Nominees: Jana Aranya (The Middleman), Rocky, Taxi Driver, Outlaw Josey Wales, Chinese Roulette, Insiang
Oscars pick: Rocky
Nominees: All the President’s Men, Bound For Glory, Network, Taxi Driver
Back in the day I was thrilled with Rocky's win. I remember it being the first theatrical release I went to see by myself, and I remember how I fell in love with it. I couldn't get it out of my head. I even bought the novelization and the theme song on a 45.
It boasts a colorful cast: Burgess Meredith as the irascible trainer Micky. Carl Weathers, Burt Young, and Talia Shire. At the lead was Sylvester Stallone, who also wrote the picture and was a Hollywood underdog himself. He came from the school of Brando, and his Balboa is a close cousin to Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront - a broken down fighter who gets a chance of realizing his dream at fighting for the title. It's a sweet story, a romance more than anything - empowering as we relate to and root for the little guy. While it has inspired scores of 'underdog beats the odds' sports films, what was different here was that Rocky loses the bout. The point wasn't to see him crowned champion but to examine what it means to give it your all and prove to yourself that your no bum. While there was a series of sequels, each more polished than the next; none matched the heart and honesty of the first. It's a special film and I wouldn't call it an Oscar mistake as some do, though today I'd rank several ahead of it...
Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver is a gripping tale of urban and mental decay. Robert De Niro is brilliant as the sociopath Travis Bickle. Although he narrates the piece, it's the actor’s physical attributes -his expressions and body language- that lends the performance its strength. Author Danny Peary felt that... "Unlike Marlon Brando or Jack Nicholson, De Niro’s characters are too inarticulate to be effective if they explode verbally, so they must become physically destructive." With that in mind, what happens at the end is inevitable. Taxi Driver is an unpleasant though engrossing look at desperation, loneliness, and a city's seedy underbelly.
While Rocky and Taxi Driver were very much 70s films, the art house production, Cria cuervos (its title comes from the Spanish proverb "Raise ravens and they’ll peck your eyes out") feels contemporary- even though it has allusions to Franco's fascist regime. Directed by Carlos Saura, it's a contemplative movie that centers on a young girl and her sisters who have lost their mother to cancer. Cuervos doesn't romanticize childhood and instead looks at how dark these so-called 'days of innocence' can be. Ana (played by Ana Torrent) believes she has killed her father (who she blames for her mother's death), imagines her own suicide and plans the poisoning of her Aunt. Somehow she doesn't come off an evil figure. I don't know if Torrent was as great an actress as some believe. She's got this open, expressionless face that doesn’t reveal a lot - and we as viewers could be projecting our own feelings on to her. Never the less, she does have these haunted, soulful eyes that draw one in and allows us to feel empathy for her.
Ana is visited by strong memories, visions of her dead mother, played by Geraldine Chaplin (who also pulls double duty as the adult Ana) and through it all we experience both the vast loneliness in life, as well as the intimacy of Ana's interiority. Cria isn't a slam bam, easy watch for the masses. It's somewhat enigmatic and moves like a slow dream. But its multifaceted collision of grief and detachment, memory and family, stayed with me long after the final credits rolled.
Note: I've recently watched Satyajit Ray's Jana Aranya - which is a powerful story of a young man caught in a moral dilemma - and added it to the list of nominees.
Honorable Mentions:
Pradip Mukherjee, Jana Aranya * Clint Eastwood, The Outlaw Josey Wales * John Wayne, The Shootist * Peter Finch & William Holden, Network * David Carradine, Bound for Glory * Sylvester Stallone, Rocky * Dustin Hoffman & Laurence Olivier, Marathon Man * Tetsuya Watari, Yakuza Graveyard
Honorable Mentions:
Sissy Spacek, Carrie * Liv Ullmann, Face to Face * Jodie Foster, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane * Mona Lisa, Insiang * Andrea Schober, Chinese Roulette * Margit Carstensen, Satan's Brew * Annie Girardot, Docteur Françoise Gailland * Dominique Sanda, The Inheritance
Supporting Actress: Jodie Foster, Taxi Driver
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