agita the rest of the decade. The Oscars would spend much of it themselves when it came to the director’s nomination starting in 1975 with what was going to be one of their most glaring omissions.

When Bergman had been nominated for Cries & Whispers, no one blinked because the film had been nominated for Best Picture. While Truffaut didn’t have a corresponding Best Picture to go with Best Director, no one was that upset either. Francis Ford Coppola had directed two of the five nominees for Best Picture: The Conversation and Godfather II but he could only be nominated for one of those films and when they chose the latter, not even Coppola was that upset. However in 1975, things took a nasty turn – and it was caught on camera.

As I mentioned in passing in a different series the five major contenders for Best Picture going into the nominations are among the greatest films ever made: Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, Nashville and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. All five films were deservedly nominated for Best Picture. On nomination day news cameras were in the home of Steven Spielberg, the then wunderkind director who had just directed the highest grossing film of all-time. (Not for the first time as all fans know.) The cameras were there to record his reactions of receiving a nomination. They caught a different kind.

The four other directors of their films, Robert Altman, Milos Forman, Stanley Kubrick and Sidney Lumet were all nominated. Even by that point in their careers all of them were considered among the greatest directors of all time. But the fifth spot went to Frederico Fellini for Amarcord. Spielberg’s reaction was genuine and immortalized. “I can’t believe it!” he said in despair. “They went for Fellini over me!” It was the first – but sadly, not the last time in the first two decades of his career that the Academy would find ways to show how little they respected one of the greatest directors in history. The fact that they chose to do so for a movie that had won foreign film the previous year – and that some critics consider far from his best work – was an insult. The Academy would change the rules that year back to a film being nominated for Best Foreign film could be eligible for awards in both that category and all other categories. They may have thought they were solving their problems. It turned out they were creating new ones.

Fellini was nominated for Directing and Screenplay. The following year he would be nominated for original screenplay for Casanova, which would be the last nomination he ever received from the Oscars. By that point he had begun his decline into excess and would never be in the good graces of the critics again.  

The following year the Oscars would make history in one of their better ways. At the start of 1976 critics became enraptured by Seven Beauties directed by the Italian filmmaker Lina Wertmuller. The story is the tale on an Italian national with grand ideas of importance, (played by Giancarlo Giannini in the role that led to his crossing over with American audiences) who believes in upholding the honor of his seven less than attractive sisters. One of the darkest satires from an incredibly dark filmmaker and writer-director Wertmuller became known across the pond.

The New York Film Critics would nominate it for Best Film, Director and Screenplay but they were still in love with Bergman. Seven Beauties would be nominated for Best Foreign film but the major winner would be Face to Face, his most recent collaboration with Ullman. Ullman would receive her third Best Actress prize from the New York Film Critics in five years and she swept all of the four major film critics groups: (New York, LA, National Board of Review and the National Society of Film Critics).

Four of the five nominees for Best Picture are also among the greatest films ever made: All The President’s Men, Network, Rocky and Taxi Driver. (There is less  regard for Hal Ashby’s Bound for Glory the fifth nominee that year.) However only three of those movies had corresponding directing nominations.

That year Wertmuller made history as the first woman to be nominated for Best Director. That she did so for directing a foreign film makes her accomplishment all the more remarkable; it was only last year that the second female director for directing an international film Justine Triet was nominated for Anatomy of a Fall. Bergman received his second nomination for Best Director for Face to Face and I would argue the decision to nominate him instead of Martin Scorsese for his masterpiece Taxi Driver was a blunder as bad as ignoring Spielberg the previous year. Scorsese would sadly spend the remainder of the century receiving even less recognition from the Oscars than Spielberg did – and in his case much of his best work would receive no corresponding Best Picture nominations at all.

The last two years of the decade had their shares of ups and downs but foreign films didn’t enter to the discussion. At the end of the decade, however, they made one last glaring appearance.

In 1979 much of the world fell in love with the groundbreaking La Cage Aux Folles, the story of the manager and star of a drag night club in Saint-Tropez who are a gay couple When his straight son brings home a fiancée and her ultra-conservative parents, a farce ensues.

A groundbreaking film for a community that was essentially being ignored in America  it became an international sensation and very quickly became beloved by millions of all sexual persuasions. A Tony-winning musical would become one of the greatest succession for Jerry Herman on Broadway and its American remake The Birdcage has a special place in the hearts of many. Indeed, it even inspired its own franchise which is even more remarkable. It won the Golden Globe that year for Best Foreign film but for reasons that are unclear (perhaps because it was produced by both Italian and French productions) it was nominated for Best Foreign film. It was, however, nominated for 3 other Oscars, including Best Director for Edouard Molinaro and Best Screenplay.

The five nominated films, while not all are at the level of Apocalypse Now, are still exceptional movies: All That Jazz, Breaking Away, Kramer vs. Kramer and Norma Rae. It’s hard to argue that Martin Ritt was robbed of an Oscar nomination the same way that Spielberg and Scorsese were. The film had been nominated for Best Drama by the Golden Globes but Ritt was not among the nominees for Best Director. Indeed there were other better films that probably should have been nominated for Best Picture instead of Norma Rae – The China Syndrome, Being There or Manhattan are all far superior in quality. And frankly there’s a better case that Allen or Hal Ashby should have nominate for directing the latter two films each of which are considered among the all-time masterpieces. Molinaro’s nomination looks more like an oddity than a deliberate slight.

Deliberate slights, however, were going to come fast and furious in the next decade. In the next part of this series I will deal with the 1980s when the Oscars starting to go out of their way to nominate international directors and start to look like they were deliberately becoming elitist in their choices.