1983 - The Big Chill

This week, I had the pleasure of visiting the recently re-opened Vidiots, originally one of the most iconic video stores in 1980s LA, specialising in obscure and cult titles. Now, in the age of streaming, it's a non-profit organisation that complements its video rental services with regular screenings, many with filmmaker Q&As. I attended one such event in which editor Carol Littleton gave some fascinating insight into the film that is the subject of this post.

So, let's continue our review of the Best Picture contenders from 1983 by discussing...


The Big Chill
Director:
Lawrence Kasdan
Screenplay:
Lawrence Kasdan & Barbara Benedek
Starring:
Tom Berenger, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Mary Kay Place, Meg Tilly, JoBeth Williams
Academy Awards:
3 nominations
0 wins

Seven close friends from college are reunited for the funeral of the eighth member of their group, Alex, who just committed suicide. Along with Alex's young girlfriend, Chloe (Tilly), the gang spend a few days at the South Carolina home of the only married couple of the bunch, Sarah and Harold (Close and Kline), reminiscing about their accomplishments and failures over the last fifteen years.

On the surface, The Big Chill may feel a little thin, plot-wise, but that's the magic of this film. Apart from the catalyst at the beginning of the film, most of the major plot developments are internal to the characters themselves. This is a character study at its finest. In fact, it's not just one character study - it's eight! This group of dreamers from the 1960s, who all compromised in one way or another, are now grappling with those choices while also dealing with the confusion and guilt that comes with their close friend's suicide. Ultimately, all the characters end the film in a different place than they started, no action sequences required. Instead, the character development comes from how these people talk to each other and work through their individual or relationship struggles. And the result is utterly captivating. These characters feel like our own friends.

Much of our connection to these people can be credited to the effortless acting from a stellar cast. There's not a weak link among them. We can see exactly what they're thinking even when they don't say anything. Granted, they talk plenty, but as Carol Littleton explained during the Q&A I mentioned in my intro above, the silences are just as important, if not more so, than the dialogue itself. Indeed, there are specific moments where we can see the exact decision a character has made, due to the perfect synthesis of the script (which has earlier laid the ground work for a particular plot point), the acting (which provides only a subtle shift in facial expression) and the editing (which cuts from one character's informative POV back to her own close-up as the decision is made). Genuinely, it's a perfect lesson in collaborative filmmaking.

Littleton also gave us the skinny on what happened with Kevin Costner, who was cast as the dead friend Alex. In the original script, the final scene was intended to be a flashback, allowing us a glimpse of the good times these characters had talked about so much. In theory, it sounds to me like a very intriguing and satisfying conclusion to the film, a sort of nostalgic button, particularly since the actual ending feels slightly abrupt. But Littleton explained the reasons why the scene was ultimately left on the cutting room floor. While it worked well on paper, it became clear, after filming it and many different attempts at editing it, that it just didn't work, partly because it felt like a costume piece with all the characters suddenly appearing in psychedelic 1960s garb after being in contemporary 1980s gear the whole time, and partly due to the strangeness of Costner who looked naturally much younger than the others who were all made up to look more youthful - though in actuality Costner is only 8 years younger than Glenn Close, the oldest member of the core cast. Still, that's Costner's arms, legs and body that can be seen being dressed for the funeral at the beginning of the film.

Speaking of Close, she was the only performer to receive an Oscar nomination for this film, but in my estimation, the entire cast is so terrific that it's impossible to single anyone out. (One imagines that if the SAG Awards existed at that time, this would have been a shoo-in for Best Ensemble.) Along with that Supporting Actress nod, the movie was also cited for Original Screenplay and, of course, Best Picture, but failed to win any of them.

1983 - Tender Mercies

Well, look at this. Thanks to the downtime I've had during this LA trip, this will be my third post in a week, a feat I haven't achieved in about 6 or 7 years. And there'll be more to come, too, as I prepare to attend a screening of one of the other nominees in this current review year. More on that in the next post.

For now, we begin our look at the 1983 Best Picture contest with...


Tender Mercies
Director:
Bruce Beresford
Screenplay:
Horton Foote
Starring:
Robert Duvall, Tess Harper, Betty Buckley, Wilford Brimley, Ellen Barkin, Allan Hubbard, Lenny von Dohlen, Paul Gleason
Academy Awards:
5 nominations
2 wins, including Best Actor (Duvall)

Ex-country singer Mac Sledge (Duvall) finds himself in a small town motel in remote Texas after a drunken binge. The widowed owner, Rosa Lee (Harper), takes pity on Mac and accepts his offer to work for her in exchange for room and board. The two soon fall for each other and later marry, but his idyllic new life is disrupted when his ex-wife, Dixie (Buckley), also a country singer, tours nearby. Old wounds are reopened and Mac struggles to determine what he really wants out of life.

