“Deliverance” (1972)
Why Was It A Surprising Nomination? Four words. Squeal. Like. A. Pig. Over forty years on, the scene in which a pair of hillbillies rape Ned Beatty‘s Bobby remains as disturbing and as potent as it ever did, so you can only imagine the impact it would have had on an AMPAS audience that might have been challenged in recent years (“Midnight Cowboy” and “A Clockwork Orange” having led the way), but would have been unlikely to see anything like it before. But even beyond the film’s most memorable moment, it’s hard to think of a movie that’s less of an “Oscar” film. Putting aside the brutal violence of John Boorman‘s picture, it’s the kind of stripped-down, faintly existential survival thriller that even today would struggle to get traction, even in a year where survival narratives have dominated (it’s less awards-friendly, at least how we think of the term today, than “Gravity” or even “12 Years A Slave“). And the film resists becoming a good vs. evil narrative, with the harried heroes of masculinity making bad decisions, killing the wrong people, and being haunted by their actions. It was well-received on the whole, but proved controversial in some quarters: Vincent Canby in the Times called it “an action melodrama that doesn’t trust its action to speak louder than words,” Variety attacked it for “nihilistic, specious philosophising,” and Ebert again found the violence unpleasant, saying that “The appeal to latent sadism is so crudely made that the audience is embarrassed,” adding that it was “a fantasy about violence, not a realistic consideration of it.”
Why Was It Nominated? Those critics were very much in the minority, with most critics falling over themselves to praise Boorman’s picture. It was also, crucially, a huge hit (the fifth biggest of 1972, beating fellow nominee “Cabaret,” among others), so it stood in good stead, even if it didn’t have much of a chance against mega-blockbuster “The Godfather,” which won Best Picture. It’s also worth noting that 1972 might have marked something of a peak in terms of adult cinema—the firmly R-rated “The Godfather” became the biggest hit in history, “Last Tango In Paris” packed arthouses, and three of the top ten grossers of the year, “Behind The Green Door,” “Deep Throat” and “Fritz The Cat,” were either borderline pornography, or actual pornography. With all of these events, plus Watergate underway and the feminist movement gathering steam (that year saw the passing of the Equal Rights Amendment and the founding of Ms. Magazine), the time may have been perfect for an ultraviolent, shocking look at bruised American masculinity, especially one as artful as “Deliverance.”
How Does It Stand Up: Very well. We might be separated from some of the cultural context these days, but “Deliverance” remains John Boorman’s finest hour, a terrifying and brutal thriller (virtually bordering on a horror film), with career-best performances from its cast, and some immaculate craft throughout. Unlike some of these films on the list, it seems to have hardly aged a day.
“The Exorcist” (1973)
Why Was It A Surprising Nomination? Um, have you seen “The Exorcist?” Not only is it a horror movie, a genre upon which the Academy is notoriously squeamish about bestowing any sort of legitimacy, but it is one of the scariest, and most grotesque horror films ever made—we can’t recall any other film in which a prepubescent girl stabs herself in the crotch with a crucifix repeatedly and demands that her mother lick her getting this sort of industry approbation. And its overt religiosity, of course, was interpreted as blasphemy by some, with preacher Billy Graham famously calling the film itself “satanic” and claiming that even the celluloid itself that went into the prints was evil, which all seems kind of quaintly hilarious now, but adds to the surprise of the film’s level of establishment acceptance: Hollywood rarely messes with religion. And we’re not talking a random, tip o’ the hat Best Picture nomination—there is depth and breadth to the Academy’s desire to recognize this film: it received ten nominations, across major categories (Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay) and technical categories too (Cinematography, Editing, Sound Mixing and Production Design).
Why Was It Nominated? Well, it is an extraordinarily good horror movie. And of the ten nominations it won just two (Sound Mixing and Screenplay), which could arguably make it a good earlyish example of a practice that has become more common recently, especially since the Best Picture field was widened to ten potential nominees: the “it’s nice just to be here”/“hasn’t got a hope” nomination. But aside from that, let’s look the 1974 Oscars in general: this was a year in which Ingmar Bergman was nominated (for Picture and Director) for “Cries and Whispers,” a foreign-language film in which a character self-mutilates; “Last Tango In Paris” with its explicit anal sex scene, picking up noms for Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando; even Jack Nicholson’s nod for the (at the time) incredibly profane “The Last Detail” deserves a mention. Ah, the seventies, we might say with a misty eye, and we’d probably be right: this was a period in which button-pushing, edgy fare was more routinely rewarded that it is now. Up to a point. In terms of wins, “The Sting” which also got ten nominations, won seven, including Picture and Director. This was William Friedkin’s first film since winning Best Director for “The French Connection” and so it’s very possible that whatever he’d put out next would have gotten an added bump from his newly-minted status as an Oscar-winning director. However, his nomination in that category would mark the last time Friedkin got the nod to date.
How Does It Hold Up Now? “The Exorcist” is still a terrific film, but its impact has necessarily lessened over the years, partly due to the massive, massive shadow it casts on popular culture: it’s unlikely that anyone could come to a viewing of it today without already having seen about a hundred parody references, from the pea-soup vomit to the priestly defenestration to the infamous spider-walk. But that’s perhaps part of the reason it is still a hall-of-famer: you have to see where all those pop culture references came from, and while so doing, you may well be surprised at how genuinely shocking some of those scenes still are in their original form (I refer you back to the crucifix/blood/masturbation/mother scene which still makes me gape).
