Best Picture, 1978

Awards presented April 9, 1979

The nominees were ... 

• Coming Home 
• The Deer Hunter 
• Heaven Can Wait 
• Midnight Express 
• An Unmarried Woman 

... when they should have been ...

• Days of Heaven 
• The Deer Hunter 
• Heaven Can Wait 
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers 
• An Unmarried Woman 

And the Oscar went to ...

The Deer Hunter

It was one of the most controversial best picture choices from an Academy that shuns controversy. There are many who have called this one of the great American movies. And many who have called it wrong-headed and morally confused. It compellingly portrays an American subculture tossed into the crucible of the Vietnam war, and features powerful acting (Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, John Savage) and camerawork by the masterly Vilmos Zsigmond. But one now also has the advantage (or is it a disadvantage?) of viewing it through the story of its Oscar-winning director, Michael Cimino, who would wreck his career with the extravagance and self-indulgence of Heaven's Gate. Even in The Deer Hunter we can see the storm clouds gathering, in Cimino's lavish, prolonged treatment of the wedding party, which is brilliantly staged and photographed but advances the story not at all. Or could it be that the ability of a film to arouse profoundly mixed reactions thirty-five years later is itself a sign of that film's greatness? I searched the list of eligible films from the year and found no compelling alternative. Everything else looks timid or dated.