What Shoulda' Won Best Picture: 1981 Edition

The Who Should Have Won/Been Nominated For the Oscar debate is a fun one, for participants and observers. It’s always funny to me how seriously critics take themselves, and they get even more prissier and more sanctimonious around Oscar time. I thought’d it fun to look back at the Oscars, starting with the year I first watched the ceremony, and give my take on why I thought so-and-so should have won.

I will take a given year, narrow down the Best Picture Nominees to two, maybe three, one of which will be my favorite. Then I’ll pick which movie should have won, and patiently wait for all of you to tell me how wrong I am. I might jump from year to year if I get bored, but for now, the rules are that I start with the year I started watching the Oscars and continue on chronologically. Another rule certain to be broken: I’m writing about Best Picture nominees and winners, other categories are not included. Oh, and I will try to refrain from hopping on the soapbox to trumpet a movie that wasn’t nominated, like, say Unidentified Flying Oddball (1979), which was and is way better than either Apocalypse Now (consensus shoulda won) and Kramer Vs. Kramer (winner winner French Toast for dinner).

I first tuned in to the Oscar telecast in 1982, when I was eleven years old. At the risk of over-defending myself, please understand that I became hooked on the Oscar telecast for nerdy reasons, not for faaaabulous reasons. Just putting that out there.

The 1981 Nominees:

Atlantic City – Never saw this movie. Probably never will, due to the fact that Nolte rejected my idea for a comprehensive series entitled: Movies in Which Susan Sarandon Has Appeared Naked.

On Golden Pond – I remember liking this movie way more than I thought I would, considering I really wanted to see Sharkey’s Machine. I think I had my dad talked into it, too, but mom interfered.

Reds – In half-ass researching 1982, I found that this ode to commies and the commie chicks who love them was the pretty odds-on favorite to win. I don’t love the movie, but I kind of admire it, sort of.

Chariots of Fire – I did not, did not, did not want to see this movie, the Best Picture Winner of 1981. But we had already seen Super Fuzz and me, my dad, and my brother couldn’t convince my mom and my sisters to go see Enter the Ninja. Three dudes versus three women, and the women won. “Why can’t we just split up?” I groused as the lights dimmed. But you know what? I did kinda like it, and I continue to appreciate it. It’s slow, but it’s a good story, with inspirational themes.

Raiders of the Lost Ark – I didn’t — wait for it — want to see this one, either, because I was obviously a brat and a half. Besides, I heard it took place in 1936. But for once, my dad wasn’t on my side, and he made me go, opening night, and God bless his dearly departed soul for it. If I had known about the melting faces, I never would have argued, but the surprise would have been ruined. I saw it twenty-six times in the theatre. There were no video stores at the time. Cable wasn’t popular. Every time I saw it, I did so with the seemingly inescapable feeling that this could possibly be the last time I ever saw it. Probably not, but hell, my parents didn’t let me see Jaws in the theatre, forcing me to wait until, what – 1978? – to see it on regular TV, on a Sunday night. As it began, I saw three words onscreen. “Dad? What does Edited for Television mean?” “It means this isn’t the real movie,” my sister answered.

So, yes, I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark twenty-six times, fifteen or so times at the dollar theatre, the scratched print jerking through the clunky projector, whole frames missing. When video finally hit it really big, the first movie I bought was…Reds. I kid, I kid.

Therefore, is it really any contest? For me, this race comes down to Chariots of Fire and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Of the five nominees, Raiders remains the most, if not the only, beloved movie of the bunch. Not one time in the last twenty five years has anyone in the world walked into a video store and excitedly asked for Atlantic City for any other reason than to sound cool, as in, “I’m on a Louis Malle kick.”

Maybe I’m wrong, but this much is certain: Raiders of the Lost Ark was and is the only one of the nominees to contain melting faces.

Raiders remains, to me, the greatest example of how to get an action movie right. The obvious reason the movie has endured is that it’s a fun action movie. Bourne is fine, and all, but hardly what I’d call fun. You’d be hard pressed to top the fun and humor of Indy, from its dialogue (“Asps. Very dangerous. You go first.”), to its unbelievably paced chases and fights.

But there are a lot of fun movies that don’t really endure, and it’s Raiders’ overall intelligence that leads to little things that make the movie endure.

I remember this being the first time it occurred to me that a movie could be smart, and that a character’s smart moves could add tension and affect everything. Like when Indy finds Marion in the tent, an awesome reunion, and he…leaves her there!? His reasoning makes perfect sense from his and our perspective, but creates more tension between the couple.

It’s also really efficient. We only know what we need to know, if that. What happened – I mean really happened? — between Marion and Indy all those years ago before the narrative kicks in? She seems happy to see him, then she punches him. Says something about how he treated her, to which the coolest guy ever replies, “You knew what you were doing.” That’s all we need to know. I can almost certainly guarantee if this movie or something like it were made today we would know. Every. Little. Detail. And it might not make it a bad movie, but at best, it would nag at us.

The clever screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan is layered with payoffs big and small. I’m not talking about twists, I’m talking about the filmmakers planting an idea that later reveals itself to have great impact on the narrative. Like the scar on Toht’s hand, which blew me away as a ten year-old. Floored me. Or meeting Marion as she destroys the competition in a drinking game. Seems like a cool intro to a cool chick, but later, she’ll put her incomprehensible tolerance to alcohol to a real test. But the more subtle payoff comes in perhaps my favorite scene in movies, in which faces melt as they never have before or since, and Indy realizes what his true internal goal had been all along.

The Arc of the Covenant is only a MacGuffin. A great one, one most of us have heard of, but is perfectly explained for heathens and Army Intelligence (“Didn’t you guys ever go to Sunday School?”). Eons better than three obscure rocks or a crystal skull of myth, and somehow better than even the Holy Grail. But it’s really just an excuse for us to watch Indy come to respect the supernatural. The plant comes early, in a brilliantly shot sequence in Indy’s stateside house. It seems like pure exposition, one long shot of Brody explaining the mission. Indy asking questions. Will Marion be there? I dunno. Brody wonders if they’re messing with something they can’t comprehend, and Indy laughs him off, doesn’t believe in superstition, hocus pocus, but Brody warns him to be careful anyway. Indy promises he will, before tossing a loaded gun nonchalantly on the bed. Spielberg cuts to the gun, and we’ve just been told what the movie is really about, and while we sense it, we don’t really even know it until the end. Just before those faces melt.