The nominees were ...
The Last Emperor. Bernardo Bertolucci's sweeping, sumptuous film certainly deserved the Oscars it received for cinematography (Vittorio Storaro), production design (Ferdinando Scarfiotti), and music (Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Byrne, and Cong Su). But it received no nominations for acting, which suggests the hollowness at the film's core: John Lone and Joan Chen are excellent as the emperor and empress, but the characters they play are passive figures swept along by history, and as such never engage our sympathies.
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| Empire of the Sun |
Steven Spielberg's least-known great film has a fine screenplay by Tom Stoppard based on J.G. Ballard's book, and 13-year-old Christian Bale already shows signs of what an exceptional actor he would become. The movie had the misfortune to appear in the same year as Hope and Glory, John Boorman's more accessible film about the adventures of a boy in wartime, and The Last Emperor, which had a more focused epic quality. But in some ways, Empire of the Sun captures the best of both films: the epic images of the latter and the human dimension of the former. It won no Oscars, though it was nominated for cinematography (Allen Daviau), art direction (Norman Reynolds and Harry Cordwell), sound, music (John Williams, of course), film editing (Michael Kahn, ditto), and costume design (Bob Ringwood). But neither Spielberg nor his film were nominated.
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