Oscar revote time!!!!!! Best Actress 1981

Critics were careful to point out that Streep have the best performance of the year but Hepburn had a lock on the statue.

GENA ROWLANDS in Gloria.

End of thread.

no r1. Hepburn was a shocking win. It was Streep vs. Keaton with Streep given the edge. Listen to the gasps when Hepburn wins.

Kathleen Turner should have been nominated - and won - for Body Heat.

Aside from Dunaway in Mommie Dearest, it's the one performance from 1981 people still talk about.

Meryl’s least favorite Meryl performance is French Lieutenant’s Woman.

Streep winning that year would likely have prevented her winning the next year (for Sophie's Choice), allowing Jessica Lange to win for Frances, not Tootsie in Supporting, which would likely have created an Oscar for Teri Garr, or Lesley Ann Warren, or Kim Stanley (but not G).

Faye Dunaway never stood much of a chance of getting a nomination. Although her performance was praised, the film opened to negative reviews and mediocre box office. Then the studio decided to market it as a piece of camp, which pissed Dunaway off so much she refused to have anything else to do with it. AMPAS was not going to touch what John Waters so famously described as "the first comedy about child abuse" with an oscar nomination or win. Not on the heels of the Golden Globes coming under fire with the Pia Zadora win at the same time.

Sally Field in Absence of Malice, Kathleen Turner in Body Heat and Liza Minnelli in Arthur were most likely the runners up to the top five that year. I doubt Faye was even in the top ten.

I think Streep would have won for Sophie's Choice anyway. People were saying it was the greatest performance ever given. People did win twice in a row (Hepburn, Tracey, Hanks, Luise Rainer)

and I think G was in the mix behind Lange. G was the only one of the other nominees to get critics circle awards.

I agree. Streep would have still won for Sophie's Choice, being a consecutive winner and winning three Oscars in a short time span.

No way would Streep have won three acting oscars in under five years.

Her win for FLW would have taken a lot of the momentum out of giving her one for Sophie's Choice.

Sally Field probably was in 6th (I just put Miss Dunaway in for fun) Sally got a Golden Globe nomination (oddly Paul Newman and Melinda Dillon didn't yet they got in at Oscars.)

Poor Sally she was 6th maybe like 3 times (Steel Magnolias, Forrest Gump, Malice)

I want to agree with whomever said upthread that Kathleen Turner should have been nominated/won. She was electric in Body Heat.

Her omission is even more ironic/glaring since they gave Barbara Stanwyck an Honorary Oscar that year.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman hasn’t aged particularly well, and even Meryl’s biggest fans rarely mention it when discussing her best work. Nobody ever thought On Golden Pond was Hepburn’s best, but at least the sentimental hokum has some life to it.

Marsha Mason didn’t deserve to be there, but she’s at least better than her movie deserves. Susan Sarandon would have made a fine winner, although I wonder if an early win might have prevented her from becoming insufferable later, or just accelerated it.

Really, Diane Keaton outshone them all.

Keaton was riveting in Reds. Even she said in the AFI salute that "the performance works" (because Warren was really hard on her.) Keaton never thinks anything she did was any good so this praise is rare.

Meryl badmouthed French Lieutenant's Woman on the Graham Norton show a while ago. I think that might be because of bitterness that the director gave the part she wanted in Sweet Dreams to Jessica Lange.

I don't know if it is her most hated film . She usually mentions Still of the Night as her worst.

"I was going to be nominated, but the film was too controversial." -Faye Cuntaway

Meryl said this nomination was the first and only time she thought she was going to win, but didn't

Even with Sophie's Choice, she won every award - but after losing the previous year she refused to get her hopes up

[quote] GENA ROWLANDS in Gloria. End of thread.

Thank goodness you're not Muriel, since Gloria was the year before.

Meryl's 21 nominations have been pretty predictable. This was the only time she was favored but lost. The Iron Lady was also a bit of a mystery what would happen but the others all were very predictable.

Faye was runner up for Best Actress for MD at the New York Film Critics Awards, so it was not completely out of the questions that she could have gotten an Oscar nom.

She should have, and she should have won.

