I saw National Lampoon's Animal House in the theater back when it came out and thought it was hilarious, but it wasn't until I worked as a Delta House lawyer in an Omega House legal shop that I realized just how brilliant its insights into the human condition are. Better than the Bible.
"Will that work?"
"It's gotta work better than the truth."
PICTURE (Drama)
winner: Halloween (prod. Debra Hill)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: National Lampoon's Animal House (prod. Ivan Reitman and Matty Simmons)
PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: Höstsonaten (Autumn Sonata) (prod. Katinka Faragó, Lew Grade and Martin Starger)
ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Jon Voight (Coming Home)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: John Belushi (National Lampoon's Animal House)
ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Ingrid Bergman (Höstsonaten a.k.a. Autumn Sonata)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Jill Clayburgh (An Unmarried Woman)
DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: John Carpenter (Halloween)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Warren Beatty and Buck Henry (Heaven Can Wait)
SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Christopher Walken (The Deer Hunter)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Geraldine Page (Interiors)
SCREENPLAY
winner: Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenney and Chris Miller (National Lampoon's Animal House)
Star Wars—the original theatrical release version only. Han shoots first, my friend.
PICTURE (Drama)
winner: Star Wars (prod. Gary Kurtz)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Annie Hall (prod. Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe)
PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: Cet obscur objet du désir (That Obscure Object of Desire) (prod. Serge Silberman)
ACTOR (Drama)
winner: John Travolta (Saturday Night Fever)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Paul Newman (Slap Shot)
ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Shelley Duvall (3 Women)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Diane Keaton (Annie Hall)
DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: George Lucas (Star Wars)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Woody Allen (Annie Hall)
SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: James Earl Jones and David Prowse (Star Wars)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Vanessa Redgrave (Julia)
SCREENPLAY
winner: Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman (Annie Hall)
Katie-Bar-The-Door and I arrived shortly before dawn, creeping in through a side door to make as discreet an entrance as possible.
This was our second Willow Manor Ball so we had a better idea what to expect—dinner, dancing, free booze and movie stars out the yin-yang, all of it served up in the tastiest venue there is, the cerebral cortex of each individual attendee's brain. Which pretty much means anything goes and last year pretty much anything did.
Twelve months ago we made the mistake of inviting the cast of The Thing From Another World to tag along with us, and they had been an enthusiastic bunch, I'll give them that, but when I say they set the dance floor alight, I mean that quite literally. Only a hostess as gracious as Tess Kincaid wouldn't have sued our socks off. And I like my socks; I like wearing them. I wasn't inclined to test her patience again so soon.
We had been there maybe ten seconds when a burly waiter with a police revolver tucked under his arm approached us balancing a tray in his ham-sized fist. "Have a cocktail," he growled.
"Oh, no, thanks."
"I said have a cocktail!"
"I guess he wants us to have a cocktail," said Katie.
The drinks helped us blend in with the crowd, a mix of tuxedos, cocktail dresses, Halloween costumes and flights of fancy I don't have the space to describe, but sometimes you're in the mood for champagne and sometimes you want sterner stuff. This was an occasion for the latter.
We made our way to the bar.
"The important thing is the rhythm," a tall, thin man was explaining to the bartender. "Always have rhythm in your shaking. Now a Manhattan you shake to fox-trot time, a Bronx to two-step time, but a dry martini," he said, "you always shake to waltz time." He stopped and looked at me, an impish grin playing under his pencil-thin moustache. "How about you, friend. Dry martini?"
"I was hoping for a gin rickey," I admitted.
"A gin rickey," he said, quickly filling a highball glass with ice, gin, club soda and fresh-squeezed lime juice, "you shake to Jay-Z's '99 Problems'—the bootleg Grey Album mix, of course."
"That's pretty specific," I said, as a dog ran up and punched me in the belly with his paws.
