Bases 13

And The Oscar Could Have Gone To...., Part 3:
Alternate Best Picture Winners
At The Academy Awards
by Chris Oakley

Summary:

Having covered four-plus decades’ worth of potential cinematic PODs in our two previous chapters, we’ll now start to look at some of the ways Academy Awards history could have been rewritten in the‘70s and early ‘80s. In particular, we’ll see how pop culture (not to mention a few careers) could have been changed if one beloved screen classic had gotten the Best Picture Oscar-- or another one hadn’t...

#13: ...An Offer He CAN Refuse: Godfather loses in the Best Picture
category(1972)

Is there anybody left in the United States who isn’t familiar with the Godfather movie trilogy? From the “make him an offer he can’t refuse” line in the first movie to the gruesome execution of Fredo Corleone in the sequel to Michael Corleone’s anguished shout of “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” in one of the most dramatic moments of Godfather III, the Mafia-centered film saga has embedded itself in pop culture to the point where even if you’ve never seen any other gangster flicks you can instantly pick up on Godfather references. We’ve even seen the Sonny Corleone machine gun slaying sequence from Godfather I parodied on The Simpsons. When the original Godfather won the Oscar for Best Picture at the 1972 Academy Awards, it officially cemented the movie’s place in history as a bona fide American cultural phenomenon.

But imagine that Godfather had lost out on the Best Picture nod to one of the other four films which had been nominated in that category. Could that have kept the mob saga from attaining the lofty heights it did in OTL? Maybe not, but it certainly would have made the climb up a good deal harder. Godfather wasn’t a crime drama in the traditional sense; to use an analogy with a more recent hit gangster film, David Mamet’s reboot of The Untouchables, there was no Eliot Ness to Marlon Brando’s Al Capone. Indeed, some of the cop characters in Godfather later turn out to be more criminal than the criminals themselves. So it was a bit of a challenge finding somebody to pull for in either the original movie or its spin-offs. For that matter, there may very well have not even been spin-offs.

And if there hadn’t been two sequels to Godfather, one of the most popular TV series of all time, The Sopranos, might have ended up “sleeping with the fishes”.

#14: Attica! Attica!: Dog Day Afternoon upsets One Flew Over TheCuckoo’s Nest for Best Picture(1975)

And speaking of Al Pacino’s cinematic resumé, now would be a good time to look back on one of his more eccentric movie offerings,Dog Day Afternoon. Suffice it to say that his flustered, high-strung would-be bank robber character in Day is a far cry from the dominating‘force of nature’ type we’re used to seeing him portray in films like the Godfather trilogy or more recent Pacino flicks such as Scent Of AWoman or Glengarry Glen Ross. The character’s motivation for carrying out the botched robbery attempt-- to get money for a friend’s ‘gender reassignment’ surgery --certainly isn’t typical Pacino. The Academy’s voters were more inclined to bestow the Best Picture laurels on the Milos Forman-directed mental hospital drama One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, whose protagonist(Jack Nicholson) was a more typically robust kind of cinematic hero and in spite of his outward manifestations of lunacy actually comes across as more put-together than Pacino’s alter ego.

But suppose for a minute that the Academy had decided to throw conventional wisdom to the winds and bestow the coveted Best Picture trophy on Dog Day Afternoon. For one thing, it would have accelerated Pacino’s rise to superstardom. For another thing, it might have made Hollywood safer for slightly off-center films like Day. And on top of that, it might have inspired studio execs in Hollywood to be that much more daring in seeking out unconventional subject material for future screen projects. Last but not least, the real-life holdup which first inspired Day would have gotten a much higher profile in the annals of American crime.

#15: The Force Is Strong With This One: Star Wars: A New Hope wins the Best Picture Academy Award(1977)

It was one of the great cinematic and pop cultural juggernauts of the late 20th century. Growing from a wish by USC film school grad George Lucas to make a movie that recalled the spirit of the old Flash Gordon serials of the ‘30s, Star Wars permanently enshrined the summer blockbuster as an integral part of the film business and would help to solidify science fiction’s toe hold in the Hollywood mainstream. From there it would go on to transform American pop culture as a whole-- and even spawn a groundbreaking animated TV series and computer game franchise. So what more could an Academy Award for Best Picture have done for this movie’s prestige?

Plenty, it turns out. With Oscar’s stamp of approval on it,Star Wars could have acted as the proverbial “tip of the spear” for a greater acceptance of science fiction as a viable prime-time genre in the TV industry. Furthermore, directors who had traditionally been loath to go anywhere near sci-fi might have been encouraged to have a go at the genre to see if they could follow in Lucas’ footsteps. It might have even encouraged a certain former resident of Kapuskasing, Ontario, Canada to draft the script for The Terminator a few years early....

#16: Charlie Don’t Surf!: Apocalypse Now beats out Kramer vs. Kramer for the Best Picture Oscar(1979)

No knock on Dustin Hoffman or Meryl Streep, but frankly it’s baffled me for years that Kramer got the Best Picture nod instead ofApocalypse, which for my money is one of the greatest war films in the history of cinema. Alongside All Quiet On The Western Front, Platoon, and The Longest Day Francis Ford Coppola’s re-imagining of the Joseph Conrad novel “Heart Of Darkness” serves as an eloquent testimony to the gruesome realities of modern wars and the valor of the men that have to fight them. Nobody who’s ever seen Apocalypse comes away from it unaffected. In some ways, it could be regarded as the Hurt Locker of the disco era.

Now let’s ponder for just a second how the course of movie history in general, and Coppola’s career specifically, might have been altered if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had seen fit to roll the dice and grant him the Best Picture award that a lot of movie-watchers(yours truly being one of them) he rightly deserved. One obvious benefit, of course, is that the world would have been spared the 90-octane disaster which was One From The Heart: coming off an Oscar win for a drama, Coppola wouldn’t have been too likely to fritter away his time or credibility the kind of frivolity Heart represented.

#17: Main Drag: Gandhi loses to Tootsie in the Best Picture category (1982)

Prestige pictures usually tend to carry the day over comedy films around Oscar time. A textbook example of this was Gandhi’s win over Tootsie in the Best Picture category at the 1982 Oscars; however funny the spectacle of a man donning women’s clothes in order to get a TV soap role might have been, the gravitas of Mahatma Gandhi’s life story gave Ben Kingsley’s opus the inside track when it came time to pass out the gold statues. And things haven’t changed all that much since then.

But suppose for a minute that the Academy had decided to buck tradition and bestow the Best Picture gold statuette on Tootsie? Now you’ve got some food for thought to munch on. A win by Tootsie in the Best Picture race over Gandhi would have been a major game-changer, to say the least. For one thing, transvestism might have become a more acceptable topic for movie plotlines five years sooner than in our own history. For another thing historical epics, which due to budgetary issues are hard to get made or released even in the best of economic times, would have gone into a bit of a dry spell in the face of the recession which was then gripping the movie industry along with the rest of the American economy.

Last but not least, Kingsley might have had to wait until the early ‘90s-- possibly even longer --before becoming internationally known as a film star. At the time he signed on to do Gandhi, Kingsley was mainly recognized for his TV roles on the BBC, including a stint on the long-running soap opera Coronation Street. Had he lost out to Hoffman on Oscar night, it could potentially been a huge setback for his quest to establish himself as a genuine international cinematic luminary.

In our next chapter we’ll turn to some of the Oscar winners of the late ‘80s and the first half of the ‘90s and see how the film world in the final decades of the 20th century might have been changed if just one or two ballots among the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had been cast differently....