|
1977
The winner is listed first, in CAPITAL letters.
Actor:
RICHARD DREYFUSS in "The Goodbye Girl", Woody Allen
in  "Annie
Hall", Richard Burton in "Equus", Marcello
Mastroianni in
"A Special Day", John Travolta in "Saturday Night
Fever"
Actress:
DIANE KEATON in "Annie
Hall", Anne Bancroft in "The Turning Point",
Jane Fonda in
"Julia", Shirley MacLaine in "The Turning Point",
Marsha Mason in "The Goodbye Girl"
Supporting Actor:
JASON ROBARDS in "Julia", Mikhail Baryshnikov in "The
Turning Point", Peter Firth in "Equus", Alec Guinness
in "Star
Wars", Maximilian Schell in "Julia"
Supporting Actress:
VANESSA REDGRAVE in "Julia", Leslie Browne in "The
Turning Point", Quinn Cummings in "The Goodbye Girl",
Melinda Dillon in "Close Encounters
of the Third Kind", Tuesday Weld in "Looking for
Mr. Goodbar"
Director:
WOODY ALLEN for "Annie
Hall", George Lucas for "Star
Wars", Herbert Ross for "The Turning Point",
Steven Spielberg for "Close Encounters
of the Third Kind", Fred Zinnemann for "Julia"
 This
was the Golden Anniversary (50th year) of the Academy Awards.
Four of the five Best Picture nominees were about
strong, forceful females.
The ultimate winner was director/writer/actor
Woody Allen's semi-autobiographical, romantic comedy - the
acclaimed Annie
Hall - with innovative narrative techniques, slapstick,
and clever one-liners, about a brief, unstable love affair
between a neurotic, Jewish comedian (Woody Allen) and an insecure,
Waspish singer named Annie Hall (Diane Keaton). It was the first Best
Picture comedy since Tom Jones (1963), and it would
be another 21 years for the next romantic comedy to win Best
Picture -- Shakespeare in Love (1998).
Allen's poignant film dominated the Oscars ceremony
this year, with five nominations and four wins.
Only Allen's own Best Actor nomination failed to win. Therefore,
Allen won his first Oscar as a director rather than
as a actor-performer. The bittersweet, introspective film was
voted Best Picture (for producer Charles Joffe), Best Director,
Best Actress, and Best Original Screenplay (co-written by Woody
Allen and partner Marshall Brickman).
[Allen's achievement was that he won two of
the three awards, for writing and directing, for which he
was nominated. He was the second (or third) in Academy
history to win both Best Director and Best Original Screenplay,
following Joseph L. Mankiewicz' double wins in consecutive
years for A Letter to Three Wives (1949) AND All
About Eve (1950). Allen became the first director
to win an Academy Award for a film he starred in.
Allen also became the fourth person in Oscar history
to be nominated in a single year as both an actor and
screenwriter. Others were Charlie Chaplin -1940, Orson Welles
-1941, and Sylvester Stallone -1976. And Allen was the first person
since Welles in 1941 to be nominated for these three honors:
Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. ]
At only 93 minutes, it was one of the shortest
Best Picture Oscar winners. It was also the first comedy
to win the Best Picture Oscar since The Sting (1973),
and before that, Tom Jones (1963). This win, for United
Artists, made it the first studio to win three Best
Pictures in a row (the second studio to duplicate this
feat was DreamWorks (from 1999-2001)):
The other nominees for Best Picture included:
- Neil Simon's witty romantic comedy The
Goodbye Girl (with five nominations and only one win
- Best Actor) about a mismatched (odd-couple) pair of New
York roommates - an aspiring actor and a former actress
- and her precocious 9 year-old daughter. [Simon's wife
at the time was star Marsha Mason.]
- director Fred Zinnemann's Julia (with
eleven nominations and three wins - Best Supporting Actor,
Best Supporting Actress, and Best Screenplay), based upon
Alvin Sargent's Oscar-winning screen adaptation of Lillian
Hellman's best-selling memoir Pentimento, told the
tale of Hellman's pact with childhood friend Julia (who was
working in the Resistance) to smuggle money into Germany
during WW II as part of the Nazi resistance movement's rescue
of persecuted Jews
- writer-director George Lucas' box-office
blockbuster (one of the biggest grossers to date, surpassing
the success of Jaws
(1975)) - the first of the trilogy of fantasy tales, Star
Wars (with ten nominations and six wins, mostly in
technological or special effects/visual areas with none in
the top categories) was the ultimate science fiction fantasy/adventure
film of a life and death struggle - with a young hero, a
princess who needs to be rescued, talking robots, a black-garbed
villain, and a Jedi knight. [Its six awards were for Best
Art Direction, Best Costume Design, Best Sound, Best Editing,
Best Music Score (a third Oscar for John Williams), and Best
Visual Effects. It also received a Best Sound Effects Creations
- a Special Achievement Award for the "creation of the
alien, creature, and robot voices." Its sole acting
nomination for Alec Guinness was lost.]
