Best Picture and Director 1987

[The Original BJ]

I didn't have my records in front of me when I wrote my original post, so I forgot to give a shout out to Law of Desire, maybe my favorite Almodóvar film (and there's a lot of competition!) Obviously not a movie that was a part of the Oscar race, but it would have been on my Picture/Director ballots for sure.

[Heksagon]

This year has one excellent film (Broadcast News), one good film (The Last Emperor), one borderline good film (Hope and Glory) and two terrible ones.

Broadcast News is the best film here, and it's easily James L. Brooks' best film also. The film revolves around themes that Brooks obviously knows well, and fortunately, he resisted the temptation to turn the conflicted human relations in this film into the type of sappy romance that his films usually have.

The Last Emperor is another historical epic, although it's strangely missing both the romance and the civil rights themes that the Academy usually likes to see in historical films. This film could have been just a big budget TV movie had some other director done it, but fortunately Bernardo Bertolucci gives this film at least the structure and appearance of a good film, so I do think it's a good movie, even if its characters and themes are rather shallow.

This year also has two of the worst Best Picture nominees of the decade. I'm really surprised about the positive things people here are saying about Moonstruck; I didn't think it was funny or intelligent, I thought it was a mess with artificial, unbelievable characters. I've only seen the film once, a long time ago, and reading these comments gives me the feeling that I should probably give it a second chance.

In any case, Moonstruck is certainly better than Fatal Attraction, one of the worst films ever nominated for Best Picture.

My votes go to Broadcast News and Bernardo Bertolucci.

[The Original BJ]

I would rank Full Metal Jacket as a thoroughly disappointing exclusion in both categories -- it's yet another great triumph for Kubrick, and it deserved quite a bit more attention than the one nomination it got. (I have not yet seen Au Revoir Les Enfants, a movie many people I know think very highly of, so whether I would find that a major omission as well remains to be seen.)

I will say this about Fatal Attraction: it's NOT boring, and as far as lurid thrillers go, I find it to be pretty entertaining, mainly because it has an energy to it and is directed with some real verve. This is not to suggest that Adrian Lyne deserved his directing nomination -- he absolutely did not. But sometimes a movie can be fun without necessarily being art, and for much of the movie's running time, it's kind of a kick. Of course, the original ending -- tying back in the Madame Butterfly thread -- had a noirish irony to it that seems like it would have been vastly superior to what ended up onscreen -- a not-dead-yet resurrection straight out of a Freddy Krueger movie. So even on the level of a pulpy thriller, it falls apart at the end. I think Glenn Close's ferocious portrait of obsession was worthy of recognition; I could never take the movie seriously as a Best Picture or Director candidate at all.

In some ways, The Last Emperor is sort of the flip-side of Fatal Attraction. It's a classy production from top to bottom, with absolutely beautiful photography, sets, and costumes. And Bernardo Bertolucci is obviously a filmmaker with genuine visual gifts, so it doesn't feel as clunky as some of the more lumbering epics to win Oscars. But on a narrative level, I find it fairly unengaging, and it's difficult for me to give votes to something even as well-crafted as this if I just didn't love watching it. I bet at some point I'll give it another try, but I doubt I'd change my mind enough to give it my Best Picture vote. And given that I've already chosen Bertolucci for his bracing '70's work, I'll pass on honoring him again for essentially his Out of Africa.

Based on My Life as a Dog, I wouldn't have expected Lasse Hallström to be the next Ingmar Bergman, but nor would I have expected him to dip so depressingly into turn of the millennium Miramax land the way he did either. My Life as a Dog is a sensitive coming of age movie that deals with some poignant situations in a realistic way, and yet it also contains warm doses of humor that never feel overly quirky. I can't say that I mind it as a nominee in this category, perhaps as recognition for what Hallström's career was before Harvey Weinstein got to him. But nor does he get my vote for what is ultimately a minor movie.

