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1975
The winner is listed first, in CAPITAL letters.
Filmsite's Greatest Films
of 1975
Actor:
JACK NICHOLSON in "One
Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest", Walter Matthau in "The
Sunshine Boys", Al Pacino in "Dog Day Afternoon",
Maximilian Schell in "The Man in the Glass Booth",
James Whitmore in "Give 'Em Hell, Harry!"
Actress:
LOUISE FLETCHER in "One
Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest", Isabelle Adjani in "The
Story of Adele H.", Ann-Margret in "Tommy", Glenda
Jackson in "Hedda", Carol Kane in "Hester Street"
Supporting Actor:
GEORGE BURNS in "The Sunshine Boys", Brad Dourif in "One
Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest", Burgess Meredith in "The
Day of the Locust", Chris Sarandon in "Dog Day Afternoon",
Jack Warden in "Shampoo"
Supporting Actress:
LEE GRANT in "Shampoo", Ronee Blakley in "Nashville",
Sylvia Miles in "Farewell, My Lovely", Lily Tomlin
in "Nashville",
Brenda Vaccaro in "(Jacqueline Susann's) Once Is Not Enough"
Director:
MILOS FORMAN for "One
Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest", Robert Altman for "Nashville",
Federico Fellini for "Amarcord", Stanley Kubrick for
"Barry Lyndon", Sidney Lumet for "Dog Day Afternoon"
 Director
Milos Forman's One
Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest was the first film since It
Happened One Night (1934) that swept the five major
Oscar awards - called the Big Five:
- Best Picture (for producers Saul Zaentz and
Michael Douglas - with his first feature production)
- Best Director
- Best Actor
- Best Actress
- Best Adapted Screenplay (for Lawrence Hauben
and Bo Goldman)
The record-tying film (with nine nominations
and five wins) was an adaptation of Ken Kesey's 1962
anti-authoritarian novel and Dale Wasserman's play about an
unbending, repressive mental institution that lobotomizes attempts
at independence, and one man's anti-establishment attempt to
bring life and spirit into the rigid, conformist system.
The other four films nominated for Best Picture
were an interesting mixture:
- Stanley Kubrick's three hour, beautifully-filmed
adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel about an
18th century English rogue - a hand-crafted, bold, epic period
costume drama, Barry Lyndon (with seven nominations
and four wins). Kubrick's leisurely, opulently-photographed
film won a number of technical awards (Best Cinematography
(John Alcott), Best Art/Set Direction, Best Costume Design,
and Best Music Scoring Adaptation) - Kubrick was credited
with three of the seven nominations: Best Picture (production),
Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay
- Sidney Lumet's masterpiece based on a real-life
incident, Dog Day Afternoon (with six nominations
and only one win - for Best Original Screenplay), an offbeat,
energetic drama about a heist-gone-wrong, featuring a crazed,
frustrated, bi-sexual man who robs a bank to obtain funds
to finance a sex-change operation for his transvestite/gay
lover (Chris Sarandon)
- then-unknown, 29 year-old director Steven
Spielberg's manipulative Jaws (with
four nominations and three wins - Best Sound, Best Film Editing,
and Best Original Score for John William's recognizable 'da-da...da-da' score)
- a truly scary, summer mega-hit (the highest grossing hit
in movie history at the time, and the first real blockbuster
which inspired other summer blockbusters in future years)
about a large shark that was terrorizing an ocean coast -
a tale based on Peter Benchley's novel of the same name [Note:
previous Best Picture-nominated blockbusters had won - such
as Gone
With the Wind (1939), The
Sound of Music (1965), and The
Godfather (1972)]
- Robert Altman's innovative classic with a
tremendous ensemble cast of two dozen characters, the sprawling,
improvisational satire on country-western culture, singers,
politicians, and America in Nashville (with
five nominations and only one win - for Keith Carradine's
laidback original song: "I'm Easy" - Carradine
became the first Oscar-winning composer to perform
his own winning song in a film)
For his first major film and box-office hit,
Czech director Milos Forman won the Best Director award for One
Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Robert Altman lost in
his second bid for the Best Director honor (he had been nominated
previously for M*A*S*H (1970)). Surprisingly, Steven
Spielberg was not nominated for Best Director for Jaws.
In his place, Federico Fellini was nominated as Best Director
for Amarcord, based on Fellini's reflections of his
childhood in a coastal Italian town in pre-war Italy. [The
film was also nominated for Fellini's Original Screenplay -
the film won the Foreign Language Film Award for 1974].