- director Herbert Ross' The Turning Point (with
eleven nominations and no wins) was the dramatic story of
two dancers, both blessed and cursed by their own 'turning
point' choices in life between career or marriage/motherhood.
[The Turning Point has the dubious distinction of
having a record number of nominations - eleven - without winning
a single Oscar. Its record was later tied by Spielberg's The
Color Purple (1985).]
Woody Allen won the award for Best Director for
arguably his best film, Annie
Hall. Herbert Ross, the director of Best Picture-nominated The
Goodbye Girl, was not nominated in the Best Director category
for that film but for his second Best Picture-nominated film, The
Turning Point. Neil Simon was not nominated for his Best
Picture-nominated The Goodbye Girl. Simon's Best Director-nominee
slot was taken by director Steven Spielberg for Close
Encounters of the Third Kind (with nine nominations
and two wins, for Best Sound Effects Editing and Best Cinematography)
about extra-terrestrial contacts with earthlings - his first
film after the enormously popular Jaws
(1975).
[Only one director won the Oscar award for
a film not nominated for Best Picture - director Frank
Lloyd for the un-nominated film The Divine Lady (1928-9).
Therefore, it would be unlikely that Spielberg would win
the Best Director award. Close Encounters
of the Third Kind probably didn't show up on the
list of Best Picture nominees because its genre type - blockbuster
science fiction film - was already taken by Star
Wars.]
The Best Actor award was an upset: 30 year-old
Richard Dreyfuss (with his first nomination - and sole
Oscar win) won the award for his role as adversarial, temperamental,
yet aspiring actor Elliott Garfield, a Richard III thespian
who shares a cramped tenement apartment with a single mother
and her daughter in the comedy The Goodbye Girl (the
film's sole Oscar win). [Curiously, Dreyfuss was not nominated
for his leading role as electrical lineman Roy Neary whose
life-transforming experiences caused obsessional behavior and
eventual enlightenment in Close Encounters
of the Third Kind. At thirty, he became the youngest man
to ever win the Best Actor Award, but lost that honor twenty-five
years later when 29 year-old Adrien Brody won for The Pianist
(2002).]
The leading contender in the Best Actor category
was sentimental favorite Richard Burton (with his seventh and last unsuccessful
career nomination) as intense psychiatrist Dr. Martin Dysart
who counsels a stable-boy who blinded horses in Sidney Lumet's
adaptation of Peter Shaffer's play titled Equus (with
three nominations and no wins). [With his seventh loss, Burton
set a record for the most nominations without a win.
Peter O'Toole duplicated his 'accomplishment' in 1982, and
surpassed it in 2006.]
The other three Best Actor nominees were:
- Woody Allen (with his first nomination) as
Alvy Singer - a successful Jewish, New York comedian who
has a 'nervous romance' with WASP-ish songstress Annie Hall
in Annie
Hall
- TV sitcom actor John Travolta (with his first
nomination) as disco-crazed, Brooklyn paint store clerk Tony
Manero in director John Badham's Bee Gee's-saturated Saturday
Night Fever (the film's sole nomination)
- Italian star Marcello Mastroianni (with his
second of three unsuccessful career nominations) for his
performance as Gabriele - a suicidal gay man who is attracted
to a housewife (Sophia Loren) in the nominated Foreign Language
Film by director Ettore Scola, A Special Day (with
two nominations and no wins)
The Best Actress winner was Diane Keaton (with
her first nomination - and sole Oscar win) for her title
role (in her fourth film with Allen) in Annie
Hall as Annie Hall - a kooky, aspiring singer and Alvy
Singer's (Woody Allen) love interest. The neurotic title character
was noted as repeatedly saying the trademark phrase in a non-chalant
manner: "La-de-dah!"
Other Best Actress co-nominees included the two
main actresses in The Turning Point, the story of two
dancers who have chosen separate paths:
- Anne Bancroft (with her fourth of five career
nominations as Best Actress, with only one win for her first
nomination for The Miracle Worker (1962)) as American
Ballet Theatre star Emma Jacklin who has pursued a dance
career as a ballerina
- Shirley MacLaine (with her fourth of five
career nominations as Best Actress - she won for Terms
of Endearment (1983)) as Deedee Rodgers - a former
dancer who has chosen a life of home and family
The other two Best Actress nominees included:
- Jane Fonda (with her third of seven nominations
- she won Best Actress for Klute (1971) and would
win Best Actress again for Coming Home (1978)) as
cloistered young playwright Lillian Hellman in Julia
- Marsha Mason (with her second of four unsuccessful
career nominations) as ex-dancer Paula McFadden - Dreyfuss'
apartment co-habitant in The Goodbye Girl
Jason Robards Jr. (with his second nomination),
the only American-born performer among the other four
foreign-born Best Supporting Actor nominees, won his second consecutive Best
Supporting Actor award for his role as thriller-writer Dashiell
Hammett (Lillian Hellman's lover) in Julia. [Other actors
who have accomplished the same two-in-a-row win were: Luise
Rainer (1936 and 1937), Spencer Tracy (1937 and 1938), Katharine
Hepburn (1967 and 1968), and Tom Hanks (1993 and 1994).]
