How did Jill Clayburgh lose the Oscar for An Unmarried Woman?

I guess not....

Hover, hover, little OP.

The film caused a splash because of Paul Mazursky "keeping at it" with his directorial style and Jill Clayburgh's performance. But no one was going to get in the way of Fonda's popular comeback in a Vietnam film that took a rounded view of war and THAT war.

And the other nominees were rather tepid or just misplaced.

And your "get the posts" approach to thread starting, with the usual stupid question posed with none of your own thoughts, shows you to be not just a hoverer but also a bit of a cunt.

I just saw her vomit in I'm Dancing as Fast As I Can.

She must be the most vomiting actress of film.

She didn't vomit in Dancing. She drooled.

The infamous presentation where Richard Dreyfuss delays announcing the winner and pisses off Clayburgh.

Because the Oscar morons of 1978 voted for that Jane Fonda snore of the decade, Coming Home. It should have stayed away. So should Jane.

Fonda was a shondeh.

The other nominees were far from tepid. Ingrid Bergman gave the best performance of her career in Autumn Sonata, and should have won her third for that over Murder on the Orient Express. Geraldine Page was also excellent in Interiors. I'd rank Jill below these two, but above Fonda and Ellen Burstyn in Same Time, Next Year

Oops got the wrong year for the Dreyfuss fucking around. Must have been the next one.

How did Dreyfuss get to present Best Actress two years in a row?

Maybe Jon voight didn’t go to the 1980 ceremony

"Coming Home" is set against a hazy backdrop of war in Vietnam. The story begins during the Tet Offensive and ends perhaps a year or so later. The historical landmarks get vaguer as the movie drifts along . . . but almost none concerns the war itself." Washington Post

it's really the story of a woman who has her first orgasm thanks to a paraplegic and it could be about any war.

Coming Home is such a piece of shit movie. I remember there being some concentrated campaign against The Deer Hunter that same year by Fonda and other limousine liberal Hollywood types for portraying Vietnamese people in a "harmful way." It is a MILES better movie than Coming Home.

R5 Jane's costar seems a little annoyed and tense as Ross and Rogers present Best Actor. His speech is also pretentious and pointless.

Dreyfuss looks awfully sick in that clip with Shirley MacLaine.

I lost what ? who cares, look what I've got

Is La Luna worth watching or is it insufferable?

It's tough going since it's about a drug adduct but then I find all Berto's movies tough going.

[quote] How did Dreyfuss get to present Best Actress two years in a row?

Because the Academy thought he was so handsome they wanted to have a good hard look at him for another night.

Is her daughter Lily Collins is more famous than her mother?

No, she is not is, R19.

^ Maybe because Lily Collins is not her daughter?

Lily Rabe is.

And the answer is still no.

What about Jill's mother, Lily Munster?

I can't really see Jane Fonda doing this.

I never got An Unmarried Woman. I'd have been Mrs. Alan Bates so fast that guy wouldn't have known what hit him.

She foamed at the mouth r4.

You have to understand the period. It was a very different era..Oscars weren't about art, or talent, or even the best performance that year. The western world was traumatized by the disastrous war at its door. Jane was -expertly- all over the medias with her politics, her feminism, her sexlife, her grudge against her father of men in general, her appearence...Oh, wait...

R24, who wouldn't be Lady Bates ?

Fonda is exhausting. Is she on the spectrum.

R18 She inherited a lot of $$$ from her mother's side as well as a good chunk of her mental disease.

Jane Fonda’s Oscar win for Coming Home is one of the least deserved in the Best Actress category. The role and performance are nothing special, but the material was weighty and topical and she was a huge star in a passion project.

Clayburgh was much better and could have won in a less politicized year. Ingrid Bergman won most of the major critics’ prizes, but this would have been her fourth win (in a foreign language film, no less) and I’m not sure the Academy was ready for that.

Geraldine Page was excellent, but with quite limited screen time. She won the BAFTA for best supporting actress.