"I've had eighty years to experiment," the thin man said. He introduced himself: "Nick Charles." His words were slurred but silky, as light and lilting on his lips as Fred Astaire was on a dance floor. Still, there was a worldly-wise toughness underneath his drunken elegance, and you would never mistake him for a gigolo or a pool parlor dude.
"Fictional characters," said a voice down the bar, "never worry about their fictional livers." I looked over Nick's right shoulder to see a lanky brunette with a wicked jaw curled seductively around an empty glass. "Bartender, bring me five more martinis," she was saying. "Line them up right here."
"My dog," said Nick, pointing at the beast peeing on my rented shoes. "Oh, and my wife."
"You might have mentioned me first on the billing," said Mrs. Charles.
"Nora, I'd like you to meet Katie-Bar-The-Door and the Mythical Monkey."
She nodded politely. "Katie, Myth, I don't usually look like this—I've been Christmas shopping. You know in 1934 we did our shopping on Christmas Eve? Now we do it before Halloween—fortunately, though, all online. Which explains the sweat pants and fur coat. Never left the sofa."
"Aren't you hot in that thing?" Katie asked, fingering Nora's floor-length sable.
"Stifling," Nora said. "But I figure if you're going to slaughter a room full of animals and sew their pelts into a garment, you might as well get some use out of it. Next year, I'm wearing Dalmatian."
"Come on," said Nick, "let's get something to eat—I'm thirsty. Katie, Monkey, won't you join us?"
"Yes, please do," Nora said. She was courteous and friendly to a fault, the sort of woman who would make a hobo feel welcome at the funeral of her mother. Which was good because we were joined at a large corner table by a motley collection of gangsters and roughnecks whom Nick introduced as Spider, Fingers, Clinker, Morelli, Dancer, Nunheim, Aunt Katherine, Julia Wolf, Rainbow Benny and Uncredited Hatcheck Girl.
"Oh, Nicky, you know such wonderful people," Nora said, and managed to sound like she meant it.
The caterer wasn't nearly so nice. "Waiter, would you please serve the nuts," she shouted at a plump-bellied man in a white dinner jacket and then she glared at us and snapped, "Yes, I said it—nuts! You're all nuts! Crazy as the proverbial loons! But all the same, would you care for some almonds and cashews?"
We declined and instead whistled up a variety of seafood, including shad roe, cracked crab and broiled lobster, that somehow arrived at the table as fourteen identical orders of sea bass. While as a general rule one should never order fish on Sunday, this being a fictional universe, it was actually quite good, a filet without bones, almost, cooked in butter as yellow as the sun.
We ate and while we waited for dessert, Nick raised his glass and said, "Now, my friends, I suppose you're wondering why I invited you to this swank little soiree—just this: I know who killed Robert Landis."
A groan went around the table and even the dog Asta opened one eye and yawned. "Good grief," said Clinker. "Not this again!"
The Hatcheck Girl agreed. "Bor-ing!"
"Bloody hell," muttered Morelli, "he's going to catch another killer. Every time I get invited to one of these darn dinners," he told Katie, "Nick here feels like he has to solve a murder. Even when I snuck into The Thin Man Goes Home as a completely different character, he solved another murder!"
"Yes, I agree with the riffraff," Aunt Katherine intoned haughtily. "Had I known you'd indulge in such tomfoolery, Nicolas, I'd have stayed home," and then under her breath added, "you alcoholic windbag!" At that Nora protested, and Nick whined, "I really do know who killed Robert," but the Nob Hill dowager would have none of it. "The floor show is quite sufficient without your added twaddle and flimflam. Besides, I'm missing a rerun of The Mentalist, dammit!"
Just then Jimmy Stewart popped out of the crowd, waving a pistol and foaming at the mouth. "Sure, I killed Robert! I've hated him for years! And Pedro and Selma, too! But more than anything," he said, "I hate sea bass! Sea bass?!? Who serves sea bass on a Sunday!?!"
"Put down that gun!"
"Get out of the way!"
Stewart waved us all back. "I've got six bullets!" he shouted. "One for the chef and one for myself! That's right, one for myself. And the rest for anyone who tries to stop me!"
