Oscars Debate: 1975's Best Picture

The 1976 Oscars for the films released in 1975. Your nominees: Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, Nashville, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Of course we can make the usual points about how the Oscars don’t actually matter from a cultural values standpoint and that pageantry in art is pointless and so on an so forth. You already know all of these points. But at the end of the day, it’s someone’s job to vote for these awards, and that begs an important question: How the fuck are you supposed to pick in a category that strong?

Debates like these are partially why I’ve avoided doing Oscars articles about Best Picture categories. If you focus on a narrower category, like Best Original Screenplay or Best Cinematography, there’s a more defined criteria for what you’re trying to reward. Was this story told effectively? Does this movie’s visual style balance the need for aesthetic and storytelling? But Best Picture is just… which one’s the best? Even when all of your nominees aren’t masterpieces, how do you choose?

Honestly, for this one, the artifice of the Oscars isn’t really needed. All five of these movies are fantastic, and I’ll take any excuse I can to talk about them. But therein lies another problem: All five have been talked about to death, and for good reason. You know why they’re great, or at the very least, you know why others think they’re great.

So rather than a more analytical take on who should win, I’m just going to talk about what they meant to me when I watched them, and what they mean to me now that I’ve seen them all again for this article. (Well, I rewatched four and watched one for the first time. We’ll get to that.) So let’s talk about these in autobiographical order. 

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

I watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for the first time on DVD at my dad’s house. I was in early middle school, and this was during the phase when my father was clearly tired of watching kiddie movies with me and my brother, so in a desperate effort to steer us onto a different track, he started showing us some of the classics. Sometimes, this meant the violent action movies my mom wouldn’t dare show us. Predator and Total Recall and some of the other Schwarzenegger classics. Sometimes, he’d show us some of the more deserved baby boomer gems. The first movie I ever watched on a DVD was his copy of Blade Runner, and not long after that, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I loved it from the get-go.

It’s a movie that ticked off a lot firsts for me. It was my first true exposure to Jack Nicholson, it was the first movie I had ever seen that directly addressed mental illness, and in a lot of ways, it was probably my first serious drama in general. (Or at least one of the earliest ones I can remember.) But a lot of the subtext was lost on me. I was a very little kid, and I thought the movie was about a free spirited guy and a nurse who was mean to everyone. I didn’t even know what subtext was yet, let alone how to appreciate it. 

I didn’t understand the countercultural elements of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest until years later, when I read the book on one of those big stupid cruise ships that probably shouldn’t exist anymore post-COVID. What began as an exercise in getting myself out of English homework for the next month or two ended as a complete upending of a story I thought I already knew. I saw the system that keeps these men in place, some of whom were committed, some of whom are there of their own free will. The escalation once even a small part of that system gets challenged. The way in which both sides of this conflict will probably war with each other until the end of time. A whole lot suddenly made sense to me.

Now, in 2020, as I watched it, I didn’t think of failing social systems or the corrupting nature of power. I thought about Cool Hand Luke, a movie that I never liked. (Sorry! Hey, in an article of praise, we need a hot take or two for the sake of balance.) It didn’t occur to me until now that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest might be the reason that I never liked it.

Both movies are about, to varying degrees, rebellion. There’s an oppressive system in place, and both movies explore the consequences and the existential importance of fighting said system. The difference, however, is allegiance. Cool Hand Luke is clearly on Luke Jackson’s side. Luke is a rebel, over-punished for the way he lives his life and undervalued in how he changes the other prisoner’s lives for the better. We want him to fight. We’re sad when his spirit seems broken, and we’re angry at the oppressors who ultimately take his life. 

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, on the other hand, is much more morally ambiguous. All Luke ever did was tamper with parking meters. McMurphy has a long history of violence and he’s in prison this time for statutory rape. The questions the movie, and the book, want us to grapple with are much harder to answer. Does McMurphy deserve his fate? Does he deserve a chance to change? Was he ever really given the opportunity to do so? 