Burstyn probably placed fifth. I would have replaced her and Fonda with Liv Ullmann from Autumn Sonata and Melanie Mayron from Girlfriends.

I would have definitely have gotten Liv Ullmann a nod over Fonda and Burstyn. Hell, I’d have given Jamie Lee Curtis a nod for Halloween over those two - it’s a great central performance and in a now iconic movie.

I think Fonda deserved to win for Julia the previous year over Diane Keaton in Annie Hall and if this had happened Clayburgh would won for AUW.

The real winner for 1977 should have been either Gena Rowlands for Opening Night or Shelley Duvall for 3 Women. I also wouldn't have been mad if Diane Keaton won for Looking For Mr. Goodbar instead of Annie Hall.

At 8:50 there was a smear campaign by friends of this interviewer who claimed it was nothing more than a high budget soap opera - Jill was not too pleased with this assessment

Bobbie Wygant was a poisonous cunt

R6- Jane Fonda declined the offer to play Erica in An Unmarried Woman because she the part was lame or something and meanwhile she agreed to star in that DRIVEL Coming Home- FASCINATING!

I think Fonda was way better that same year in Comes a Horseman, a film that has all but been forgotten, and only got a nomination for Richard Farnsworth for supporting actor.

R37- The next year she starred in The Electric Horseman.

And?

I prefered the remake " An Unmarried trans woman of color".

The best part of that clip is at the very end when you hear Jill mutter “what’s Turning Point?”

I’m not a fan of Unmarried Woman but the interviewer was very unprofessional with her soap opera comment when she clearly suggests that certain critics have written about it being a glossy soap opera, which was bullshit.

She was doing that on purpose R41, dind't you know that passive aggressive foul cunt Bobbie Wygant ? (she canadian of course)

No, I’ve never seen her before

[quote] How did Dreyfuss get to present Best Actress two years in a row?

Jon Voight had been cancelled after making the news with his cannibalistic erotic fantasy texts to his Left leaning female co-stars.

R36 - Jane Fonda turned down An Unmarried Woman and did Julia instead. Paul Mazursky said she told him to follow her to London to convince her to take the part. Jane was not asked to be in Coming Home - she was the producer.

R43, she demanded hundreds of takes, and retakes for her interviews, but here, she didn't delete her cunty remarks, or reframed her questions. it was 100% intentional, and Jill knew it

With The Deer Hunter winning big, and Coming Home winning three in the top categories also, it fit into the anti Vietnam war theme of the evening. Also ironic that Oliver Stone won his first Oscar (his adaptation of Midnight Express) that night, he would win other Oscars for HIS takes on the Vietnam war and what it cost this country. Clayburgh would’ve been a great winner and a ballsy choice. I think either Siskel or Ebert thought she should win, but Fonda is Hollywood royalty and was rewarded for her big year in Coming Home, Comes A Horseman and California Suite.

Jane Fonda was asked what made The Deer Hunter a “racist film”, but she answered that she had actually not seen the film herself.

R48 in my Inside Oscar book, she said she got a call from Julie Christie, who told her the Viet cong were portrayed as subhuman and sadistic, so Fonda took her cues from her. Her co winner Michael Cimino, who won director for TDH, said she didn’t say a word to him or look at him while they took their photos together. Even if it was true, it was stupid for Fonda to admit she’d never seen TDH. For all Fonda knew, Christie might’ve been embellishing it.

Barbra Streisand was offered the role first, as was common practice during the 1970s, and then it was offered to Fonda.

Clayburgh was in a group of actresses who were offered all the roles that Streisand and Fonda had already turned down first. That group consisted of Clayburgh, Keaton, Burstyn, Christie, Hawn and Marsha Mason.

R50 HOW VERY DARE YOU ???? WHAT AM I ??? CHOPPED LIVER ?

Vanity Fair did a great piece on this a few years back.

The 1979 oscars came down to which Vietnam movie you supported. It was the first time that stories about the war were being told on screen, and people were on edge over the depictions. Jane Fonda's oscar was Hollywood apologizing for helping make her a pariah for the previous few years.

