Awards presented April 7, 1970
The nominees were ...
... when they should have been ...
And the Oscar went to ...
Midnight Cowboy. The astonishing performances of Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman (who seems to have gone out of his way to choose a role as far from Benjamin in
The Graduate as possible) are somewhat undermined by the film's obtrusively flashy editing and camera tricks and its rather shrill satire of urban attitudes. Some of what seemed hip and knowing at the time seems smart-alecky and sexist (
viz., the characters played by Sylvia Miles and Brenda Vaccaro) today. It earned an X rating for language and depictions of sex when first released, but today is rated R.
... when it should have gone to ...
An extraordinary Western in which director Sam Peckinpah uses extravagantly bloody violence to underscore a portrait of human folly. The Academy has never looked kindly on Westerns, so it's no surprise that it made no showing among the best picture nominees, but the story and screenplay received a nomination (losing to a film on which
The Wild Bunch almost seems a sardonic commentary,
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), as did Jerry Fielding's score. The extraordinary cast includes William Holden, Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson, and Warren Oates. Although violence has become commonplace in Hollywood films, when
The Wild Bunch was prepared for a theatrical re-release in 1994, the ratings board upped its initial rating to a prohibitive NC-17. After an appeal, the rating was restored to the original R.
No comments:
Post a Comment