However, the real tragedy of the 1981 Oscars is that Warren Beatty was an asshole and forced MGM to push Shoot the Moon into 1982 because he didn't want Keaton's performance in that competing with her performance in Reds. MGM was all set to make Shoot the Moon a prestige Christmas Oscar release before Beatty threw a fit. So MGM moved Shoot the Moon to the 1st quarter of 1982 and it was all but forgotten by the time next year's Oscars came around. A real shame, too. I think It was Albert Finney's best work and was right up there with Goodbar for Keaton. I think both would have been nominated in 81, with a possible nod for Dana Hill for supporting actress and for Bo Goldman for screenplay.

[quote]"I was going to be nominated, but the film was too controversial." -Faye Cuntaway

"MISS Dunaway...TOE-talee UNprofessional!"

Oh, wow. I never knew that about Shoot the Moon. Keaton is great in both films, though. I love Shoot the Moon but I don't know if it being released during the Christmas Oscar season would have benefitted it. It was rather downbeat. Though I agree Finney, Keaton and Hill deserved nominations.

Had Meryl won for French Lieutenant and then again for Sophie, she would not have four Oscars. They would have wound up giving it to Viola Davis instead of Meryl for The Iron Lady. I don't think Meryl will ever see four wins.

I think Keaton is better in Reds though than she is in Shoot the Moon. She should have got in in 1982 over Julie Andrews, Debra Winger or even Sissy Spacek.

If Elizabeth McGovern won over Maureen Stapleton for Reds - it would have been the first and only time not a single acting winner showed to accept their award

R20- I had NO idea about that!

Love Shoot The Moon- just a very special and (DEPRESSING) film...

And that ending is SO not a Hollywood ending.

Great film with stellar work from Finney and Keaton. And Dana Hill was clearly a very old soul. That performance is very hard to watch (in a good way)

It is beautifully shot as well..

Strange McGovern didn't attend. (I've heard her say she was in Europe filming Once Upon a Time in America.)

You'd think they'd have let her fly in. She probably thought it was the first of many to come...but no.

Timothy Hutton's giggle when he says her name seems to be acknowledging the fact that they had been dating.

Hutton had a lot of actress girlfriends (Uma Thurman, Mary-Louise Parker, McGovern, Debra Winger.)

A nod for Lange in The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Some other leading ladies in 1981, not all Award worthy, but interesting to reminisce:

Sigourney Weaver, Eyewitness; Jessica Lange, Postman; Bernadette Peters, Pennies From Heaven; Sally Field, Backroads; Jane Fonda, Rollover; Sissy Spacek, Raggedy Man; Carol Burnett, The Four Seasons; Glenda Jackson, Stevie (year of LA release; a fantastic film!)

Of those nominees, Susan Sarandon.

For my money, Barbara Sukowa distinguished herself as Actress of the Year with her tours-de-force in "Lola" and "Marianne and Juliane" (though I'm not sure if she was eligible).

My pick for Best Film of 1981 was Pennies From Heaven. I would have also given Herb Ross Best Director for it, and nominated Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters for Lead Oscars and Christopher Walken for Supporting. Plus a whole bunch of BTL awards.

Exactly R4. It should have been Turner or Dunaway. It’s a scandal that Kathleen Turner doesn’t have an Oscar. FLW is a dull bore and Meryl is unremarkable in it. Hepburn is slightly better in a tic filled performance.

Faye Dunaway this, Faye Dunaway that. She may be one of the most addled and disturbed true BITCHES ever in all of media. Who else is there really? Naomi? Only a true witch, himself, is going to be into Faye.

God giving to Heoburn! A bitch who never campaigned for any of her Oscars - and the Oscars taking the bait and rewarding her. Kate had them by the balls.

Isabelle adjani possession miscarriage

R33 Fuck off

If you love Hollywood (as most gay men do) you love Faye and all the other legendary crazy divas.

Out of all the performances that year the only one we still talk about is Dunaway in MD.