Nobody else really stood a chance.

Fonda admitting she hadn't seen the movie but knew hers was the better picture pretty much sums up a lot of her activism. While I've agreed with her on many issues, she's the archetype of the hollywood dilettante who finds a cause, and then acts like the rest of the world is completely unaware and must be beaten into submission hearing about how SHE feels about it. That's why I can't bear to listen to her on climate change, no matter how right she is. She lacks depth and most of all, she can't share the spotlight.

[quote] she's the archetype of the hollywood dilettante who finds a cause, and then acts like the rest of the world is completely unaware and must be beaten into submission hearing about how SHE feels about it. She lacks depth and most of all, she can't share the spotlight.

Truer words were never spoken.

Yes wasn't there some bad blood from Coming Home story writer Nancy Dowd because Fonda was saying she had originated the idea?

Fonda is a terrible actress. So self-conscious. She knows very well she's a fraud. If she hadn't constantly occupy the media with her antics, she would never have had a star career. She couldn't rely on her acting skills to remain in the public eye. She understands fame and Hollywood very well, I'll give her that.

Fonda is NOT a terrible actress. Klute, her first Oscar, is widely considered one the best best actress wins. Granted, she’s done material that’s beneath her, but that’s every Hollywood actor. She’s gotten multiple award nominations in all acting fields. Won the Oscar twice and the Emmy once. You don’t survive 60 years in the industry being a terrible actress.

Fonda was excellent in KLUTE, and totally deserved her win. I do not, however, think she is worthy of being a two time Oscar winner.

I was a kid when Jill’s big movies were out, so I only really saw them as an adult. She is very, very good in AN UNMARRIED WOMAN, but I don’t think I was all that impressed by the movie itself. I may need to watch it again.

She’s good in one of my favorite little-seen movies of the 80s, SHY PEOPLE, with Barbara Hershey and a young Martha Plimpton.

Good news the whole movie is online.

An Unmarried Woman is a virtual remake of La Femme de Jean, a very popular French movie from 1974 with an identical plot. This of course would never have been acknowledged by Paul Mazursky because the narrative fit perfectly into any mid-70's Feminist discourse and pass unnoticed.

Fonda is a terrible to middling actress. She's passable in the right roles like Klute (which any competent actress could have played, Julie Christie practically played it already in Darling) but is too damn self conscious on screen for me to believe her in anything, and is godawful in comedies, she has no sense of humor. She remains overpraised because of her looks, controversy and family heritage - Henry might not have been a great guy, but he was much better actor. Jane is a less repulsive proto-Angelina Jolie.

Pauline Kael on Coming Home: “The politics of the film are extremely naïve, and possibly disingenuous. Coming Home doesn’t oppose the Vietnam War on political grounds. The film embodies a pure-pacifist attitude toward Vietnam: the war is condemned on the basis that our soldiers are maimed and killed in it. Except for a sex scene or two, Coming Home is the sort of film a Protestant church group might put out—blandly humanitarian. Though it was shot by Haskell Wexler, a wizard of fast-moving strong graphics, it has a Waspy glaze to it—a soft, pastel innocuousness, as if all those involved were so concerned to get the message across without offending anyone that they fogged themselves in. Jane Ronda’s face seems a little vague and pasty, as if she didn’t want to stand out too much; her features seem to have disappeared. She’s trying to act without her usual snap, and the result is so unsure she comes flutteringly close to a Norma Shearer performance.”

R28 What, the cunt spectrum?

R45- Nevertheless she was above appearing in An Unmarried Woman but lowered herself to appear in Coming Home.

R23 I can't really see Jane Fonda doing this.

Oh, I don't know about that. It wouldn't be much of a stretch for Jane Fonda to do that

R2, lol. Your awful.

oh dear r65

am listening to the Paul Mazursky DVD audio commentary. He said he wanted Clayburgh because she had that Vassar private liberal arts college quality that Fonda also had. Jill didn't actually go to Vassar but Sarah Lawrence College.