Moonstruck isn't the kind of movie I'd root for as Best Picture, but it's the kind of movie I'd want to see more of -- a mainstream romantic comedy that is intelligent, quite funny, and well-acted by a strong ensemble. (It's really depressing to think about how low this genre has fallen -- today, the romantic comedy seems to mostly exist in the territory of Katharine Heigl/Kate Hudson movies.) It was also nice to see Norman Jewison free from serious racial drama land -- it's not that I think his work here is anything momentous, but he directed his cast to performances both fun and heartfelt, and the film moves along at a quick and snappy pace throughout. As I said, not a landmark or anything, but a thoroughly enjoyable romantic comedy.

Hope and Glory is a rather lovely look at the homefront during wartime Europe, and I like the fact that it manages to set this coming-of-age story against a time of major historical significance without drawing overly reductive parallels between the lessons the young hero learns and the impact of the war. In fact, what makes the movie most impressive -- and surprising, I might add -- is that rather than ever dipping into melodrama, the film relies on its sense of humor to carry it along. And the movie is often really funny, highlighting war's essential absurdity by viewing it through the eyes of a child attempting to process it. Somehow, it all manages to work, to feel touching and funny without trivializing the gravity of the events surrounding the characters. For this, I have to give a lot of credit to John Boorman, for such control of tone throughout. Hope and Glory is also a very good-looking film, with picturesque yet lived-in images, and this combination of tone and visual grace leads me to choose Boorman as Best Director. He's not an overwhelming choice, but he's had a worthy enough career as a filmmaker, and he's worthy enough this year.

But he gets my vote only because James L. Brooks is not on the ballot. For me, Broadcast News is the clear standout of the Best Picture slate. This is a film that feels like many different movies all in one, in all of the best ways. It's a very insightful workplace drama, grounding the actions of the characters in an environment that is consistently compelling and specifically detailed. It's also a great romantic comedy, with the Hurt-Hunter-Brooks triangle full of laughs and heart -- and I honestly didn't know who Hunter would end up with (if either guy) by film's end, which looks like a fairly major accomplishment these days. It's a thematically rich examination of the ethics (or lack thereof) behind the television news industry. And it throws in moments of broad comedy that nonetheless work tremendously well within the tapestry of the rest of the film (i.e. Joan Cusack racing to get the video tape into the machine on time). And the dialogue throughout is just so funny and smart -- Mister Tee already listed the "I certainly hope you'll die soon" killer, but "I would give anything if you were two people so I could call up the one that's my friend and tell her about the one I like so much," and "If anything happens to me, you'll tell every woman I've ever gone out with I was talking about her at the end," and "Except for socially, you're my role model" and on and on all provide such insightful moments of humor amidst heartfelt human foibles. It makes me want to cry a single tear down my face that Brooks didn't make it onto the Director ballot, for what I think is his best and most fully cohesive film. But at least I can vote for Broadcast News as Best Picture.

[Reza]

Voted for Hope and Glory and John Boorman.

Best Picture
1. Au Revoir les Enfants
2. Hope and Glory
3. Jean de Florette / Manon des Sources
4. The Last Emperor
5. Moonstruck

The 6th Spot: Broadcast News

Best Director
1. Louis Malle, Au Revoir les Enfants
2. John Boorman, Hope and Glory
3. Claude Berri, Jean de Florette / Manon des Sources
4. Bernardo Bertolucci, The Last Emperor
5. Norman Jewison, Moonstruck

The 6th Spot: James L. Brooks, Broadcast News

[Mister Tee]

The way the 1987 Oscar race unfolded caught me totally off-guard. Heading into December, I thought it had been a pretty dreary year; there was nothing that seemed best-picture-likely. But there were six unseen December openings with strong enough pedigrees (by cast or director) that I assumed one would turn out to be the savior – Wall Street, Ironweed, September, Broadcast News, Good Morning Vietnam or Empire of the Sun. When Broadcast News swept through the NY critics vote, I thought it had won that particular race, and the die was now cast. But a number of surprising things happened: the LA and National critics showed more enthusiasm than anticipated for John Boorman’s low-grossing September opener Hope and Glory, propelling it into contention; a comedy with Cher that I hadn’t even noted among the December openings turned into a major sleeper hit; the box-office hit Fatal Attraction, which it was hard to believe people took seriously, started showing up at the Globes and Guilds, making it an unexpected c ontender for nomination; and, then, the great shock on nominations day: James Brooks was startlingly omitted from the directing list – the biggest race-changing omission I’d witnessed until the Dreamgirls shutout in ’06 (and I guess you’d say the Affleck blanking this past year -- though that one was obviously turned around). At that point, the field opened for a movie Gene Siskel had been touting relentlessly and the Globes had endorsed…a movie I’d thought of as a non-factor when it opened, but one that ended up sweeping 9 categories. Weird year.

