By DOUG STRASSLER

Since we’re approaching Oscar eve, my favorite time of year, I figure it’s not only fitting but necessary to write another entry for the Best Picture Expansion Project. In honor of the apparent battle royale between frontrunners Avatar and The Hurt Locker, I’ve decided to write about another year with polarizing Best Picture results: 1980. A full list of that year’s films can be found here; below is the list of the five finalists:

Actual Best Picture Nominees

Coal Miner’s Daughter

The Elephant Man

Ordinary People Winner

Raging Bull

Tess

In Retrospect:

1980’s Best Picture winner was a no-brainer at the time, but has since emerged as a controversial pick, as affection for Raging Bull has grown. For my money, though, both Bull and People are unqualified masterpieces. They’re just very different types of movies: Bull is a directors’ movie and reflects current filmmaking sentiments; People is a writers’ movie and mirrors the era in which it was released.

Martin Scorsese took the life story of Jake La Motta and turned Bull into a rumination on the male animal. Robert De Niro’s performance brims with rage and sexual jealousy as La Motta questions his own virility and identity. It’s a beautifully shot and edited movie – perfect, really. But it’s also very raw, and upon its release, the movie’s violence turned some viewers off. Also, De Niro’s performance, which won an Oscar and came to embody Method acting, was as vilified as it was acclaimed for the actor’s dramatic weight gain for the part. Some felt it was distracting and that another actor more physically suited for the role should have taken it.

People, meanwhile was a cold film about a fractured family struggling to pick up the pieces after the drowning of the older, more beloved of two sons. Timothy Hutton won Best Supporting Actor (though it’s a lead role, he had no chance competing against De Niro) for his searing embodiment of the guilt and depression of those left behind. Robert Redford, in his first stab behind the camera, won as both director and producer, and he wrung the most out of his superb troupe of actors: Judd Hirsch, in one of filmdom’s most convincing portrayals of psychoanalysis; Dinah Manoff and Elizabeth McGovern, as two young women who attempt to break through to Hutton’s character; and Mary Tyler Moore (shedding her “lovable Mary” reputation) and Donald Sutherland as the parents unsure of how to go on. (Sutherland himself has never been nominated for an Oscar. Last year, I spent several BPEP’s discussing how the genius Jeff Bridges had been overlooked by the Academy, and now he looks like a lock to win on Sunday. I think I’ll start a 2010 campaign for Sutherland now!) This movie Breaks. Your. Heart. It is real, and devastating, and remains one of the most honorable, inspiring works I have ever seen. I’m not alone. Many actors I know, and more famous ones, refer to People – particularly Timothy Hutton’s performance – as the reason they wanted to start acting.

It was only a decade later, when Scorsese’s Goodfellas lost to another actor-turned-debuting-director, Kevin Costner, that some savvy PR people began spinning Scorsese’s Oscar losses into a great underdog narrative. At the time, though, Bull was mostly praised for its individual cast members and Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing; People was the story that gripped the nation, and here’s why I believe it to be so. Best Picture winners are victorious because they tap into the cultural zeitgeist, capturing the feeling of the times, and the late 1970s and 1980s were a time in which the picture of what makes a family redefined itself. The divorce rate spiked, and more single-parent families emerged, which is reflected in such major releases as An Unmarried Woman, Starting Over, Shoot the Moon, and other Oscar victors like Kramer Vs. Kramer and Terms of Endearment. The struggles of the Jarrett family in People echoed fundamental changes in the domestic landscape, and that’s why it won.

There were two other great, real-life tales also nominated that year. Coal Miner’s Daughter, which nabbed Sissy Spacek an Oscar for her portrayal of Loretta Lynn, remains to me the benchmark of a musical biopic – heck, maybe any kind of biopic. I love the way Michael Apted was able to fluidly capture the full arc of Lynn’s rise from deep poverty to stardom. Bonus points to Spacek and Beverly D’Angelo (as Patsy Cline) for using their own singing voices.

The Elephant Man was David Lynch’s most conventional movie until The Straight Story. It tells the tale of the deformed John Merrick (his real name was Joseph, he’s played here by John Hurt), who finally finds humane treatment when surgeon Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins) discovers him. John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, and especially Anne Bancroft also turn in moving performances.

(Elephant had a long-lasting effect on the Oscars: it led to the creation of the Best Makeup category.)

As for Tess, the fifth nominee, I wasn’t a fan of the Thomas Hardy novel and I’m even less of a fan of the Roman Polanski adaptation. It belongs nowhere on this list. Any of the movies listed below are more deserving:

The Expansion Pack

6. The Empire Strikes Back – I won’t try to preach to the unconverted here; you’re either a Star Wars fan or you’re not. But this is the best entry in what is arguably one of the most important trilogy in movies, and it also features one of the great cliffhangers of all time. Darth Vader is Luke’s father? Han Solo is frozen? What? It may just be a popcorn film, but it’s popcorn filmmaking at its most fun.

7. Gloria – Gena Rowlands was nominated as a mob moll who discovers her maternal instinct. As directed and written by her husband, indie pioneer John Cassavetes, Gloria has both grit and heart. Its influence can be seen in movies as disparate as Aliens and The Professional. Note: avoid the remake with Sharon Stone.

8. Melvin and Howard – Crazed billionaire Howard Hughes (Jason Robards) bequeathed $156 million to Utah service station employee Melvin Dummar. This seriocomic film purports to understand what that connection might have been, and the effects such a windfall can have. An irreverent social critique on money, family, and the media, it won a well-earned Supporting Actress Oscar for Mary Steenburgen and introduced the world to Jonathan Demme, one of the most unique voices ever to document “ordinary people.”

9. Airplane! – Yeah, that’s right, I said it. If the point of nominating 10 movies is to increase the variety of movies recognized, then this spoof has to make the cut. It’s genius and makes you laugh every time. Bravo to writer-directors Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker for letting dramatic talent like Lloyd Bridges, Leslie Nielsen and Robert Stack use their comedic arsenal – in the case of Nielsen, it launched a second career. My highlight: watching Barbara Billingsley – aka June Cleaver – speaking jive.

10. Inside Moves – Diana Scarwid, best known as Joan Crawford’s terrorized daughter Christina in Mommie Dearest, received a nomination for this movie, but Moves is really about the guys. John Savage plays Roary, a man left partially crippled after a failed suicide attempt. He soon meets other disabled people, including Jerry (David Morse), a bartender with a bad leg. When an operation gives Jerry a second chance, he must choose between his new life and his de facto family. This is one of director Richard Donner’s most personal movies, and it marks a return to the screen for Harold Russell, the real-life disabled World War II veteran who won not one but two Oscars for The Best Years of Our Lives.

The Snubs
9 to 5
The Big Red One
Breaker Morant
Kagemusha
Mad Max
Private Benjamin
Resurrection
The Shining
The Stunt Man

Here’s the thing, though: When two great movies go head to head for Best Picture, it doesn’t matter whether it’s 1980 or 2009; movie lovers are the ones who ultimately win.