What Shoulda' Won 1984's Best Picture? Who Cares?

Well, I’m four chapters into this series and I’m ready to cheat. Why? The 1984 Nominees for Best Picture:

Places in the Heart

A Soldier’s Story

A Passage to India

The Killing Fields

Amadeus

At the risk of sounding like a Philistine, those…are not movies. They’re films.

Places in the Heart, well, I like it, I really really like it – or wait, do I? Or was that The River that I liked? Or Country? Seriously, a tri-fecta of depressing farm movies? A Soldier’s Story is noteworthy for unleashing Denzel on the world, but the movie is fairly burdened with self-importance. I cannot recall one instance, one single moment, in my life, when I have ever had even a hint of desire to see A Passage to India. On the other hand, I remember wanting to seem smart and making my dad take me to see The Killing Fields. I get it, it’s important, but daaaaaaaamn, they might as well have had a warning, “You will neither need nor want popcorn while watching this movie.” Amadeus is more accessible and more fun than I, at 13, ever imagined it would be, but still, it ain’t no movie.

So, here’s the cheat. I’m not picking my favorite among these movies, er, films.

No, the Best Original Screenplay category, while itself lacking the awesomeness of Ghostbusters, Blood Simple, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8the Dimension, and/or Revenge of the Nerds, is nonetheless a much more fun category. Behold:

Places in the Heart

The North

Broadway Danny Rose

Splash

Beverly Hills Cop

Given that only one of these was nominated for Best Picture, it’s pretty easy to guess who won: Robert Benton for Places in the Heart. Love the guy. But this isn’t my favorite of his movies.

The North, never heard of it. Fire away, snobs.

Broadway Danny Rose, haven’t seen it in years, but it was my first Woody Allen movie and as a kid and I thought it was pretty damn funny.

Splash. Love that this got nominated, but I wonder if it has held up. Splash, if I recall, was Touchstone’s first movie. Writers Brian Grazer, Lowell Ganz, Babaloo Mandel, and Bruce Jay Friedman take a very goofy premise and, with big assists from Director Ron Howard, and stars Tom Hanks and John Candy, make it way better than it should be. I would have rather Ghostbusters had taken this spot. It was, as I recall, one of the two or three real zeitgeist movies that year, another being…

Beverly Hills Cop. Has there ever been a fresher jolt of star power than Eddie Murphy in his first few starring vehicles? Starting with 48 Hrs, continuing through Trading Places, and capping the tri-fecta with Beverly Hills Cop, Murphy amazed audiences who seemed to intuit that he was too big for SNL. His many missteps between then and now disappoint and confound because with these three movies, he seemed unstoppable.

Beverly Hills Cop was the first time Murphy was asked to carry a movie, and carry it he does, and he almost didn’t get the part*. From the first time we meet his Axel Foley, he’s all confidence and swagger. Without a doubt, he elevates great material. I know he ad-libbed, but his ad-libbing would not have meant a thing if the story wasn’t there. Sidney Lumet recalls that Dog Day Afternoon was heavily improvised. So should its writer, Frank Pierson, return his screenwriting Oscar for that film? A resounding “No,” according to Lumet, Pierson deserved the Oscar – as much as anyone deserves a subjectively chosen award, of course. Lumet’s point, I think, is that we tend to slightly overrate the importance of dialogue as a storytelling device. None of Murphy’s ad-libbing changed the story that writers Danilo Bach or Dan Petrie, Jr. crafted.

Beverly Hills Cop proved to be a genuine cultural phenomenon. Its synth-pop theme song clogged the airwaves for six months. People went out and paid money, actual money, for T-shirts advertising a high school they had never heard of, because Eddie Murphy wore one. Up until The Passion of the Christ, it was the highest grossing R-rated movie of all time.

*The development of Beverly Hills Cop, from script to screen, could be a movie itself, full of studio politics, odd casting choices, misguided rewrites, and last minute fixes. Bits and pieces of this backstory are available on the movie’s Wikipedia page and its IMDB Trivia section, but they don’t tell the whole story.