Tender Mercies is certainly not afraid to take its time. It's a slow-paced slice-of-life story, and since it takes place in a slow town, that leisurely pace feels somehow comfortable, never gratuitous. The beautiful scenery doesn't hurt, either. All in all, it's a sweet story, though it could be argued it's a little too simple. Not that nothing happens. The plot moves forward just fine, but the conflicts aren't quite as profound as they could be. We never really see Mac's worst alcoholic behaviour since he sobers up near the beginning of the film. And the tension he previously caused with his ex-wife when he was at his worst is not explored deeply enough, for my liking.

Winning the Best Actor Oscar for this role, Robert Duvall impresses not just with his acting chops but, holy crap, he has a nice set of pipes, too. Plus, he wrote a couple of the songs that he sings in the movie! The supporting cast are also expertly natural and subdued, matching the overall tone (with the possible exception of the child actors). Some standouts are Wilford Brimley as the exhausted music manager and a young Ellen Barkin (pictured) as Mac's estranged daughter. There's also a brief appearance by character actor Paul Gleason, famed for playing everybody's favourite 1980s movie assholes.

Best Picture of 1991

Yet another review year that I left to drag on for two years. In the time it took me to watch these five films, the Academy added another 20 to my list. Obviously, at this rate, I'll never finish this crazy assignment I've set myself. And after some quick calculations, I reached the sobering conclusion that even if I watch just one movie a week from now on, it'll still take me another eight years to finish. Well, I don't know if I'll be able to achieve that one-a-week rate consistently, but I'm certainly going to try to cram in as many viewings as I can during this current trip to LA. Anyway, enough moaning. Let's get into this current verdict.

The nominees for Best Picture of 1991 are:

• Beauty and the Beast
• Bugsy
• JFK
• The Prince of Tides
• The Silence of the Lambs

1991's nominees are definitely an interesting bunch. I'm a proud movie buff, so like always, I enjoyed each of these films, despite recognising that perhaps some of these films may not have received a nomination if they were released in another year. In fact, I'm surprised that Thelma & Louise, another classic from 1991, didn't knock one of these five aside to secure itself a nod. I think this verdict may have been a lot tougher if it had.

Entertaining as it was, The Prince of Tides will be the first to be culled. It had many beautiful and affecting moments, but its reliance on melodrama took it down a notch for me. Two films that perfectly encapsulated their respective genres - Bugsy with its moody film noir tones, and Beauty and the Beast with its exquisite musical animation - are the next to be set aside.

Thus, the showdown is between one of the most seminal films of my adolescence and one of the most seminal films of the 1990s in general. JFK was an obsession of mine as a teenager. I was engrossed in its mystery as well as the incredible artistic achievement of its cinematography and editing. However, I can acknowledge now that much of its three-hour runtime is spent in perpetual exposition. Consequently, in agreeance with the Academy, The Silence of the Lambs, a paragon of the thriller genre with its disturbing tension and gripping misdirects, will be officially named my favourite Best Picture nominee of 1991.

Best Picture of 1991
Academy's choice: The Silence of the Lambs	Matt's choice: The Silence of the Lambs

Your choice:

Feel free to let the world know your opinion using the poll above or the comments below. And now we travel back in time just a few years earlier to land on what might be one of the most homogeneous shortlists the Academy has put together. With its myriad relationship dramas, it's the nominees from 1983, a year I've chosen for what seems to be the most common reason I ever choose a review year: there's a local screening of one of the contenders.

And the nominees for Best Picture of 1983 are:

• The Big Chill
• The Dresser
• The Right Stuff
• Tender Mercies
• Terms of Endearment

Stay tuned...

1991 - The Prince of Tides

The dust has truly settled on another Oscar season, so let me wrap it up by noting the decidedly average result of my predictions. I correctly picked only 16 of the 23 winners this year. Mind you, I did exceedingly well with the major categories, nailing Picture, Director, both Screenplays and three out of the four acting awards. Emma Stone pipped Lily Gladstone at the post, it seems, and that was my lone error in the top eight categories.

As I write this, I'm again in Los Angeles. I'm about to finish off this current year of review, which ironically began in this very city two years ago when I saw Bugsy on the big screen. Indeed, no visit to LA is complete without at least one trip to one of the many revival cinemas here, so I have my sights set on a few potential Best Picture nominees that are screening.

For now, though, we come to the final movie in the 1991 Best Picture race...