“Taxi Driver” (1976)
Why Was It A Surprising Nomination? We pretty much could have packed out this entire list with nothing but the films of Martin Scorsese, to be honest. With the exception of “The Aviator” and maybe “Hugo,” when the director makes something that might seem more obviously Academy-friendly, like “The Age Of Innocence” and “Kundun,” he’s overlooked, but when he’s on the territory for which he’s best known—brutal violence, f-bombs, drugs, etc. etc.—he often ends up with a Best Picture nomination, even if it took him nearly thirty years to actually win the thing. “Raging Bull,” “Goodfellas,” “Gangs Of New York” and “The Departed” all hardly feel like Oscar bait on the surface, but it’s the awards success of “Taxi Driver” that feels the most surprising in hindsight. The first time one of Scorsese’s movies landed a Best Picture nod, it’s also one of his darkest: we’d hesitate to call Paul Schrader‘s script nihilistic, because there’s enough religious subtext in there to give it some light, but the story of Travis Bickle, and the grim, seedy version of New York he inhabits, full of dates in porno theaters, child prostitution, would-be assassination and gun rampages, makes it an unfriendly watch even today. In fact, the film only just scraped by with an R-rating, after Scorsese desaturated the color of the blood in the final shootout at the MPAA’s request. As a result, even in the stronger-stomached 1970s, it was attacked in some quarters: Time called it “thoroughly depressing realism,” and the use of the then 13-year-old Jodie Foster was deemed as exploitative by some. It’s also fair to say that the film was released as the tide started to change: the age of the blockbuster had arrived, with “Jaws” a nominee the previous year, and feel-good hit “Rocky” being the film that beat Bickle to the Oscar.
Why Was It Nominated? Again, the film probably went some way towards capturing the mood of a fundamentally depressed nation—the economy was only just starting to pull out of recession, the specter of Vietnam and Watergate lingered (“All The President’s Men” was a nominee the same year), and crime rates were high. Rocky Balboa might have won out on Oscar night, but Travis Bickle was in some ways the more appropriate (anti-) hero for 1976. And for all the film’s bleakness, he could be read as a hero—risking everything to save the innocent(ish) young girl and being hailed for his efforts in the end. It certainly helped that the film was critically praised to the skies—it had already won the Palme D’Or at Cannes the previous spring, confirming Scorsese as the next big thing, cleaned up at the critics’ awards, and picked up stellar reviews of the kind that couldn’t be ignored.
How Does It Hold Up? Impeccably. Whether you find this or “Raging Bull” the peak of Scorsese’s career (some would argue for “Goodfellas,” but they’re wrong), there’s no question that this is the director at the height of his powers, with a deep bench of a cast led by the titanic De Niro, and a hellishly atmospheric picture of NYC.
“An Unmarried Woman” (1978)
Why Was It A Surprising Nominee? It might have been the most daring period in Oscar history, but the late 1960s and 1970s were very much a boys’ club when it came to the Academy Awards (especially in contrast to the early days of the Oscars, which were much more open to what was then broadly-deemed the “woman’s picture” (see “Mrs. Miniver” or “Rebecca,” to name two that won). Look at the films that were nominated or won Best Picture in this time period, and there’s an awful lot of testosterone, from “Midnight Cowboy” and “Patton” through “The French Connection” and “The Godfather” films to “The Sting,” “Rocky” and “The Deer Hunter,” with only the occasional “Love Story” or “Julia” to break it up. Which makes “An Unmarried Woman” all the more of an outlier in the grand scheme of things. Following a wealthy New York woman (Jill Clayburgh, who was also nominated) adjusting to a new life after her husband leaves her for a younger woman), it hailed from writer/director Paul Mazursky, who’d received nominations for penning “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” and “Harry and Tonto,” but who otherwise remained somewhat outside the establishment. Clayburgh, meanwhile, was mostly an unknown face, best known for playing a love interest in “Silver Streak,” leaving supporting player Alan Bates the best known face in the film. And perhaps most importantly of all, this was a film not just about a woman, but about the sexual awakening of a middle-aged woman. You’d be lucky to get a film about that at an indie festival in 2014, let alone in wide release at the end of a decade dominated by the womanizing, hormonal movie brats.
Why Was It Nominated? In part, and like so many of these films, “An Unmarried Woman” came pre-lauded by an international film festival: it had played in-competition at Cannes, and Clayburgh had taken the Best Actress Prize there. The reviews were fairly sensational too, with Ebert calling Clayburgh’s performance “luminous,” and concluded by saying that Mazursky “won’t settle for less than the truth and the humor, and the wonder of ‘An Unmarried Woman’ is that he gets it.” But perhaps more importantly, it landed at the right time. A sea change was coming as the very masculine New Hollywood era came to an end, and in contrast to the films that had come before, the next few years would bring winners and nominees like “Kramer Vs. Kramer,” “Norma Rae,” “Ordinary People,” “On Golden Pond,” “Terms Of Endearment,” “Places In The Heart,” “Out Of Africa” and “The Color Purple,” more sensitive films for a more sensitive 1980s. “An Unmarried Woman” helped to pave the way.
How Does It Hold Up? We’re admittedly very fond of Mazursky, but even we would acknowledge that “An Unmarried Woman” has dated a bit, with the late ’70s being a very different time for women than it is now in general. But there’s enough universality to the picture, enough touching wit and funny pathos, that it’d be worth seeking out even without Clayburgh’s marvelous performance.