FLW is pretty anemic, but Heartburn (god her terrible hair and outfits!!), Plenty, and Falling in Love aren't much better. When Meryl got her Medal of Freedom in 2014, Obama claimed that anybody who saw FLW had a crush on her. I do think she looked gorgeous in her cameo in Manhattan, with her long flaxen hair and aquiline nose, but still your typical icy shiksa goddess. With the possible exception of Bridges of Madison County I can't think of Meryl radiating any genuine eroticism on screen.

In some ways I think giving Kate Hepburn another Oscar was a rebuke to Faye and Mommie Dearest. Reservations about the film's campiness aside, the source material (Christina's book) had already rankled members of old Hollywood, i.e. a major Academy voting bloc, when it was first published in 1978. Even people who may have been sympathetic to Christina probably would never have voted for a movie or performance that disparaged such a major star and the industry in which she worked.

Jeremy Irons was a very hot property in French L. Just came off Brideshead and followed it up with The Real Thing on broadway.

Was Body Heat acclaimed on its initial release? I thought that was one of those films that grew in esteem as the years went by.

No, it was very acclaimed.

Body Heat also had its detractors who felt the film was derivative and that Turner's vamping wasn't genuinely sexy:

"[Kasdan] has devised a style that is a catalogue of *noir* clichés--Deco titles, flames and a heat wave, ceiling fans, tinkling wind chimes, old tunes, chicanery in muted voices, a weak man and a femme fatale in white and insinuating hotted-up dialogue that it would be fun to hoot at it if only the hushed, sleepwalking manner of the film didn't make you cringe or yawn....If we felt that this siren [Turner] enjoyed her perversity and control--as Barbara Stanwyck did in Double Indemnity--there'd be some humor, at least, in her ensnarement of the lawyer. Or if she had Stanwyck's smeary mouth and cheap, teasing way of rubbing against her fall guy, there'd be the suggestion of zingy, nasty sex. But what's hiding never peeps through. She's groomed and cultivated, like Lauren Bacall in a fool's reverie." --P. Kael, 11/9/81

It's a shame that 'Shoot the Moon' was pushed to early 1982 and did not get any love come Oscar time the following year. Albert Finney, Dana Hall, and Diane Keaton all gave win-worthy performances.

It says a lot about the Academy that they showered the vastly inferior 'Marriage Story' with nominations and a win for Laura Dern's wretched, phony performance and completely neglected 'Shoot the Moon,' a far more truthful (and therefore unsettling) portrait of a dying marriage.

Going by 1981 eligibility, my Best Actress vote would have gone to Marsha Mason of these nominees, with Diane Keaton a close runner-up. Mason's brief stint on the A-list is often cynically attributed to her marriage with Neil Simon, but in 'Only When I Laugh' she was given a fantastic role and delivered a funny, moving, ably shaded star turn. Joan Hackett would have been my winner in supporting for the same film.

Sissy Spacek deserved a Best Actress nomination for 'Raggedy Man.'

R43 Sit down bitch, Laura Dern steals every single second she’s on screen. You are Shoot the Moon troll. I will admit marriage story sucks, it’s Scarlett who’s a humanoid even trying to look ugly with boy hair and shirts. Adam also at his ugliest.

R29 Burnett has said she didn’t deserve to be nominated for the Four Seasons. She thought her performance was ok but not worthy of a nod. I think Hepburn just got swept up in the OGP wave and huge box office. Everyone knew Henry Fonda was going to win so they just voted for her too. You’d be hard pressed to find any Academy members that really thought Kate NEEDED a fourth Oscar, but, let’s face it, FLW and Reds are chores to sit through, which hurt Streep and Keaton.

Laura Dern's recent over the top schticky turns in nearly everything she does now is akin to Jessica's Lange's breathy horny older woman of old age. It's each of their older actress bag of tricks. Dern seemed to be picking up acting in MS where she left off on that TV show. It was a ridiculous performance moreso for garnering awards.

R46 Someone’s bitter at R46. 😂

Meanwhile, Meryl and I both have actual taste.

Dern's award was complete bullshit. But then again, the Oscars have gotten the Best Supporting Actress category wrong about 85% of the time.

