I also agree that one should not vote unless all five are seen. I have that as a principle unless I’m only missing one nomination and my choice among the other four is so strong I vote anyway. A good example is best supporting actor 1996. I’ve never seen James Woods/Ghosts of Mississipi but William H. Macy is such a deserving winner for me that I voted anyway.
On the other hand if none of the four deserves my vote I abstain from voting until I watch all five. And sometimes it’s not really a good decision, like this poll for instance. I’ve only seen The Landlord for the first time a couple of months ago, but I’ve seen the other four such a long time ago that I don’t remember which one stands out so I have a hard time voting and decide to abstain. I guess I should take notes (thank god for letterboxd now).
Best Supporting Actress 1970
Re: Best Supporting Actress 1970
I think you're right. Tbh, at some point a while back I think I voted for Karen Black. If I had the option to change my vote (or null it until then), I would check out Airport and rectify that choice.flipp525 wrote
I think you assume wrong, Sabin. It’s worth seeing every nominated acting performance just to say you have (aren’t we all trying to be Oscar completists?). But also to be able to assess each category. No one should truly be voting in these polls until they’ve seen all the nominated performances.
Airport, as hokey as it seems at times, is a part of the history of cinema and a progenitor of the “disaster film” that took over the 70s. I also find Maureen Stapleton’s performance unexpectedly heartbreaking. At times, it seems like she’s in an entirely different movie.
I agree that Lee Grant is excellent in The Landlord. A well-deserved nomination.
The Landlord is such an interesting film. I'm sure something like it is ripe for a remake today.
"How's the despair?"
Re: Best Supporting Actress 1970
I think you assume wrong, Sabin. It’s worth seeing every nominated acting performance just to say you have (aren’t we all trying to be Oscar completists?). But also to be able to assess each category. No one should truly be voting in these polls until they’ve seen all the nominated performances.Sabin wrote: (I still assume I don't need to see Airport).
Airport, as hokey as it seems at times, is a part of the history of cinema and a progenitor of the “disaster film” that took over the ‘70s. I also find Maureen Stapleton’s performance unexpectedly heartbreaking. At times, it seems like she’s in an entirely different movie.
I agree that Lee Grant is excellent in The Landlord. A well-deserved nomination.
Last edited by flipp525 on Thu Jul 28, 2022 11:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
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Re: Best Supporting Actress 1970
Just saw The Landlord for the first time. I would need to revisit Five Easy Pieces and M*A*S*H to make a contemporary assess of who is best of the three (I still assume I don't need to see Airport) but the film makes better use of Lee Grant's strengths than Shampoo IMO. It's a very funny performance. I understand why she didn't win for it. It doesn't really deepen out as the film goes on. She remains a caricature of white liberals from beginning to end, but for me that's a virtue to the overall film which I liked quite a bit. It's a shaggy affair that I found amiable enough at the beginning. It takes a little while to get going, spending quite a bit of time in affluenza in the first act and I'm still not convinced it gets out of second gear enough. Or rather, I thought I was going to be watching a movie about a landlord who buys a tenement and plans to evict the tenets and yet spends very little time actually doing that. You'd think those scenes would be a given (the title: "Watch the landlord get his."). Instead, it becomes a funky little sitcom about an out-of-touch white guy who gets an education in the world around him. What I liked so much about the film is that we're never really asked to identify with Elgar Enders (Bridges, very funny). He's an impossibly awkward intruder into this world. My favorite moment is when Fanny puts their child up for adoption and says he wants the baby to be adopted as white "so he can grow up casual like his daddy."
There's something missing from this film. I'm trying to figure out what it is. Maybe it's because Elgar is treated like so much of a joke throughout that we're afforded limited identification with his emotional journey. Then again, that's probably the point.
There's something missing from this film. I'm trying to figure out what it is. Maybe it's because Elgar is treated like so much of a joke throughout that we're afforded limited identification with his emotional journey. Then again, that's probably the point.
"How's the despair?"
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Big Magilla
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Re: Best Supporting Actress 1970
I don't know whether he was drunk or not, but Gig Young suffered from severe mental problmes for years. His character in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, although unque in his career, was closer to his real persona than the amiable characters he usually played. I worked at 810 7th Avenue (at 50th St.) in New York from 1970-1976 and would see many famous people in the building, stndning outside or walking up and down 7th Avenue and Broadway (on the other side of the building). The scariest by far was 6'1" Gig Young who always walked fast, head slightly bowed with a scowl on his face as though daring anyone to come up to him. Although it was a shock when in 1978 he shot and killed his 21 year-old bride of three months and then turned the gun on himself in his apartment over Carnegie Hall, it was not surprising in retrospect.
