Awards presented April 14, 1980
The nominees were ...
...when they should have been ...
And the Oscar went to ...
Kramer vs. Kramer. Despite the performances of Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep, and the direction and writing of Robert Benton, all of whom won Oscars, it doesn't add up to enough. It seems to signal Hollywood's retreat from the daring filmmaking of the 1970s into the slick but unadventurous movies of the 1980s.
... when it should have gone to ...
Never was a movie more plagued with difficulties, which director Francis Ford Coppola's wife, Eleanor, documented in her own film, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, in 1991. But out of adversity came a fascinating, compelling film that was never quite finished: Even though Coppola returned to it in 2001 with a re-edited version known as Apocalypse Now Redux, adding forty-nine minutes that improve and clarify the narrative, the ending remains incoherent. It won only two Oscars, for sound and for Vittorio Storaro's cinematography. The Academy was unlikely to give it the best picture award a year after having honored another controversial movie about Vietnam, The Deer Hunter, but it should have, and it should also have given the supporting actor Oscar to Robert Duvall for his crazy surfing colonel.
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