1974 Alternate Oscars

My choices are noted with a ★. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ.

I suppose One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is Jack Nicholson's most famous performance, but I think Chinatown is his best — and it's not close.

As for Roman Polanski, he presents me with a bit of a philosophical conundrum. On the one hand, I think Chinatown is the best movie of 1974 (and maybe of the decade). On the other hand, I also think Polanski, the film's director, is a morally-reprehensible human being who should spend the rest of his natural life in an American jail. Can I hand him an award for what showed up on the screen without also making myself complicit in his crime?

I've written about cognitive dissonance before (here) — that uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously:

The farther I get into blogging about movies and their history, the clearer it becomes that the people who made great movies weren't necessarily great people, and certainly what you see on the screen doesn't reflect what you would have seen in their private lives. John Ford was an insufferable bastard, Henry Fonda was a terrible father, Woody Allen married his girlfriend's daughter. ... Jane Greer, on the other hand, was as sweet as chess pie, as loyal as a faithful dog and as brave as your average Marine, but that doesn't mean she wasn't absolutely riveting as the murderous femme fatale Kathy Moffit in the noir classic, Out of the Past.

There are any number of ways you can handle unpleasant information about the people who make movies. My father refused to watch Jane Fonda because of her politics; my mother-in-law wouldn't watch John Wayne because of his. Which is a pity from the point of view of the movie fan because it means you miss out on Klute and The Searchers ...

You can also go the other way and excuse behavior of your heroes you would never forgive of your enemies. Thus you'll find plenty of petitions seeking to free Roman Polanski despite committing a crime you'd insist your neighbor be buried for. Our brains are hard-wired that way, or so scientists tell us, something to remember the next you (or I) want to beat someone senseless for taking a position we don't agree with. There's not much future for the republic if we're forever choosing to behave like territorial pack animals.

In writing this blog, I have opted for a third way. I have in the past and will continue in the future to distill out the professional from the personal, the on-screen persona from the private one, and though I have written about both, and will continue to do so, I've been choosing awards and reviewing movies strictly based on the former. Some of the winners have been creeps and some have been saints, but all of them have done something on screen that I think is worth your time and attention.

It's either that or stop writing about movies altogether. But then anything you write is guaranteed to offend somebody. After all, I imagine there are still some people out there who insist the world is flat. You can't please everybody.

That was true when I wrote it ten years ago. If anything, it's even more true now.