The nominees were ...
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It's inevitably compared to the two other great Vietnam films, The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, but Platoon has something the other two lack: a director who had actually served in Vietnam. Oliver Stone's experiences there are the shaping force for Platoon, whereas Michael Cimino's and Francis Ford Coppola's view of the war was shaped by literature and cinema, Cimino striving for a mythic dimension and Coppola deliberately letting his narrative be driven by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. This is not to say, let me hasten to add, that Stone's is the "real" Vietnam, or that his film isn't also informed by myth, literature, and cinema. Stone's screenplay turns Barnes (Tom Berenger) and Elias (Willem Dafoe), for example, into larger-than-life figures. Although the movies of Stone's later career, in which he courted controversy whenever he could, were sometimes shrill or wrong-headed, Platoon retains a freshness and intensity even today.
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