So if Shoot the Moon had been released in Dec...you can’t be nominated twice in the same category, so I assume people are just assuming that the one/two punch would have put her over the top for the win? She had just recently won and she’s not Meryl, or Hollywood royalty like Fonda, so I’m not so sure about that.

That said, if my so-called boyfriend had done that to me and my film I would have cut off his balls.

WhatEVER. Hardly any other actresses can drip the charisma Dern did in marriage story.

This

[quote] So if Shoot the Moon had been released in Dec...you can’t be nominated twice in the same category, so I assume people are just assuming that the one/two punch would have put her over the top for the win? She had just recently won and she’s not Meryl, or Hollywood royalty like Fonda, so I’m not so sure about that.

I think it was more that Warren wanted all the nominations for Reds he could get. It was his passion project and his directorial debut, and the film was being watched by Hollywood while in production (in the same way Dances With Wolves and Titanic were) and people were expecting an overbudget disaster on the same level as Heaven's Gate. The film wound up getting very good reviews and even did decently at the box office (considering it was a 3 1/2 hour epic), and was widely favored to win Best Picture at that year's Oscars, but up until its release, its fate was very much unknown.

If Keaton got a nomination for Reds, then it was seen as a plus for Warren. If she got one for Shoot the Moon, then not only did it take away from Reds, but it was also HER film, not his. I'm sure he looked at her nomination for Reds as his accomplishment.

I don't think a 2nd win for Keaton would have been out of the question in 81. There was also strong talk for a 2nd win for Streep, and she had only won 2 years prior (to Keaton's four). There was no frontrunner that year and the race was mostly between Streep and Keaton, with the other three well behind them. Hepburn's Oscar was a shock. Had Shoot the Moon come out in Dec of 81, it might have been the one-two punch to send Keaton over the top as opposed to "one more Oscar for Warren's film." Or it might not have mattered and Hepburn still would have gotten it. No one knows.

R44, Laura Dern steals the scenes she’s in, but not in a good way. Rarely subtle and never deep, I didn’t believe a word that came out of her mouth. Baumbach and Dern wanted to create an attention-grabbing, GIF-able character and succeeded, but it worked against the reality of the film. She was a cartoon, begging for prizes with every uninspired, over the top line reading and phony gesture.

R53 Well you certainly noticed her, too! She was sensational. ;)

Who cares about Laura Dern from 2019? Let's talk about Miss Diane Keaton giving two amazing performances in '81 and '82.

Ugh I hate Diane Keaton

R43, I appreciate your regard for Marcia Mason in Only When I Laugh. I think it’s richly comic and sad and beautifully plotted. The last scene where she enters the restaurant to see her daughter and ex-husband has always been very moving to me. Mason is underrated and I think she’s due for a reappraisal.

Yeah, I don't get why Mason is so underrated. Is it because people associate her more with Neil Simon than her individual achievements? I've always loved her acting.

I feel like she and Jill Clayburgh somehow don't get enough respect because they were very popular during their peaks.

R55 I do wish she were a two timer, somehow. If Field and Lange (not to mention Hillary Swank) are, she certainly deserves it.

I have doubts it would have happened though. I think the Academy voters held resentment to whomever the Beatty woman was at the time, like they were too much the prom king and queen. Plus, she never did much press then, which doesn’t exactly endear yourself to the industry:

I think Shoot the Moon is Keaton's best performance after Goodbar. It's shame Keaton is more associated with comedy because she has given some outstanding dramatic performances (Goodbar, Reds, Shoot the Moon, Mrs. Soffel, The Good Mother, Marvin's Room).

R60 well there’s nothing wrong with comedic performances either. I actually think Baby Boom is one of her best performances.

But the truth is (and I actually know this) she refuses to take a pay cut so any of the smaller, more interesting films that say Annette Benin’s or some of her contemporaries take in the hopes of being in the Oscar running again...she’s not gonna do them because she just doesn’t care enough if it means getting a fraction of her salary.

Louise Bryant is a great role and Keaton makes the most of it, unlike Beatty, horribly miscast as John Reed. I agree that Glenda Jackson and Sissy Spacek gave terrific performances that year too.

I’m no Keaton fan but she was wonderful in Marvin’s Room. It doesn’t help that she looks like my old cunt neighbor.

