Midweek Movie Free Talk

I watched all the Best Picture nominees from 1980: Ordinary People, The Elephant Man, Coal Miner's Daughter, Tess, and Raging Bull (which I saw years ago).

I had Coal Miner's Daughter downloaded on my computer for two years now so I decided to finally watch it. After that I was like "well might as well watch the Best Picture winner" and so I watched Ordinary People. And then kept the ball rolling and watched Elephant Man and Tess.

Going back to the Lost Highway discussion, I stated Elephant Man would be one of my favorite films from Lynch. And I was right, it's actually my favorite movie Lynch has ever made. It's interesting that a guy known for making weird and psychological films can make such an emotionally charged drama like this. It reminds me of Edward Scissorhands a lot, with the broader theme being your outside appearance not matching how you feel internally and how people make judgements on you based on not being nice to look at. That's something I'm always going to relate to even if it doesn't match my current experience in life. It's a beautiful looking movie, it's kind of wild it didn't get a Cinematography nomination. It really hit me hard.

Ordinary People also hit me really hard. I watched this and Elephant Man back to back, so it was getting like a train of emotions run on me. I can see why it won Best Picture now, it's probably one of my favorite winners ever. It's an examination on grief and the effects of it on a family when one member refuses to acknowledge the pain and start the healing process. I think this was probably Matt Damon's and Ben Affleck's main inspiration when they wrote Good Will Hunting, there's a scene in it that's very reminiscent to the "it's not your fault" scene. It's a shame Mary Tyler Moore didn't win an Oscar for this (although she probably would have won if she went Supporting instead).

Coal Miner's Daughter was good. It's the proto-music biopic where it was the first to do a lot of the stuff we see in current music biopics. I think it's better than a lot of modern music biopics, even if it frames a clearly abusive relationship as romantic and sweet. Spacek gives a great performance.

Tess was the weakest of the nominees. It's my least favorite Polanski film. It's super long, and super boring. It's not terribly engaging. It's a beautiful looking movie though, and deserved that Cinematography Oscar, but yeah it's not very compelling. I can't even tell you if that's going against the grain because it's not a very widely watched film.

Not a Picture nominee, but it was nominated for Director the same year, I saw The Stunt Man. That's a satire on the industry and auteur filmmakers. I thought it was bad. And I'm shocked it got into Director over Coal Miner's Daughter which was much better made.

Edit: if I had to rank them: Ordinary People, Elephant Man, Raging Bull, Coal Miner’s Daughter, Tess. Pretty strong year overall.