The winner in the Best Actor category was long-overdue
actor Jack Nicholson (with his fifth nomination, his first Oscar
win, and his third consecutive nomination in the 70s,
and the third year in a row against Al Pacino) as the life-affirming,
ill-fated, free-spirited, anarchic misfit Randle Patrick McMurphy
in One
Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest who eventually submits
to shock treatments and an incapacitating, unnecessary lobotomy.
It was his flamboyant, individualistic performance that brought
Nicholson the Oscar. [He had previously been nominated and
lost as Best Actor for Five Easy Pieces
(1970), The Last Detail (1973) and Chinatown
(1974), and as Best Supporting Actor for Easy
Rider (1969).]
Other Best Actor nominees included:
- Walter Matthau (with his third nomination)
as Willy Clark - George Burns' love-hate vaudevillian partner
in the film adaptation of Neil Simon's play The Sunshine
Boys (with four nominations and one win - Best Supporting
Actor) about two veteran partners who are reunited after
decades of hostility for a TV special
- Al Pacino (with his fourth of eight career
nominations, and his fourth consecutive nomination)
was nominated as Sonny Wortzik - a bank-robbing bisexual
in Brooklyn in Dog Day Afternoon
Two other Best Actor nominees were honored for
performances in filmed plays: Maximilian Schell (with his second
nomination) as Arthur Goldman - a suspected war criminal in
an Adolph Eichmann-like trial in director Arthur Hiller's The
Man in the Glass Booth (the film's sole nomination),
and James Whitmore (with his second and last unsuccessful career
nomination) in a magnificent, one-man show/tribute to President
Harry S. Truman in director Steve Binder's Give 'Em Hell,
Harry! (the film's sole nomination).
The entire slate of nominees for Best Actress
was composed of weak or non-lead performances. Nicholson's
co-star Louise Fletcher (with her sole career nomination for
her first major screen role - and with her sole Oscar
win) won for Best Actress for her role (actually a supporting
role) as iron-willed, rigid, overbearing, sadistic, tyrannical
Nurse Ratched, head of the ward and a symbol of repressive
society in One
Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. During her acceptance
speech, she translated her words into sign language for the
benefit of her deaf parents at home - a first!
The other four Best Actress nominees were in
unique, unusual roles:
- young 19 year old French actress Isabelle
Adjani (with her first nomination and the youngest nominee
ever in the category) as Adele Hugo - the youngest daughter
of author Victor Hugo in director Francois Truffaut's tale
of obsessive love The Story of Adele H. (in French
with English subtitles)
- Ann-Margret (with her second nomination) as
Nora Walker Hobbs (Tommy's mother) in the loud, garish, ground-breaking
rock film about the deaf, dumb, and blind boy and featuring
The Who - the Ken Russell-directed film Tommy (with
two nominations and no wins)
- two-time Oscar winner Glenda Jackson (with
her fourth nomination) in the title role as a middle-class
pregnant woman in director Trevor Nunn's film Hedda -
the film adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's play Hedda Gabler
- Carol Kane (with her sole nomination) as Gitl
- an old-fashioned 19th century immigrant Jewish wife in
New York City's Lower East Side in the small independent
film by director Joan Micklin Silver, Hester Street (the
film's sole nomination)
The oldest nominee and winner ever for
a Best Supporting Actor Oscar was 80 year-old George Burns
(with his sole nomination - and sole Oscar win). He won the
Best Supporting Actor award for his role (in his first film
in 36 years - his last film had been Honolulu (1939))
as Walter Matthau's curmudgeonly, feuding vaudeville comic
partner Al Lewis that sabotages their TV comeback in director
Herbert Ross' and Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys.
Other Best Supporting Actor nominees included:
- Brad Dourif (with his sole nomination) as
Billy Bibbit, the stuttering mental institution inmate whose
sexual tryst leads to his tragic suicidal end in One
Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
- Burgess Meredith (with his first nomination)
in the role of former vaudevillian Harry Greener - the father
of untalented but aspiring star Karen Black in director John
Schlesinger's nightmare vision of 1930s Tinseltown based
on Nathanael West's novel The Day of the Locust (with
two nominations and no wins)
- Chris Sarandon (with his sole nomination),
husband of Susan Sarandon at the time, as the bank-robber's
(co-star Al Pacino) pre-op (male-to-female) gay lover Leon
Shermer, in Dog Day Afternoon
[Note: This was one of the first transgender roles
in a major studio film.]