Jane Fonda deserved the Oscar, and rightfully won it.

OK R68 is F&F. as well as R57. You don't want to understand ? we'll make you understand. It's over. You've forced that phony bitch down our throat long enough. GAME OVER. GOSH! you behave as if you had won the woe vs wade thing. it's OVER!

The National Board of Review, the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics named Ingrid Bergman Best Actress for Autumn Sonata. Jane won the Los Angeles Film Critics award for Coming Home

Jane BOUGHT the Los Angeles Film Critics award for Coming Home

corrected that for you

actually, R71 the LA Film Critics Association bought the whole mediocre film. Naming it Best Picture and awarding both Jane and Jon. Runner ups for Best Actress were Ingrid Bergman Autumn Sonata and Ellen Burstyn A Dream of Passion.

[quote] Jane is a less repulsive proto-Angelina Jolie.

Angelina wears her repulsiveness on her sleeve. Jane hides it underneath the plastic surgery and "activist" screen. She's deeply mental and has done more harm in the world than Mia Farrow ans Vanessa Redgrave ever dreamt they could. She's a living Dorianne Gray.

How can she lose something she didn't have in the first place?

Clayburgh co-won Best Actress at Cannes with Isabelle Huppert for Violette Noziere.

20 years later, Dowd was still pissed:

It’s not easy to stand up to a woman as vindictive, vicious and commercially ubiquitous as Jane Fonda, but I’m glad I did. Her campaign against me, well documented, caused me deep humiliation and grief. Thanks to my undeniable talent, I survived. True, every time in the last thirty years I have thought with relief I would never have to see her stretched face or hear her empty laugh again I turn on a television set and she has re-emerged like make-over Alien, this time as an elderly Christian or whatever her most recent tiresome re-incarnation is. Of course, I can hope that as the apocalypticians say, the end is near, but Jane will more than likely rise from the grave peddling something or other. Some nuisances, like termites and cockroaches, last forever.

Thanks R76, glad to see that cunt have her comeuppance at last

I underestimated the hate for Jane on DL

R78 you haven't seen nuffin' yet

So Paul Mazursky says he refused to follow Jane Fonda to London to convince her to be in the film but he says he did go to London to convince Alan Bates.

Only in the 70s could someone as ordinary looking as Jill Clayburgh (not to mention Sissy Spacek and many others) become a star. That’s probably the real reason her career couldn’t sustain into the 80s (plus she was already in her mid 30s when she hit it big). We got our best actresses from that decade though - and maybe that was why.

Jill was exceptionally beautiful. I don't see many Jills in the streets, where do you live, asshole R81

I agree with R81, she was common looking. Like Pugh today.

R83 = Olivia Wilde

Clayburgh was appealing and attractive. She was pretty but no Candice Bergen, Faye Dunaway, Cybill Shepherd, Jacqueline Bissett or Faye Dunaway in terms of beauty.

THE jill clayburgh is too homely to be an actress is a tired trope invented by John Waters back in the day.

[quote] Cybill Shepherd, Jacqueline Bissett

were not in the same league as Bergen, Dunaway & Dunaway ( I forgot there were 2 of them ) . They had big noses. Deneuve, Andress, Pettet, Farrow , were.

(^.^) the maiden aunt brigade has arrived

R86 were not in the same league as Bergen, Dunaway & Dunaway ( I forgot there were 2 of them ) . They had big noses. Deneuve, Andress, Pettet, Farrow , were.

You also forgot syntax and punctuation as well. WTF!

Jane Fonda is dying

Jacqueline Bissett was considered the poor man's Julie Christie.

While there is absolutely no doubt that I deserve to be mentioned more than once on a list of true beauties, it's NOT "Faye Dunaway" or "Dunaway," bitches!

I thought Fonda was more deserving of an Oscar for The China Syndrome. It was a great star vehicle but a strongly written role that played to Fonda's strengths.

I wonder if Geraldine Page would have won if she was in supporting.

R94 probably not. Page and Stapleton would’ve split the vote.