Nurse Ratched has gained a reputation as one of the greatest villains in Hollywood history, but how much of that reputation is actually deserved? True, some of her actions are needlessly passive aggressive and cruel. But is it that evil to, say, no longer allow severely mentally ill and potentially violent patients to gamble, even if it is only with cigarettes? Does trying to maintain some sort of serenity in a mental hospital make you evil? True, the move with the World Series broadcast was rather dickish, but maybe she wasn’t entirely wrong to do it. How many of her evil deeds were really just poor communication?

Again, I ask these questions not to convince you that Nurse Ratched isn’t villainous. There are times when that’s unquestionable. I’m asking them because unlike Cool Hand Luke, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest has room for shades of grey, and as a result, you can detach yourself and see the bigger picture. Cool Hand Luke is about a man. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is about a system. 

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a perfect example of how to make a work of art that stands the test of time. Of course, our understanding of mental health has changed. Of course, some of the attitudes and language in this movie is no longer acceptable. But the legacy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest seems secure because it’s a film whose meaning changes over time, as well as the audience’s relationship with it. Of all the movies on this list, this one’s arguably the most prescient. Particularly in 2020.

Jaws

I’ve told this story on this blog before, but I don’t remember where and I don’t feel like scanning through all my shit in order to find it, so I’ll tell it to you again.

This was in my first year of high school and the height of the DVD market. The only thing I asked for as far as Christmas gifts that year were DVDs and my dad got me over thirty of them. It was a Christmas that forever altered the course of my life. Some of them, to my father’s chagrin, I still haven’t watched. (Specifically Little Big Man. I don’t know what blocks me from watching it, but it’s there.) Some of these movies are, to this day, some of my favorites.

Christmas came and went, we had one free day, and then we were going on a family trip to Jackson Hole. On that free day, I decided to watch as many of these new DVDs as I could, and because I didn’t take my own emotional state into account, the five movies I watched, in order, were Taxi Driver, Jaws, The Conversation, Tsotsi, and Requiem for a Dream.

Depression, social alienation, violence, paranoia, drugs, spirals, and… Jaws. For SOME REASON, Jaws always stood out in my mind as something of a comfort film. Sure, people die horribly, that kid gets eaten and his grieving mother slaps Chief Brody in the face, and those shark bite photos gross me right the fuck out. But… c’mon. It’s Jaws. It’s the movie that launched a million blockbuster directors, and I can’t think of another movie more suited to introduce a young mind to just how fun movies can be.

I first saw Jaws right when I was truly becoming a film snob. I wasn’t at my worst yet, but I definitely thought I was above blockbusters, and I definitely went into it with my knives out. But Jaws is so good that it still managed to penetrate my psyche, and there it remained.

I went to college, and eventually, I got over myself. Now I actively look forward to seeing the big dumb blockbuster as much as I look forward to seeing the pretentious indie darling. (Fun fact: I saw Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens and Son of Saul for the first time on the same day. It was a day.) Yet in all this time, it never occurred to me to go back to Jaws until now, and honestly, it was the hardest one to come back to. 

It’s not that I dislike it now. Not by any means. But of all these rewatches, this was the one I struggled the most with to not dick around on my phone. It feels like I’ve seen it a million times, even though I only saw it once before watching it again for this article.

However, the obvious reason it feels that way is because Jaws is now so embedded in our understanding of movies that it’s hard not to see it everywhere, and it wasn’t until this rewatch that I really understood how deep it goes.

It’s the kind of story being told. Something’s killing innocent people, there’s an investigation into what it is, some more people die, but eventually it’s found and after a struggle, it’s (seemingly) killed. Read into it any metaphor you so desire.

It’s the kinds of characters in this story. The mild-mannered family man trying to do what’s best in his leadership position. The stuck up nerdy expert who has to get their hands dirty and provide all the exposition. The grizzled vet, literal or figurative, who knows how the world really works and has the skills necessary to bring our protagonists right where they need to be before they can be killed. The idiot higher-up who doesn’t listen to the experts and causes a calamity. The list goes on.

