In Contention

Tag: The Deer Hunter

  • LIFE WITHOUT OSCAR: 1977 and 1978

    Catch up with the idea behind this series here.

    Hey, that “Star Wars” thing was nominated for Best Picture in 1977. The blockbuster game-changer was beaten by the romantic comedy game-changer “Annie Hall,” in what has to be one of my favorite Best Picture wins ever. It would be 21 years before another comedy won the top prize in “Shakespeare in Love,” which is another one of my favorite Best Picture wins. More good comedies please!

    Sir Stevie Spielberg earned his first Oscar nomination for directing “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” but saw the film lose out on a Best Picture nod to “The Goodbye Girl.” That film earned Richard Dreyfuss the honor of becoming the youngest Best Actor winner until Adrien Brody, decades later.

    “The Deer Hunter” bummed everyone out enough in 1978 to take home Best Picture and Director statues. The only real competition came from “Coming Home,” as anti-Vietnam films were suddenly back in vogue.

    1977 was also Bob Hope’s last turn as Master of Ceremonies (his eighteenth). No more quips like this one, “Tonight we set aside petty differences, forget old feuds, and start new ones.” Luckily, 1978 was the first of many Johnny Carson hosting gigs with gems like, “I see a lot of new faces. Especially on the old faces.”

    But here’s what had to watch from home.

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  • Going to war with Oscar

    Willem Dafoe in PlatoonOver at The Big Picture, Patrick Goldstein spent some time revisiting the three “bona fide” war films to win the Oscar for Best Picture (in the last 40 years): “Patton,” “The Deer Hunter” and “Platoon.” He notes that each of those films, when adjusted for inflation, grossed over $300 million, $280 million and $160 million respectively.  We all know where “The Hurt Locker”‘s tally sits.

    What he took away from another look was that each film captures modern day ambivalence toward war, which really, the best of war cinema does.  Which reminds me, I caught “Black Hawk Down” again on cable earlier this week (a brilliant film), and certainly the point is driven home there, though in more camouflaged strokes.  When Tom Sizemore sarcastically quips, “Just get it over with,” in response to a young soldier screaming, “They’re going to get us killed,” any notion that the film uses high octane tropes to drum up a sense of “duty” or American flag-waving quickly flies out the window.

    But I digress.  All of that is kind of inherent in the drive to make a war film, unless you’re talking about a golden age period that saw the likes of John Wayne (who Goldstein reminds “ducked out of the fighting himself”) standing up, larger than life, to the identity-less enemies of a nation.

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  • Cheer up, Meryl — you have your masterpiece

    Meryl StreepYou may well have spotted this very funny (and frequently accurate) Onion piece doing the web rounds today, in which a writer claiming to be Meryl Streep shoots down her career with all the withering disdain of Miranda Priestly.

    The gist of the argument is that, as fine an actor as Streep is, she has — whether through bad luck or bad choices — never made a truly great film.

    I can see the temptation to agree. Certainly the latter stretch of Streep’s filmography is spotty: even if you remove the outright embarrassments, (“Prime,” “Mamma Mia!”) or even the respectable-but-still-throwaway entertainments (“Julie & Julia,” “The Devil Wears Prada”), you’re left with a lot of worthily middlebrow titles engineered more as performance showcases than as vital, durable cinema.

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  • Cimino and Oscar

    Lots of talk about deserving (and undeserving) directors in the Oscar chatting this week. Let’s take it to specifics with one race that stood out to a few commenters.

    It seemed in the spring of 1979, following the Oscar ceremony, there was a sense in the industry that if the Academy could have taken back their votes — which saw “The Deer Hunter” and director Michael Cimino winning for Best Picture and Best Director — they would have done so.

    The first screenings of “The Deer Hunter” had begun the summer before, when executives saw the film and were stunned by its raw, visceral power, leading to buzz within the business that a masterwork had been born. Execs at United Artists sought out Cimino and inked him to a contract to make a film before before the release of the Vietnam epic, a move they would live to regret.

    By the time the film was released in December of 1978, word of mouth was so strong Cimino seemed to be defying anyone to dislike the effort or say anything negative about it. Film critics awarded it best picture and director honors, except those in Los Angeles who gave “Coming Home” highest marks, while Cimino won the directing award. Nominated for nine Oscars, “The Deer Hunter” won five, adding Best Supporting Actor (Christopher Walken), Best Sound Mixing and Best Film Editing to the aforementioned Best Picture and Best Director trophies.

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  • Will Francis Ford Coppola ever see an Oscar again?

    The first time I saw “Apocalypse Now” I staggered out of the theater stunned by what I had seen on screen. I remember sitting on Bloor Street with this burning need to tell people what I just witnessed, what I had seen and how profoundly it had galvanized my soul. At that moment I began writing about film, giving up the dream of being an actor and becoming a critic-historian. Francis Ford Coppola altered the course of my life, and his films have changed the way I see and think about movies.

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  • Foundas got served

    I never miss an opportunity lately to read up on someone giving LA Weekly critic (or in this case, Village Voice pundit) Scott Foundas his due. Today, its Ryan Adams at Awards Daily, who lays into Foundas’ rather inane stretch for an observation that Paramount Pictures are doing everything they can to keep Iraq out of the promotion for Kimberly Peirce’s “Stop-Loss.” Take a look:

    Whoa! spoiler alert there, Scotty! Stop Loss is about Iraq, you say? Never woulda guessed from the saturation advertising of, um, soldiers in desert camo and stuff. Way to “spill the beans” there, friendo. And yet Foundas believes the same target audience he belittles are so informed that they’ve seen all the Vietnam movies like The Deer Hunter and Coming Home…

    Of course, Adams is biased here. He’s made no attempt to conceal his pre-ordained love for “Stop-Loss” in recent weeks. But I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt on this one. Give it a read. And if you really want to put yourself through it, check out Foundas’ stretch for a news item at the Voice.