Back up a bit: It’s a little surprising that two well-received and financially successful films from the summer didn’t get more attention: The Untouchables and Full Metal Jacket. The Untouchables was the greatest box-office hit dePalma had yet had, but maybe seemed to voters (as it did to me) too trivial for prizes. Full Metal Jacket was the more impressive, to me – one of my favorites on the year, actually – but I think, after Deer Hunter and Apocalypse a decade back, and Platoon just the year before, Academy members were just Vietnam-ed out.

I can cite a few other movies I genuinely enjoyed that year – The Big Easy (which came during the brief period it seemed Dennis Quaid might become a real star), Housekeeping, Tin Men – but nothing else so strong I need to loudly protest its exclusion.

I’ve already tipped my hand above on Fatal Attraction, whose nominations (beyond Glenn Close’s effective change of image) I found ridiculous. Actually, the first half of the movie wasn’t bad, in simple thriller terms. But it got sillier and sillier as the violence escalated, and the preview-crowd-dictated final grapple – which may have accounted for the film’s outsized success -- went ludicrously over the top. Because the film made so much money, there was the usual pundit attempt to find in the film some deeper meanings about the interaction between the sexes – it was seriously propounded as a metaphor for the AIDS era, or, god help us, some kind of warning to men to be more sensitive to women (because, you know: the Close character may have basically opened her legs on a moment’s notice, but she clearly had to be looking for a meaningful relationship). The best picture nomination here was insulting enough…but the fact that the directors passed over Brooks in favor of Lyne undermines their well-cultivated reputation for superior taste.

My Life as a Dog is such a wee, sincere thing that one is reluctant to give it too much abuse. But it gets in my craw a bit -- the kind of professionally sweet/minor foreign language film that offers no challenge but, because it’s got subtitles, makes audiences (and some Academy voters) feel like they’re supporting higher art by voting it nominations. To be clear: this is not a directing nomination in the tradition of La Dolce Vita/Red/Amour – it’s strictly in A Man and A Woman/La Cage/Il Postino territory.

I know people with quite good taste who swear by The Last Emperor – think it’s an epic on par with Lawrence of Arabia. I think it’s clearly way more engaging and artful than the dread Gandhi (or Braveheart to come), and Bertolucci is far more an auteur than those who usually tackle this genre. But, while I found the film quite beautiful to look at, and solid in the early going, for me the last third felt like the last half – and once those flygirls appeared on the scene, it became hard for me to take the film fully seriously. Nevertheless – give how limited my options are in the category -- I find myself giving Bertolucci my director’s vote, for his visual flair.

Moonstruck came as a very happy surprise. I’d been unimpressed with Shanley’s breakout play Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, and Norman Jewison hadn’t made a movie I’d cared about in many years. Nor had he ever made a movie near as funny as Moonstruck (maybe he sat in on whatever comedy lessons James Ivory took a year earlier). I’m not advocating for Moonstruck as anything above wonderfully enjoyable. But, in a year so moribund, merely having a funny script played by a terrific, fresh cast amounted to a triumph. The film doesn’t get my votes, but it has my respect.

Hope and Glory, as I said, passed through its fall run without making real critical waves, but then ended up showing well in all of the three major critics’ groups’ voting. It was generally a case of “we didn’t appreciate it while it was around, but in December retrospect it looks pretty good” – the film is very nicely detailed and a lot of fun to watch, but it doesn’t re-invent any wheels. Boorman probably ranks second in both my votes, but secures neither of them.