Re: Best Supporting Actress 1970
Gig Young seems drunk and very off (and thin) in his presentation of the Oscar to Rosalind Russell accepting for Helen Hayes. He rushes her off the stage in an oddly hurried manner as well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7jr0Pcpd4k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7jr0Pcpd4k
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-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
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I can't recall a single thing about Airport, and the fact that neither of these performances stands out in my memory can't be a good thing.
Sally Kellerman and Lee Grant each give probably the best performances of their careers here. Neither can quite stand up to Karen Black, though (even though Lois Smith is even better in the film!). She gets my vote hands down.
Sally Kellerman and Lee Grant each give probably the best performances of their careers here. Neither can quite stand up to Karen Black, though (even though Lois Smith is even better in the film!). She gets my vote hands down.
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I think, of all the fluky hits of that era, MASH had to be the flukiest. Do people realize just how enormous a success it was? It grossed over $80 million. Given this was an era of $3 movie tickets, that approximates out to Transformers-level today. Substantially bigger than Midnight Cowboy or Bonnie and Clyde, or even The French Connection. An Altman film, for Christ's sake.
John Irving once said that, if something with artistic aspirations becomes a huge commercial success, it's probably the result of a misunderstanding. MASH's misunderstanding was largely that, while critics and young crowds grooved on its anti-war iconoclasticism, general audiences could view it as basically Sgt. Bilko with an R-rating. I remember a guy I know, not remotely sophisticated, calling it "the funniest damn movie I've ever seen". You could make the case that lucking into this one accidental hit enabled Altman to make almost every other film he ever turned out.
As for the sexism -- Eric, you're right, the great 70s boom was essentially male-ruled. Year after year, we marveled at exciting, inventive films, and at the same time lamented there were no roles for women. It's worth noting that this reflected society as a whole. Feminism, like gay rights, was a late tag-on to the grab-bag of demands emerging from the 60s, not really taken seriously till after the anti-war protests had begun to dwindle. Even in revolutionary circles, sexism was rampant -- witness Stokely Carmichael's infamous "The only proper position for women in the movement is prone".
I think movies from the late 60s/early 70s appear particularly sexist because they were expressing the first signs of sexual liberation, but dealing with them almost exclusively from the male point of view. I doubt I could communicate to you just how sexless a society postwar America was prior to the sexual revolution. A friend of mine -- like me, raised in an Irish Catholic household -- said he was never taught sex was dirty because that would have implied it even existed. Sex in America in that era was like terrorism prior to 9/11 -- barely spoken of in general company. It became an act of hipsterism to be open about sexual matters. But, given that it was a movement coming strictly from the male mind, it mostly amounted to displaying lots of naked, willing women (not that there's anything wrong with that). Some time later, Hugh Hefner was condemned as an exploiter of women, but at the time he was an architect of liberation, and the coolest guys competed to be on his TV shows or hang around his mansion.
So, when you see bikini-ed babes flounce around in Dr. Strangelove or Lord Love a Duck, or the treatment of Hot Lips in MASH, be aware that that was, for a short while, seen as standing up to the restrictive mores of 50s America. It took a while for the other side to make its voice heard.
John Irving once said that, if something with artistic aspirations becomes a huge commercial success, it's probably the result of a misunderstanding. MASH's misunderstanding was largely that, while critics and young crowds grooved on its anti-war iconoclasticism, general audiences could view it as basically Sgt. Bilko with an R-rating. I remember a guy I know, not remotely sophisticated, calling it "the funniest damn movie I've ever seen". You could make the case that lucking into this one accidental hit enabled Altman to make almost every other film he ever turned out.
As for the sexism -- Eric, you're right, the great 70s boom was essentially male-ruled. Year after year, we marveled at exciting, inventive films, and at the same time lamented there were no roles for women. It's worth noting that this reflected society as a whole. Feminism, like gay rights, was a late tag-on to the grab-bag of demands emerging from the 60s, not really taken seriously till after the anti-war protests had begun to dwindle. Even in revolutionary circles, sexism was rampant -- witness Stokely Carmichael's infamous "The only proper position for women in the movement is prone".