It’s the structure. It’s the camaraderie. It’s the tone. It’s the pacing and the placement of set pieces in the story and the explosive finale and so many other aspects. Of course, there’s precedent for all these tropes before Jaws existed. Mainly in pulp movies and books and the kinds of stories early blockbuster directors turned to when they were perfecting the genre. But as far as the filmmaking consciousness is concerned, it’s basically all Jaws. All of it.

While I was rewatching it, I had a thought: I don’t recall a time in my life where I wasn’t aware of the existence of Jaws. Even when I was very little kid. Now it’s easy to understand why. This whole section may have seemed obvious to most. “No shit Jaws is everywhere.” But I forgot. Somehow.

Dog Day Afternoon

Like Jaws, Dog Day Afternoon was one of those many DVDs my dad got me on that fateful Christmas. I don’t remember precisely when I first watched it, but it wasn’t too long after watching Jaws.

Like Jaws, I hadn’t watched it again until this article. I thought it was great then, and as I watched it again, I still think it’s great now. As I rewatched it, I tried to think of the super insightful angle I was going to take when it came time to write about it.

One angle I thought about was the lack of appreciation for Dog Day Afternoon as an LGBTQ film. While it’s far from perfect in its representation of gay and trans characters, unlike many today, especially if you’re the billionaire creator of YA book franchise about a magical school (guess what was happening as I started writing this), it at least treats them like actual human beings. A rarity for a film made in 1975. 

Another angle I thought about was how, in a way, I think it’s underrated as a New York movie. There’s something about the way the crowd eggs on the cops and the robbers, as well as the kind of women who work in the bank and Sonny’s mother and ex-wife, that strikes me as very specifically New York. Yet it’s not the movie that comes to mind when we say “New York movie.” If you set Dog Day Afternoon in Poughkeepsie or most places south of the Mason-Dixon line, or really anywhere that isn’t a metropolitan city, it would look and feel very different.

I thought of writing about the trajectory of bank robbery movies after Dog Day Afternoon. (Inside Man literally mentions Dog Day Afternoon by name.) I thought of writing about the lack of music, and how well it builds the tension and creates a certain tone. I thought of making a point about how if Jaws didn’t happen, maybe action blockbusters would look a lot more like Dog Day Afternoon.

But apart from these thoughts and a few others, I kept going back to one central theme: Al Pacino is really fucking good in this movie. 

I know. What a shocking opinion. But here’s the thing: When we think of “good acting” or the great performances, most people think of big method Oscar-y performances. Your Dustin Hoffman in Rain Mans and your Brando in Streetcars. The kind of performances Tommy Wiseau admires. But I subscribe to the school of acting that less is more, and I’m more moved by subtlety. Come every Oscar season, I have yet another debate with a friend about how most acting isn’t the same thing as best acting. (Chiwetel Ejiofor should have won over Matthew McConaughey damnit!)

If you’ve only seen clips of Dog Day Afternoon, the famous “Attica!” scene for example, you may think that Pacino’s performance is an example of the kind of acting I don’t like. Indeed, there’s no denying that it’s a big big performance. However, the huge moments of Pacino’s performance are equally balanced, maybe even tipped, by plenty of moments of grace and delicacy. 

Even in the first scene when he’s sitting outside in the car, you take one look at him and it feels like you’ve been up all night with him. Take one look at his face when he finds out that Leon doesn’t want to talk to him and you can see the quiet devastation. Take a look at the pain that’s clearly been inflicted on him by his mother and you can see, not empathize with, but see how he’s internalized that pain and inflicted it on all of his loved ones. 

It’s always seemed small to me to reduce a whole movie down to one actor’s performance, especially when you also have John Cazale giving his own terrifying performance as well. But I think here it’s justified. He is the movie. Exhausting, energetic, and boiling red hot under the surface.

Barry Lyndon

I first saw Barry Lyndon during my junior year of college. I had a large TV that I bought after years of saving up Amazon gift card money and I had a dorm the size of a small closet. As the TV was basically the size of half the wall, and as this dorm was my first single, it was the ideal way of watching it if I couldn’t see it in a theater. 

