The 1981 Oscars Were a Joke

In retrospect, they really blew it on the Best-Picture Award

Time for a new video series on my channel! I’m re-awarding the Best-Picture Oscar, year-by-year, starting with eligible movies from 1980. That would be the 1981 Oscars.

Why don’t you tell me: which movie released in 1980 should’ve won Best Picture?

• The Shining

• Raging Bull

• The Empire Strikes Back

• The Elephant Man

• Kagemusha

• Tess

• Breaker Morant

• Ordinary People

• Caddyshack

• Herbie Goes Bananas

Just kidding on that last one, although it was Oscar-eligible.

The award went to . . .

“Ordinary People”?!?

(Okay, it’s pulling a very-high 4.0 rating on letterboxd!)

I’m betting most people I know have never heard of that one, while, odds are, quite a few have heard of the first three in the list — Shining, Bull, and Empire.

This is why I’m reawarding Best-Picture Oscar, while highlighting the difference between then and what viewers have decided over the last 40 years. Certainly, Oscar-hype is marketing, and the Academy voters have their idiosyncratic preferences. When they choose based on contemporary preferences, messes and mistakes happen. Bad ones, sometimes.

Often, as with all voting, the voters tend to prefer their friends and colleagues — e.g. Robert Redford as director of “Ordinary People” — and on what style/kind of movie was considered most profound. Back then at least, for Best Picture, they voted on a long string of saccharine adult dramas that tended toward highlighting a social cause and sentimentalizing it.

That may be to your taste, and I don’t necessarily mind “Ordinary People” as a movie. But I might’ve picked “Caddyshack” just to be a Gen-X jerk.

To my mind, there is no way that Ordinary People is a better movie than Breaker Morant, a movie every one one of you reading must see, on this anniversary of Armistice Day and Veterans Day in the US.

Breaker Morant, the rare movie about the Boer War, remains ridiculously profound.

Anyway, re-picking the 1981 Oscar was a hard choice.

I love David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man,” another movie every one of you should watch.

“Kagemusha” is one of my favorite Akira Kurosawa movies. It’s amazing.

“Raging Bull” ended up being picked as the best movie of the 1980s by a huge swath of critics. Scorsese got hosed back then, for reasons I don’t fathom.

But none of those were my pick!

Watch the video, please, to see what the new winner of the 1981 Best-Picture Oscar is.