Awards presented April 10, 1972
The nominees were ...
... when they should have been ...
And the Oscar went to ...
The French Connection. Hugely influential thriller, with tough, hard-to-like protagonists and an exciting and much-copied car chase. It made stars of Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider, and for a brief while made William Friedkin Hollywood's hottest director. But today, after countless tough-cop movies and TV series, and endless demolition derbies, it's hard to see what all the enthusiasm was for, and particularly why the Academy, with its conservative humanist bent and its disdain for genre films (e.g., Westerns, sci-fi, and thrillers) named it the best picture of the year, especially when there was a better thriller,
Klute, that it chose not to nominate.
... when it should have gone to ...
Robert Altman proved that
MASH was not just a happy accident, and that he was capable of even greater work with this extraordinary elaboration on Western themes. Altman's Old West is a muddy, messy place, but also one of great beauty, thanks to the criminally unnominated cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond. (The following year, the Academy's cinematographers would also fail to nominate the great work of Gordon Willis on
The Godfather. It has been suggested that the branch was still dominated by the old-school lighting directors of the studio era, when a cinematographer was judged by an ability to flood a set with light, whereas Zsigmond and Willis were masters of available light and evocative camerawork.) The sole nomination granted to
McCabe & Mrs. Miller was to Julie Christie. Altman certainly deserved one, as did Christie's co-star, Warren Beatty. But the ego clashes of Altman and Beatty over the direction of the film were well-known, as was the fact that Altman and Beatty took the screenplay out of the hands of its original writer, Brian McKay, and rewrote it with the help of Robert Towne. Still, out of whatever chaos there may have been came one of the most extraordinary films of the 1970s, one that still makes lists of "greatest" films, and was added to the National Film Registry in 2010.
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