In hindsight, it’s a little crazy that it took me so long to finally see it. Kubrick was, and still is, very much my guy. A Clockwork Orange is one of the movies I keep in my mental stable of films that are “my favorite” (it sits there with Network and City of God and a few others), and most of his other movies played a huge role in cementing my tastes. 

However, there was a time when IMDB scores and general internet opinions still mattered to me, and throughout high school, I had this perception that Barry Lyndon was one of Kubrick’s worst films, if not the worst, with the possible exception of Eyes Wide Shut. For a long time, the only thing I really knew about it was that it was long, slow, and had good costumes.

However, my biggest beef was the genre. Though I was well on my way to becoming a more open film fan by the time I got around to actually watching it, I still had some biases, and I had a pointlessly strong attitude against Costume Dramas. Or “Crumpingtons,” as I liked to condescendingly refer to them.

I didn’t really have a good reason for disliking them as much as I did. It’s more that I didn’t like the self-seriousness of them, nor did I like the kinds of stories they told. Lords and ladies. Manners and class. Love for money versus love for love. It’s not that these topics can’t be interesting. It’s that I didn’t care for the sensibility with which they addressed them. Lots of Jane Austen adaptations deploy the biting wit of the ladies to take down male behavior in English society, but for me, it didn’t cut deep enough. (Also not helpful was my newly found love of In the Loop and The Thick of It. I had, shall we say, a rather skewed perspective on what counted as good insult comedy.)

Of course, the real problem was that I hadn’t seen enough Costume Dramas. Now I have, and though there are plenty that still don’t do it for me, I don’t shy away from them either. As a matter of fact, I now have very high expectations of them, and Barry Lyndon was the turning point.

Oddly enough, the movie that turned me around on Costume Dramas is, in a bit of a roundabout way, an anti-Costume Drama. At the time, my perception of the leading men of Costume Dramas were that they were all aloof and gentlemanly. They could be a little rude, but in the end, they were romantics. Mr. Darcy, essentially.

Redmond Barry, later to be Barry Lyndon, is a piece of shit. He’s in love with his cousin and he’s willing to ruin her life if he doesn’t get her, he has no loyalty to seemingly anyone or anything but his mother, he treats his future wife and stepson like dirt, he’s violent, selfish, and he’s the worst kind of opportunist.

Moreover, while critiques of upper crust Europe certainly existed in the Costume Dramas I’d been exposed to up to that point, none of them were as brutal as Barry Lyndon. Whereas class and money are usually what keeps the lovers apart in many a Costume Drama, Barry Lyndon is a long demonstration of how the values of this society allow a total piece of shit to thrive before tossing him out when he becomes slightly too much of a monster.

I should state for the record that I’m not as informed on certain aspects of this film as I could be. I have not read the The Luck of Barry Lyndon, I know very little about it, and I know even less of the kind of picaresque literature Barry Lyndon is based on in general. All I had were my perceptions of the genre tropes, and from my standpoint, Barry Lyndon was the first time I had ever seen a movie take those tropes and use them against audience expectations as aggressively as it does.

Now, we have The Favourite, which takes the same philosophy to the logical extreme, and as of writing this, I’ve only seen one episode of The Great. (It seems promising!) But Barry Lyndon was what whet my appetite for something like The Favourite and other movies or TV shows like it in the first place.

Barry Lyndon is now one of my favorite Kubrick films, and I want to find all those people who led me to believe that it was one of his worsts and rant at them about how wrong they were until their ears bleed. After all, of the Kubrick movies that actually count (The Killing on up, basically), Lolita is his worst. But that’s for another time.

Nashville

Confession time: I first watched Nashville on June 3rd, 2020. It was for this very article. I’ve had a weird fascination with the Oscars for a long time, and though I was aware of this particular debate, I hadn’t bothered to actually watch Nashville and fully engage in it until now because I just assumed the movie was either as great as everyone said it was, or in the more likely scenario for me, that it wasn’t going to be my thing but I could at least respect it.