I wonder what Marsha Mason’s career would have been like after Cinderella Liberty if she hadn’t started working with Simon. That’s still my favorite MM performance.

Mason really is great in Cinderella Liberty, and I was never quite a fan of her work until I saw that performance.

I thought Dern gave a better performance in Little Women. It’s the first time we saw a flesh and blood Marmee who’s angry and sad and joyful and breaks down when her daughter dies. I know Greta had a lot to do with that but Dern really brought her to life.

Mason made a big mistake when she turned down Norma Rae. She needed to prove she could do stuff other than Neil Simon movies.

Miss Dunaway is winning! Take that salad boys!!!

Isn't Dunaway's son a little homosexual boy? You'd think she'd have more patience for them.

R59 I think you’re onto something as far as Beatty goes. There was a jealousy of Warren I think for years in the industry, and it came out through his lack of winning at the Oscars up until 1982. They threw him a bone with a director win, mainly because Reds turned a profit and wasn’t a disaster, but ending up denying him best pic when Chariots of Fire won in a huge upset. Talented, hot and fucking hundreds of women is a deadly trio of the green eyed monster in Hollywood.

At least Diane Keaton has an Oscar. Albert Finney went 0 for 5. Not only did he deserve to be nominated for Shoot the Moon, I think he should have won. They were both great in this scene.

R70 I think even more than Warren it’s the women — which is of course typical reaction from our society. Same way when a man serially cheats on his wife/GF people blame the women. Look how Annette Bening wasn’t even nominated for Bugsy. The jealousy is taken out on the women the most.

As for Finney r70, that’s because he never showed up. He absolutely deserved an Oscar at some point in his career — at least one I would say.

Shut up shoot the moon troll

Helen Lawson was sadly overlooked for SECOND SPRING. That’s the one in which she plays an alcoholic trying to reunite with the adult daughter she abandoned (Elizabeth Ashley). It’s a real tearjerker. People said their campaigning against each other cost them both a nom, but Helen wasn’t necessarily the most popular person in Hollywood by then. Performing oral sex for votes just isn’t as easy when you wear dentures.

[quote] Performing oral sex for votes just isn’t as easy when you wear dentures.

Helen uttered that same line when she played Barbara Bush in the The Nancy Reagan Story, a TV movie from 1989.

She did manage an Emmy nom for that role, but lost to Brenda Vaccaro.

Lawson played Ethel Thayer, Hepburn's "On Golden Pond" role, on stage for the Kenley Players in Dayton, but the production was closed after she improvised an erotic bump and grind striptease that involved much more than "sucking face", and later grabbed a prop rifle and threatened to shoot those "fucking loons if they wake me up before noon again."

Yes, I believe Finney was considered for an honorary Oscar a couple times, but the "rule" with the Academy is you have to show up to accept it, and Finney wasn't interested. I think that's a lot of bullshit on the Academy's part.

Unfortunately all of Finneys nominations came in years where he was never the front runner. He probably came the closest to winning for Tom Jones. They should’ve just given him an honorary one, said he would attend, and then made up an excuse like he was sick. But Finney never was interested in awards so...

They totally should have given it to him for Erin Brockovich. He was fantastic in it. And Benicio Del Toro didn't do a fucking thing in Traffic to warrant even a nomination, let alone an award.

Streep's performance has not aged well.

It's difficult to tell who was the bigger ham that year: Streep or Dunaway.

I agree about Finney in Brockovich. Julia's performance would not be as good without him, and especially the film. He's just perfect in the film.

R79, I agree that Finney should have won for Erin Brockovich, but for an entirely different reason. I thought Benecio was great in Traffic, but should have won the Oscar as a lead, just like he did at the SAG awards.

For all the successful romantic comedies Julia has done throughout her career, she has never had better chemistry with a co-star than she does with Albert Finney.

R65, I remember Mason from her but part in Blume in Love. She plays a fun, sexy one night stand of George Segal’s character. I think that’s where dhe got her first notice. The director Paul Mazursky did a great job directing the actresses in his films.

Kate wasn’t acting. She was just being Kate with the shakes.