I think movies from the late 60s/early 70s appear particularly sexist because they were expressing the first signs of sexual liberation, but dealing with them almost exclusively from the male point of view. I doubt I could communicate to you just how sexless a society postwar America was prior to the sexual revolution. A friend of mine -- like me, raised in an Irish Catholic household -- said he was never taught sex was dirty because that would have implied it even existed. Sex in America in that era was like terrorism prior to 9/11 -- barely spoken of in general company. It became an act of hipsterism to be open about sexual matters. But, given that it was a movement coming strictly from the male mind, it mostly amounted to displaying lots of naked, willing women (not that there's anything wrong with that). Some time later, Hugh Hefner was condemned as an exploiter of women, but at the time he was an architect of liberation, and the coolest guys competed to be on his TV shows or hang around his mansion.
So, when you see bikini-ed babes flounce around in Dr. Strangelove or Lord Love a Duck, or the treatment of Hot Lips in MASH, be aware that that was, for a short while, seen as standing up to the restrictive mores of 50s America. It took a while for the other side to make its voice heard.
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I've been nulling my vote for a quarter century now. Feels like just yesterday I was voting.
I haven't seen Airport so I guess I can't vote. Black, Grant, and Kellerman are very good nominees. I don't love M*A*S*H but Kellerman is incredibly funny. Really it's between Black and Grant for me. The revisionist in me would love to give this one to Grant and pave a way for Tomlin in '75, but Karen Black does such an outstanding job in Five Easy Pieces. I like what Damien says about her being heartbreaking while not overtly plugging away for pathos. She would get my vote.
I haven't seen Airport so I guess I can't vote. Black, Grant, and Kellerman are very good nominees. I don't love M*A*S*H but Kellerman is incredibly funny. Really it's between Black and Grant for me. The revisionist in me would love to give this one to Grant and pave a way for Tomlin in '75, but Karen Black does such an outstanding job in Five Easy Pieces. I like what Damien says about her being heartbreaking while not overtly plugging away for pathos. She would get my vote.
"How's the despair?"
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This is turning out to be the most surprising year we've done so far.
I thought Karen Back would edge out Sally Kellerman in the voting. Thus far Black is edging out Lee Grant 6-5 and Kellerman doesn't have a single vote! Even Helen Hayes and Maureen Stapleton have one. Won't somebody please vote for "Hot Lips"?
The movie years 1969 and 1970 were an exciting time. The production code was dead. People were making edgier films. Films that couldn't have been made just a few years earlier like Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, Last Summer and If... were all the rage in 1969. Even John Wayne could say "son-of-a-bitch" now and win an Oscar!
1970 continued the trend with thoughtful works like Five Easy Pieces, outrageous comedies like M*A*S*H, a wilder Fellini (Satyricon) and a daring Russell (Women in Love).
The dying studio system could still whip up Oscar support for films like Hello, Dolly!, Anne of the Thousand Days and Airport and the public came to see them, but the once competent film-makers like Gene Kelly and George Seaton who made these films seemed to have lost their touch. It wasn't just that the edgier films were different. It's that they were better made. The old-style Hollywood films not only couldn't compare to the new works they couldn't hold a candle to films in their own genres.
Hello, Dolly! was miscast with a too-young star, Anne of the Thousand Days was an embarrassment three years after the brilliant A Man for All Seasons covered the same territory and Airport, though an admitted crowd-pleaser, was not as exciting as The High and the Mighty.
I thought Karen Back would edge out Sally Kellerman in the voting. Thus far Black is edging out Lee Grant 6-5 and Kellerman doesn't have a single vote! Even Helen Hayes and Maureen Stapleton have one. Won't somebody please vote for "Hot Lips"?
The movie years 1969 and 1970 were an exciting time. The production code was dead. People were making edgier films. Films that couldn't have been made just a few years earlier like Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, Last Summer and If... were all the rage in 1969. Even John Wayne could say "son-of-a-bitch" now and win an Oscar!
1970 continued the trend with thoughtful works like Five Easy Pieces, outrageous comedies like M*A*S*H, a wilder Fellini (Satyricon) and a daring Russell (Women in Love).
The dying studio system could still whip up Oscar support for films like Hello, Dolly!, Anne of the Thousand Days and Airport and the public came to see them, but the once competent film-makers like Gene Kelly and George Seaton who made these films seemed to have lost their touch. It wasn't just that the edgier films were different. It's that they were better made. The old-style Hollywood films not only couldn't compare to the new works they couldn't hold a candle to films in their own genres.
Hello, Dolly! was miscast with a too-young star, Anne of the Thousand Days was an embarrassment three years after the brilliant A Man for All Seasons covered the same territory and Airport, though an admitted crowd-pleaser, was not as exciting as The High and the Mighty.