Though I’ve seen plenty of movies, like most people, I have some blindspots. One of those spots for me is Robert Altman. Before Nashville, I had only seen McCabe & Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye. I still haven’t seen MASH or The Player or Short Cuts or any of the others I should’ve seen by now.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller was yet another one of those DVDs my dad got me. We watched it together during one of the nights where he’d come to my mom’s house to spend time with me and my brother (#divorce). To be perfectly honest, I remember very little about the narrative other than some of the final scenes and the general gist. But it was an early example of a movie I liked not for narrative reasons, but for style and tone. All the westerns I had seen up to that point took place in remote desert towns, and this one took place in a snowy forrest. A small change for sure, but a change that makes it feel different, especially when you’ve only seen a genre play out in one style over and over again.

The Long Goodbye I watched for the first time in my apartment the first year I moved out to Los Angeles. It’s been a while since we’ve had a hot take, so now we’re due for another: I don’t like this movie at all. One of Altman’s signature moves is people talking over each other and a general sense of disorder when it comes to dialogue, and while it works for movies meant to be chaotic, it works less so when you need to gravitate to someone. In The Long Goodbye’s case, I couldn’t engage.

Now I’ve seen Nashville, by far the most I’ve liked one of his movies. Maybe I need to give The Long Goodbye another chance.

Nashville is a famously difficult movie to describe, as it doesn’t really have a plot, and its cast of characters is so wide and sprawling that it’s hard to know where to focus. You could say it’s about the country music scene in the titular city, but that doesn’t quite cover enough ground. You could say it’s about the political landscape of mid-seventies Nixon impeachment era America, but that’s only a small fraction of what it has to offer. At times, it’s a comedy. At times, it’s a drama. At times, many say it’s a musical. (I take issue with that particular classification, but I see where it comes from.) It is, seemingly, everything.

I guess if I had to take a crack at telling someone what it’s about, I’d tell them it’s “about” the ‘70s. It’s about a moment in time and a place where the previously mentioned art scene had to intersect with the previously mentioned political climate. It’s a movie about chaos. A time where a rootsy broken country singer can somehow become a political martyr. A time where the radicalism of the previous years was beginning to fade and the new era of conservatism was about to be born. It’s about being in the middle of it all and somehow keeping your head above water. It’s everything you project onto art and artists, and everything you don’t.

I’m giving it short shrift here, as I’ve really only given it two or three paragraphs. But if you’ve seen it, you know what I’m struggling to describe here. Just take my word for it: It’s brilliant. You may need an entire college course to understand why, but it’s brilliant.

Who Should’ve Won?

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was your actual winner. It also won Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It’s not hard to see why, as I’d say of the five, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the most traditionally “Oscar” film. However, that’s not to suggest that it didn’t deserve these wins either. (Okay, maybe I would’ve picked Pacino over Nicholson for Best Actor, but it’s not like I can be particularly mad about the Academy’s decision here.) It’s an iconic film that perfectly portrays the forever war between those who have power and those who don’t.

However, you can easily make an argument for all the other movies as well. Jaws changed the way we make blockbusters and action movies forever. Dog Day Afternoon is one of the best acted American films ever made that, like One Flew Over, packs a big socio-political punch as well. Barry Lyndon is a masterpiece from one the greatest filmmakers ever and Nashville is the perfect encapsulation of an entire decade.

So who should’ve won? In this case, who cares?

Okay, fine. Were it up to me, I’d personally go Barry Lyndon. It’s the one I find the most interesting and, in an indirect way, the most emotional. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I’ve opened up a news website in 2020, and for no reason whatsoever, I’ve become rather sensitive to stories about systems enabling terrible men.

However, the fun part of debating the Oscars isn’t what should actually win, but it’s the introspection. It’s a dead horse I’ve beaten many times on this blog but it’s one worth beating. The Oscars force you to assess art in a different way. What are the flaws in a film you loved? Why didn’t another film work for you? What do you care about? How do these movies exemplify those values? How do they not?

Even if you don’t like all five of these films, or maybe even all five, each of them have had a monumental effect on the history of filmmaking. When you have a set of nominees this strong and this impactful, it forces you to think about what you want the most of out of a film. Do you want thrills or do you want depth? Maybe you want a decent balance of both. Or neither. 

So the question isn’t who should’ve won the trophy. The question is what do you want?