"I'm not going to stop him," said Nunheim. "Are you going to stop him?"
"Not me," said Spider. "I don't like sea bass either."
A quick survey of the table revealed the group evenly split in our appraisal of sea bass, but unanimous in our distaste for bullets, and nearly so in our agreement that nobody was going to stop a heavily-armed Jimmy Stewart from shooting the chef if he really wanted to.
Only Katie-Bar-The-Door demurred and suddenly she flung aside her chair and laid out the would-be culinary assassin with a single blow of her tiny fist! Even as Jimmy Stewart fell back onto the dance floor, Katie tore the gun from his grasp and hurled it into the punch bowl, then pinned his ears back with a wrestling hold I had taught her on our wedding night.
The Oscar-winning actor was sobbing like a little girl when the police led him away.
"Why Katie!" I said. "You're a hero! You jumped right into the muzzle of that gun!"
"Hero is a sandwich," she shrugged. "I just didn't want to get kicked out of the Willow Manor Ball again. Although to tell you the truth," she said, "there is one thing I'd rather be doing—" And she gave me a come-hither look from under her eyelashes.
"Watching that rerun of The Mentalist?" I guessed.
"How did you know?" she laughed. "And afterwards," she said, waggling her eyebrows suggestively, "I'll demonstrate that wrestling hold for you."
She didn't have to ask me twice. "Let's go!"
I think the consensus pick for best drama of 1976 is Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese's classic tale of a violent, paranoid loner who's spent far too long with the himself as the hero of the movie playing in his head. I recognize its importance in film history, and I have chosen its stars, Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster, for a pair of awards, but just between you and me, I've always had a bit of trouble connecting with it. Maybe I'm not supposed to.
Another good pick would be All The President's Men, a really nifty mystery about Nixon, Watergate, and the two intrepid reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, who blew the lid off the biggest political scandal of my lifetime. And given that I met Katie-Bar-The-Door while working for the college newspaper, not to mention that I worked for years in downtown Washington, D.C., All The President's Men really resonates for me on a personal level.
And then there's Rocky, which won the Oscar and sold a lot of tickets and which might have a better reputation today if Sylvester Stallone had taken an early retirement.
But I'm going with The Outlaw Josey Wales, Clint Eastwood's post-Civil War tale of a Southern guerilla fighter who refuses to be re-assimilated into society only to find himself playing caretaker to a motley assortment of losers and underdogs, and rediscovering his humanity in the process.
Orson Welles had this to say about it: "When I saw that picture for the fourth time, I realized that it belongs with the great Westerns. You know, the great Westerns of Ford and Hawks and people like that." It's full of action, yes, and at first seems like it's going to be a re-run of the Man With No Name spaghetti westerns, but it unexpectedly turns warm and funny and finally quite touching. Personally, I like it better than Unforgiven which won the Oscar and tons of praise as a revisionist Western. This one, which I came to late during my taping frenzy of the mid-90s, is plenty revisionist for me.
I know, I know, Josey Wales is not a consensus pick at all—what pollsters these days would call an "outlier"—and normally, I value consensus above nearly everything (else the Marx Brothers and Alfred Hitchcock would win fourteen of these things and you'd roll your eyes and stop reading) (that is, if you haven't already). But I'm sticking with it.
PICTURE (Drama)
winner: The Outlaw Josey Wales (prod. Robert Daley)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Network (prod. Howard Gottfried)
PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: Im Lauf der Zeit (Kings of the Road) (prod. Win Wenders)
ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Robert De Niro (Taxi Driver)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Peter Finch (Network)
ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Sissy Spacek (Carrie)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Faye Dunaway (Network)
DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Clint Eastwood (The Outlaw Josey Wales)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Sidney Lumet (Network)
SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Jason Robards (All The President's Men)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Jodie Foster (Taxi Driver)
SCREENPLAY
winner: Paddy Chayefsky (Network)