- Jack Warden (with his first nomination) as
Lester Carr - Lee Grant's Hollywood hot-shot, philandering
husband, in Hal Ashby's comedy of morals and relationships,
in Shampoo
The winner of the Best Supporting Actress award
was Lee Grant (with her third of four nominations - and her
first and only Oscar win) as Felicia Carr - a politician's
bored wife who has sexual encounters with Beverly Hills hairdresser
Warren Beatty in Shampoo. Two co-stars in Nashville were
nominated for Best Supporting Actress awards:
- Ronee Blakley (with her sole nomination) as
the frail, unstable country music queen Barbara Jean who
unwittingly becomes an assassin's target
- Lily Tomlin (with her sole nomination) as
gospel singer Linnea Reese - the neglected wife of husband
Delbert (Ned Beatty)
Other Best Supporting Actress nominees included:
- Sylvia Miles (with her second nomination)
in a cameo role as alcoholic widow Mrs. Jessie Florian in
the film adaptation of Raymond Chandler's mystery novel Farewell,
My Lovely (the film's sole nomination) - a remake of Murder,
My Sweet (1944)
- Brenda Vaccaro (with her sole nomination -
an inexplicable one) for her role as Linda Riggs - a magazine
editor in the critically-lambasted potboiler Jacqueline
Susann's Once Is Not Enough (the film's sole nomination).
[Vacarro had co-starred in Midnight
Cowboy (1969) with Sylvia Miles, a rival in the category.]
83 year-old, legendary silent screen actress
Mary Pickford (1892-1979) accepted an Honorary Oscar in a taped
appearance for the show, "in recognition of her unique
contributions to the film industry and the development of film
as an artistic medium." (She had been nominated and won only once
during her film career, as Best Actress for Coquette (1928/29),
and hadn't appeared on film since 1931.)
Oscar Snubs and Omissions:
Director John Huston's classic epic-adventure
film The Man Who Would Be King was seriously ignored
in 1975 in all the major awards categories, especially in regards
to the acting categories for co-stars Sean Connery as Daniel
Dravot and Michael Caine as Peachy Carnehan, who were seeking
kingship in Kafiristan. It was nominated in four non-acting
categories and lost in all of them: Art Direction, Costume
Design, Film Editing, and Adapted Screenplay. And as previously
mentioned, Steven Spielberg was not nominated for Best
Director for Best Picture-nominated Jaws.
Although Al Pacino and Chris Sarandon were nominated for their
acting (lead and supporting) roles in Dog Day Afternoon,
why wasn't John Cazale nominated for his performance as "Sal",
Al Pacino's partner in crime?
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the
second film created by the cast of British TV's "Monty
Python's Flying Circus" (their first was And Now for
Something Completely Different (1971)), was also
entirely neglected in the awards. Shampoo was denied
Best Picture, Best Director (Hal Ashby), and Best Actor (Beatty)
nominations, and actresses that were overlooked included Julie
Christie as the shrewd, mini-skirted Jackie Shawn (mistress
to industrialist Jack Warden and sex partner with hairdresser
Warren Beatty) and Goldie Hawn as Jill. And Michael Ritchie's
parody of the Young American Miss beauty contest in Smile was
also ignored by the Academy.
A number of potential acting nominations were
also neglected:
- Roy Scheider as Police Chief Martin Brody,
Richard Dreyfuss as marine biologist Matt Hooper, and Robert
Shaw as Amity Island's obsessed resident shark hunter Quint
(notable for his long monologue about the ill-fated WWII
sinking of the USS Indianapolis) for their roles in Jaws
- Warren Beatty as Beverly Hills hairdresser
George Roundy in Shampoo
- Tim Curry as the iconic figure of fish-netted
transvestite Dr. Frank N. Furter in the midnight cult classic The
Rocky Horror Picture Show ( its now-classic songs
were also not nominated -- especially "Time Warp", "Sweet
Transvestite,"
"Wild and Untamed Thing," and "I'm Going Home")
- Robert Mitchum as private detective Philip
Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely
- Gene Hackman as small time LA private eye
Harry Moseby in director Arthur Penn's Night Moves (without
any nominations) and as a animal-loving loner in Bite
the Bullet
Other performances overlooked included Barbra
Streisand as Fanny Brice in Funny Lady, Diane Keaton
as Sonja in Woody Allen's Love and Death, and Candice
Bergen as a prostitute in Bite the Bullet and as American
hostage Eden Pedecaris in The Wind and the Lion.
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