[quote] Page and Stapleton would’ve split the vote.

They sure would have.

[quote] Jacqueline Bissett was considered the poor man's Julie Christie

But wasn't Julie Christie the poor man's Bridgette Bardot ?

MY NAME IS B-I-S-S-E-T, fuckers

Cybill Shepherd starred in three of the best movies of the 1970's

Jaqueline Bisset worked with Polanski, Truffaut, Stanley Donan, George Cukor and Phillippe De Broca.

Neither was the poor mans anybody.

R99 what are we ? shit stains ?

R92, sorry Miss Dunaway, Please, not the salad !

Cybill in The Heartbreak Kid looking lovely despite her big nose

R102 a big nose you’re fucking crazy

R103 Cybil has potato nose. Jacqueline's nose is way tol large and long for her face

R103 see R87 Cybill Shepherd, Jacqueline Bissett were not in the same league as Bergen, Dunaway & Dunaway ( I forgot there were 2 of them ) . They had big noses. Deneuve, Andress, Pettet, Farrow , were.

—Anonymous

R96 Finch died, so that gave him the leg up on Holden. MacLaine had the overdue factor, so that put the kabosh on Wingers chances. Abraham won the globe and LA film critics, killing Hulces chances. If there’s something that sets the other co star apart, they can win. Page and Stapleton were pretty much evenly matched in terms of not winning the Oscar yet. Stapleton did win in LA and NY film critics supporting actress for Interiors. She probably came in second Oscar wise. I think Page would’ve made a better nominee in this category than the forgotten Milford, but she certainly would’ve siphoned votes away from Stapleton. Smith was going to win regardless.

Page was certainly overdue and hardly matched with Stapleton, who had three nominations to Page's (at that point) six nominations, so you're wrong on all accounts.

R107 you’re wrong. I wasn’t talking strictly Oscar nominations, I was talking overall standing as middle age character actresses. Stapleton was already a Tony winner, both were Emmy winners at the time of this Oscars in 79. And both were multiple Oscar nominees. One didn’t really stand out above the other. Neither really didn’t have the narrative to win. When two nominees or more are in the same category, there has to be something that pushes one of them out in front of the other nominees from the same film to win. A big scene, or something personal that’s happened to them for voters to be swayed. And at this point Page, not unlike Glenn Close, just got nominated a lot. Do try to keep up.

The inside joke of Maggie Smith winning for losing an Oscar was probably too good a moment to pass up.

Wow, R108, that's a lot of claw clacking to try and justify yourself. Wouldn't it have been easier to admit you were wrong? Christ, some queens just can't lose gracefully.

No one can lose fucking gracefully after 6-8 nominations, bitches.

R110 because I wasn’t wrong. Page wasn’t going to win this year. Lead or supporting. She won none of the precursors, unlike Fonda, Bergman, Stapleton, Smith and even Dyan Cannon, who won the supporting actress globe. When I’m wrong, I’ll admit it. But inserting Page into the supporting actress category wasn’t going to change anything. If Mary Tyler Moore had been nominated for supporting actress instead of lead, two years later, I’d say she probably would’ve have won due to MTMs popularity and how well the film did Oscar wise, enough to fend off critics darling Mary Steenburgen. But not in 1978.

Buck would never have relegated MTM to supporting.

Great take on Fonda and Clayburgh, r57. Mazursky, like Woody, was a darling of New York film critics. A Married Woman got mostly good reviews, as did JC’s performance, and was a big hit with New Yorkers. Alan Bates was swoon worthy indeed and every woman I knew was in love with Saul. Erica’s apartment, not so much.

And Erica's daughter and analyst, not so much...

But Clayburgh was terrific.

This is one of those movies that has been mysteriously taken out of circulation. Why do some movies disappear like that? You'd think the producers would want to make money by offering it on streaming services.

Sometimes ownership passes into odd hands due to corporate mergers/bankruptcies R116. The rights to the original Sleuth and the Heartbreak Kid are owned by Bristol Meyers Squibb. They could give two shits about negotiating streaming contracts for movies like that.

