Is Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice my favorite performance of 1982?
Uh, no, that would be Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria, which along with Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music and The Americanization of Emily belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Dame Julie movies.
But I've already voted Julie Andrews two alternate Oscars (and you've agreed with me), so I'm bypassing her for Streep's most iconic performance.
Gotta give her one, right?
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
Okay, let's skip ahead six years to 1981. The polls from the intervening years probably aren't perfect, but they're good enough — or at least nobody complained about them at the time which is pretty much the same thing as far as I'm concerned.
In retrospect, I can see I was doing then out of necessity what I am doing now by design — relying on a consensus of other people's opinions to arrive at my list of alternate Oscar nominees. The truth is, while a post appeared every Sunday morning in 2019 like clockwork, I went weeks at a time without writing a word. I was, instead, heading to the hospital every morning before dawn, gobbling Compazine and Zofran like tic-tac's, and otherwise napping all day just so I could brush my teeth and go to bed at 7. That's something they never tell you about cancer: it's exhausting.
But I digress.
Anyway, in my heated rush to knock out ten or twelve weeks worth of blog entries during a lull in treatments, I was forced, like Blanche DuBois, to rely on the kindness of strangers. And overall, I like the results.
The danger, though, of a purely consensus methodology is you can fall into the same simple-minded habits the Academy does and wind up with the same nominees, year-in and year-out, whether they've really done anything special or not. Meryl Streep has, like, eleventy-thrillion Oscar nominations — she could puke up a roll of film after a night of heavy drinking and the Academy would give her an award for it — while some of Hollywood's greatest actresses never got nominated at all (paging Myrna Loy). So I have to be on guard for that, separating out the good stuff from the "dingoes ate mah baby!" kind of autopilot noms.
There's not much point in doing this if you don't occasionally think outside the box ...
That said, 1981 actually went pretty well as far as the voting goes, but 1981 was also the first time I paid attention to the Oscars and I wanted to tweak it a bit.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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