I just think Broadcast News is the best written and acted film of the year, and, in the absence of any truly bravura work, I’d have probably voted for Brooks under directing as well. All three lead performances are superb – maybe Hurt especially praiseworthy, for being able to conceal his penetrating intelligence without making Tom look like a simpleton. And the script is terrifically witty, with many a line worth filing away (“Jim, if there’s anything I can do…” “Well – you can die, soon”), a well-constructed love triangle where the three participants are actually evenly matched, and a keen eye for the path down which TV news was travelling (hard to believe how much worse the network news has become even since the film was made). A bum year, overall, but Broadcast News is worth savoring, and easily gets my vote here.

[ksrymy]

My picks

Best Picture
1. Broadcast News
2. The Dead
3. The Princess Bride
4. Wings of Desire
5. Full Metal Jacket

Best Director
1. Wim Wenders, Wings of Desire
2. John Huston, The Dead
3. Stanley Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket
4. James L. Brooks, Broadcast News
5. Bernardo Bertolucci, The Last Emperor

[mlrg]

In a year my two favourite films of the year (Empire of the Sun and The Untouchables) were left out of this race I almost want to abstain.

I voted for Moonstruck and Bertolucci.

[Big Magilla]

I'm not very studied on this particular year, why was Broadcast News not nominated for Best Director?

Possibly because they thought Brooks had already been amply rewarded with the 3 Oscars he won for Terms of Endearment and the virtual certainty that he would be nominated for Best Picture and Screenplay for Broadcast News but his lack of a Best Director nomination was a surprise.

[OscarGuy]

I'm not very studied on this particular year, why was Broadcast News not nominated for Best Director?

[Greg]

On the basis of sheer entertainment value and joy, I am voting for Monnstruck and Jewison.

[Big Magilla]

As far as I'm concerned, there were only two strong candidates for this year's Best Picture and Director wins. One was nominated for Best Picture and six other Oscars but lost them all. The other was nominated for two Oscars, but not for Best Picture. Neither was nominated for Best Director. At the other end of the spectrum a total piece of garbage was nominated for both Best Picture and Director and all the other nominees in both categories were middle-of-the-road floaters, one of which floated to an incredible nine wins, taking everything it was nominated for.

The film that shouldn't have gotten anywhere near an Oscar race except maybe for Best Actress was hack director Adrian Lyne's Fatal Attraction.

Lyne started out as a director TV commercials and most of his films look like nothing more than long commercials, though for what I have no idea. To add insult to injury, this is the film that stole the Best Picture and Director spots that should have gone to John Huston for his posthumously released adaptation of James Joyce's The Dead. The only other film worthy of competing with Huston's late career masterpiece was James L. Brooks' Terms of Endearment which I guess hit too close to the heart of show biz to take home any Oscars although with seven nominations it was obviously as well liked by the industry as it was by the critics.

The rest of the nominees were decent enough, but the nine Oscars granted Bernardo Bertolucci and The Last Emperor was a bit extravagant. Although the film moves better than the last epic winner - Gandhi - it is in the end just as exhausting to sit through.

John Boorman's Hope and Glory was a nice nostalgia piece about the British home-front during World War II, although we've seen better in TV productions.

Norman Jewison's Moonstruck was a nice bit of fluff, but lightweight Best Picture and Director material. In fact, the DGA must have thought so, too. Jewison was left off their list in order to give another nomination to by now perennial favorite Steven Spielberg for Empire of the Sun, a decent World War II epic featuring a star-making performance by 13 year-old Christian Bale.

Other films of note, though none of them quite Best Picture material either, included Claude Berri's one-two epic punch of Jean de Florette and its sequel, Manon of the Spring; Lasse Hallstrom's boyhood tale, Life as a Dog for which the director was a Best Director nominee; Louis Malle's stunning tale of innocents and Nazis, Au Revoir les Enfants, nominated for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Screenplay; Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam war film, Full Metal Jacket; Brian De Palma's The Untouchables featuring Sean Connery's Oscar winning supporting performance; Stephen Frears' cautionary Prick Up Your Ears featuring Vanessa Redgrave's superb non-nominated performance and James Ivory's film of E.M. Forster's Maurice which failed to ignite the box office as last year's A Room With a View had.

My Best Picture vote goes to Broadcast News and a hats off vote for Boorman for Hope and Glory.