Some of these discussions about beauty overlook the sex appeal factor. Bisset and Shepherd weren't the most ethereally beautiful actresses of the era, but their fuckability was off the charts for anyone into women. Bisset's wet t-shirt in "The Deep" remains iconic to those viewers 45 years later.

R91Jacqueline Bissett was considered the poor man's Julie Christie

Hardly, but if anyone was considered the poor man's Julie Christie it would be Carol White

I was the poor man's Julie Christie!

Bisset benefitted from Christie not working much during her heyday. If Christie wanted a specific role, then she would have gotten it over Bisset.

Yes I think Christie had a reputation like Streisand in that they were offered everything and turned down most.

I remember there was some flap because the advertising used Clayburgh's head on someone else's legs.

poster.

Have you heard the song they made from the theme music?

Jane Fonda was no Meryl Streep.

She was basically playing the same character in every movie.

What Jane Fonda would do to R126

[Quote] But no one was going to get in the way of Fonda's popular comeback in a Vietnam film that took a rounded view of war and THAT war.

Coming Home It had little to do with war let alone the Vietnam War and was about a woman achieving her first orgasm.

It implied disabled Vietnam vets are great in the sack.

R37- He’s best remembered as Mathew Cuthbert in Anne Of Green Gables (1985).

One of the all time great line ups where the winner was the worst performance.

Fonda campaigned hard for it.

[quote]I remember there was some flap because the advertising used Clayburgh's head on someone else's legs.

What's wrong with that?

R37/R130 I remember in early 2000, Richard Farnsworth was up for Best Actor in THE STRAIGHT STORY.

He lost to Kevin Spacey in AMERICAN BEAUTY and then killed himself later that year because he got cancer.

Never understood how or why this movie is popular on DL. It’s like an even more tepid Woody Allen movie. Is it because of the eldergays who miss 70s NYC?

Also I am not a fan of Jane Fonda or Julie Christie. Christie at least has some excellent films (McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Don’t Look Now). They’re really nothing special compared to the European actresses of the period, most of whom didn’t even get an Oscar nomination during their entire careers.

Isn’t this the movie that unleashed Quinn Cummings on the world?

Angelina quite resembles her father when he was young.

R136 - no that was The Goodbye Girl.

I think that year the Academy really stuffed up the nominees. I feel both Ingrid Bergman and Geraldine Page should have been in supporting, and frankly Geraldine should not have been nominated at all as she was awful in Interiors.

R8 I don't see Jill Clayburgh looking pissed off in either of the clips with Dreyfuss.

Jane's acceptance speech is so self-serving

Richard Dreyfuss has become such an utter nobody in the last 15 years or so.

R140 but Sally Field looks very confused when Dreyfuss says I'm not going to tell you.

If you compare Clayburgh's laugh reaction to that of Bette Midler, you will see the difference.

Shirley M. looked great in 1979, but what a dumb intro re Beatty.

R145 how do you mean?

Ingrid Bergman should have won this, and her performance in Autumn Sonatta is one of the better ones ever in a movie. It merged topically, biography and, well, everything, Sorry for this Mary moment.

I like Jane Fonda in a handful of films, Klute, the underrated camp of The Morning After, but she should get this oscar removed because of this cringe speech.

Julie Christie nailed a couple of performances but is an actress (unlike Candice Bergen or Jacqueline Bisset mentioned in this thread) that never, ever, moved me.

Finally, i never realized how short Richard Dreyfuss was , nor how cute. was. Quite a snack. He was so insecure there with Shirley he almost gave me an oscar.

Autumn Sonatta?

That's an italian chick I knew once who's husbands name was Vinny- and connected.

OH DEER!!!!

I found Richard Dreyfus adorable in American Grafitti, at some point not soon after, he became pretty much unbearable.

I was going to write that Jane would not have been as believable as a woman whose husband leaves her. But then Tom Hayden did in real life.

How did Jill Clayburgh lose the Oscar for An Unmarried Woman?

Voter turnout was low