The other Best Supporting Actor nominees were:
- dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov (with his sole
nomination and in his film debut) as the Russian ballet company's
star Yuri Kopeikine in The Turning Point
- English actor Peter Firth (with his sole nomination)
as Alan Strang - the psychologically-disturbed stable boy
who blinds horses in Equus
- Alec Guinness (with his third of four career
acting nominations) as the sage, heroic and mysterious old
Jedi knight - Ben (Obi-Wan) Kenobi in Star
Wars
- Maximilian Schell (with his third nomination)
as Johann, the emissary/go-between in Julia
Jason Robards' co-star, Vanessa Redgrave (with
her sole Oscar win in a career total of six nominations)
won the Best Supporting Actress award in the title role as
an anti-Nazi activist in Julia. During her acceptance
speech, she angered some viewers with a reference to a few
militant "Zionist hoodlums whose behavior is an insult
to the stature of Jews all over the world".
Other Best Supporting Actress nominees included:
- Leslie Browne (with her sole nomination) (director
Herbert Ross' real-life god-daughter) as ambitious ballerina
Emilia Rodgers - Shirley MacLaine's 19 year-old daughter
who joins Anne Bancroft's ballet company after an audition
in The Turning Point
- Quinn Cummings (with her sole nomination)
as Lucy McFadden - Marsha Mason's sophisticated, pre-pubescent,
match-making daughter in The Goodbye Girl
- Melinda Dillon (with her first nomination)
as Jillian Guiler - the mother of spirited-away child Barry
who joins co-star Richard Dreyfuss on the pilgrimage to Devil's
Tower in Close Encounters of the Third
Kind
- Tuesday Weld (with her sole career
nomination) as impulsive Katherine Dunn (Diane Keaton's older
sister) in writer/director Richard Brooks' Looking for
Mr. Goodbar (with two nominations and no wins)
Oscar Snubs and Omissions:
Steven Spielberg's film Close
Encounters of the Third Kind was bypassed in nominations
for Best Picture.
Paul Newman was neglected in the nominations
for his role as minor league hockey player/coach Reggie Dunlop
in director George Roy Hill's ultra-realistic Slap Shot.
Both Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek were un-nominated in their
first-rate performances as roommates Millie Lammoreaux and
identity-stealing Pinky Rose in Robert Altman's Three Women.
Best Actress winner Diane Keaton's performance as sexually-repressed
teacher/single's bar swinger Theresa Dunn in Richard Brooks' Looking
for Mr. Goodbar was overshadowed - and un-nominated. And
Robert De Niro was neglected for his work as an overworked,
Irving Thalberg-like 1930s producer in The Last Tycoon.
Although Annie
Hall won four of its five nominations, Tony Roberts
was neglected for his supporting role as Rob, and Gordon
Willis' cinematography was also overlooked. Despite the
film's influence on fashion in New York and elsewhere (Ruth
Morley worked with Ralph Lauren, who designed Annie's wide
tie, 30's style wide-legged pants, man's shirt and waistcoat),
there was also no Best Costume Design nomination.
None of the Bee Gee's fantastic, chart-topping
hit songs from Saturday Night Fever received an Oscar
nomination. To add insult to injury, the year's nominees for
Best Original Song Score and Best Adaptation Score were, respectively:
- "Candle on the Water" from Pete's
Dragon
- "Nobody Does It Better" from The
Spy Who Loved Me
- "Slipper and the Rose Waltz (He Danced
with Me / She Danced with Me)" from The Slipper and
the Rose - The Story of Cinderella
- "Someone's Waiting for You" from The
Rescuers
- "You Light Up My Life" from You
Light Up My Life - THE WINNER
- Pete's Dragon
- The Slipper and the Rose - The Story of
Cinderella
- A Little Night Music - THE WINNER
To make up for the glaring omission, the Academy
awarded a Best Song Oscar ("Last Dance") to an inferior
disco film the following year, Thank God It's Friday (1978),
featuring Donna Summer's film debut.
One of the best-known songs of all time, the
theme song "New York, New York" from Martin Scorsese's
musical flop New York, New York (1977), went
un-nominated for Best Original Song.
|