The Prince of Tides
Director:
Barbra Streisand
Screenplay:
Pat Conroy & Becky Johnston
(based on the novel by Pat Conroy)
Starring:
Barbra Streisand, Nick Nolte, Blythe Danner, Kate Nelligan, Jeroen Krabbé, Melinda Dillon, George Carlin, Jason Gould, Brad Sullivan
Academy Awards:
7 nominations
0 wins

In a somewhat strange turn of events, I watched this movie with the genuine conviction that it was my first time seeing it. However, after checking my movie diary (yes, I maintain a spreadsheet, tracking every movie I've seen since 1994 - don't judge!), I noticed I had in fact watched The Prince of Tides over 20 years ago. Yet, I had absolutely no recollection of it. Usually, even for a film I haven't seen for many, many years, I would at least feel some slight pangs of familiarity with certain scenes, or even a line or an image, but nope, I got to the end of the movie and was still utterly convinced that was the first time I'd watched it. In a way, I suppose it means I got to enjoy all the twists and turns all over again. I wish I could watch The Sixth Sense or Fight Club or Psycho the same way.

Based on the novel of the same name, The Prince of Tides centres on high school football coach Tom Wingo (Nolte) and his South Carolinian family's struggles. His childhood was marred by an emotionally manipulative mother (Nelligan) and a physically abusive father (Sullivan), and he also seems to be in a rut with his current home life, barely caring that his wife, Sallie (Danner), is having an affair.

In New York City, Tom's sister, Savannah (Dillon), has attempted suicide, and her psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein (Streisand), has requested some help from the family. Despite loathing New York, Tom goes to meet with Dr. Lowenstein, initially remaining tight-lipped about his family's past trauma. But as he eventually opens up, he and Lowenstein begin falling for each other, complicating things further.

It would be easy to be fooled into thinking this film was based on a play, instead of the novel from which it was actually sourced. The locations are mostly static and there's an abundance of dialogue, often melodramatic. Barbra Streisand's direction doesn't shy away from that melodrama, to the point that it seems to be the main driving force behind the production. In fact, if it weren't for the headlining movie stars, you'd be forgiven for confusing this for a TV movie. Along with cheesy lines from clichéd characters, the score cements the film's melodramatic vibe. Consider the stereotypical training montage sequence. Instead of a fast-paced rock song soundtrack, à la Rocky, this one has slow classical music.

But hey, I love movies, even melodramatic ones, so regardless of that previous paragraph, this film is still very entertaining. I found myself invested in all the characters, clichéd or not. The scene where Tom finally tells the story of the family's secret definitely packs a very large emotional punch. I can also forgive the fact that the film struggles to decide whether it's a family drama or a romance flick. For the majority of the story, I would have assumed it was the former if it weren't for the film's poster inexplicably giving away the two protagonists' eventual union. Mind you, there's more to the film after that point, so thankfully, it doesn't reveal everything.

The cast all do a superb job of elevating the material. For me, the gold star goes to Blythe Danner (pictured), who not only missed out on an Oscar nomination for this moving portrayal of a frustrated wife, but has sadly never received one for any of her brilliant work. Barbra Streisand also delivers an affable performance, sans Oscar nomination. Nick Nolte as the dissatisfied family man hiding his pain with humour, and Kate Nelligan as the bitter, controlling mother were the only two cast members to receive nominations, both well deserved. In total, the film received seven nods, but walked away empty-handed on Oscar night.

Oscar Winner Predictions 2023

Well, my Oscar nomination predictions turned out to be my worst showing in about ten years. On the plus side, I correctly picked all 10 Best Picture nominees, which seems like it should be worth something. I also aced Best Costume Design for the third year in a row ... I'm not sure what that says about me.

Now, let's turn our attention to the winners. For the last couple of years, I've felt rather unsure about my picks due to a lack of clear frontrunners in most races. This year, however, most of the categories - particularly the big ones - seem unlikely to result in a surprise when the envelope is opened. Oppenheimer is almost certainly going to be mentioned a lot on Oscar night. I've pegged it for eight awards, which I'm fairly confident about, but it could even pick up one or two more. Three of the four acting races are essentially locks - Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey, Jr. and Da'Vine Joy Randolph. Only Best Actress is somewhat up in the air, with Emma Stone and Lily Gladstone basically alternating wins throughout awards season. But I'm putting my money on Gladstone to win the final battle.

While some of the craft awards will very likely find themselves as part of the Oppenheimer sweep (Cinematography and Film Editing, amongst others), others are a little trickier. I've selected Poor Things for Production Design and Costume Design, in large part because of their BAFTA wins, but the Brits often have a slight bias towards British films, so the Academy might decide to stick to a more American film and award those two categories to Barbie instead. We shall see in a few days.

In the meantime, you can check out all my predictions here.