The 1979 Best Actress Oscar

Not one black face in the audience.

[quote]Not one black face in the audience.

Did you notice Ellen Burstyn's dress?

Jane Fonda was so so ahead of her time. The original Woke Queen.

I think they were just relieved Jane didn't launch into another hourlong tirade about Vietnam. That's the only reason she made that awful movie in the first place, and she just wouldn't shut up about it for the entire decade.

What a talented group. All were superb. I remember rooting for Ingrid Bergman. But each performance was amazing.

Richard looks thin.

What the heck is EB wearing?. That's the stuff my grandma wears inside the house

[quote]Jane Fonda was so so ahead of her time. The original Woke Queen.

Yes, but that did spill into ahead of her time Gay Lib talk. So I forgive her anything. This from the same year.

Louise Fletcher spoke in sign language when she won Best Actress a few years earlier. Jane must've saw it and decided she wanted to do it too.

[quote]That's the stuff my grandma wears inside the house

LOL

I love Jane but Jill was robbed.

I want to fix Jane Fonda's hair.

(why do things like this bring out the queen in me?)

Ellen aka Edna Rae has always been a frump.

Richard was a bit coked up.

Shirley being [bold]totally inappropriate[/bold] about her brother, referring to his sex life.

I have never seen Autumn Sonata. I have heard it might be Bergman's best performance but not necessarily the easiest movie to watch. I wonder if her winning the best supporting for Murder on the Orient Express hurt her chances of winning. Not that winning an Oscar relatively recently should affect the current, but I suspect it does.

I thought Fonda's speech came across pretty sincere and heartfelt. Wonder what she thinks of Jon Voight now.

R2, did you get black woman vibes from Ellen's dress?

R15 Every word of yours is Pure Fiction!

The intro to the 1979 awards is also '70s GOLD.

Dreyfus didn't want to be there,

MacLaine and her multiple past lives are ocd divas and heavily superstitious (I think this was before her germaphobe years but I'd wager she applied her makeup all over... no madonna hands for her. It was her transition years from young to mature actress. )... but I'd guess she was trying to stretch it out to prevent Jane from misusing the platform, they both had supported the troops, even so Hanoi had a habit of alienating even the people that agreed with her... she was over the top obnoxious about it but nepobaby royalty, even if on the ousts with her father.. .the film with her father in a short few years would do much to heal her reputation with hollywood, tho.

R19 reminded me how much I hate Johnny Carson. Such a one note schtick. Bizarre he was the biggest thing on TV for years.

R14 watch him when he’s presenting the following year - I first saw it posted here.

Great intro to the ‘79 show, R19!

Look at Margot Kidder at 1:32–looks like she is holding hands with a woman.

What was Page doing in the leading category? Her role in Interiors was clearly a supporting one.

What r11 said.

I'm surprised Ingrid was up for Best Actress for Autumn Sonata when it seems she plays a supporting role to Liv Ullmann in the film. Yes I would agree that the film is hard going - it's Liv railing at Ingrid for being a bad mother for about 90 minutes.

R25 I don’t necessarily agree she was robbed but clearly how badly her career went after the fact - and then how young she died - yeah in retrospect it would have been great had she won, because she was a terrific actress.

Diane Keaton said she and Clayburgh used to be interchangeable /up for all the same parts. (On one of the talk shows, maybe Letterman)

Jane Fonda was a virtue signaler before the term existed

Autumn Sonata is depressing as fuck, but it's still one of Bergman's most accessible and conventional films.

1979, peak Oscar.

R27 - Jill was up for the Oscar again the next year for Starting Over.

R31 and then her career died fast. A shame.

No one remembers Jane's jittery, hippy-dippy performance. Geraldine Page played against type in a performance that lives on.

Geraldine was pure Geraldine Page in Interiors. And that's not a good thing.

R34 but she’s the greatest living actress!

Jane Fonda has the hands of a pianist. Very long and elegant fingers on her. Does she play? Her wig is horrible.

I love that, R8, and she didn't hesitate or anything. That was off the cuff and obviously her true feelings.

[quote][R31] and then her career died fast. A shame.

her movie star career, yes, she chose very bad projects - but she kept working for years.

I really appreciate Interiors now, I didn't then. It's often unintentionally funny. Geraldine slips on her lines several times in that clip. Woody should have re-shot it. She comes across as an amateur, yet she's a HIGHLY respected actress.

[quote]Geraldine Page played against type in a performance that lives on.

Well, it would if anyone ever watched Interiors any more. One of my friends tried to invoke it the other day but remembered it as "Exteriors", without irony.

Coming Home is another movie that seems to have disappeared.

[quote]Coming Home is another movie that seems to have disappeared.

It was never very good. I saw it just once then and thought it was boring.

OVERRATED.

Maybe Jane learned sign language to try to make up for the previous year's signing fiasco:

Debby Boone and the not-deaf children:

When the song You Light Up My Life was nominated for an Academy Award in 1978, the producers thought they had a cute idea for singer Debby Boone’s performance. Inspired by a mother who taught a class of children the song using sign language for her hearing-impaired daughter, they decided to replicate this for the ceremony, with 11 girls singing behind Debby.

However, it soon became apparent to viewers that the 11 girls on stage were signing different songs. It was also screamingly obvious to hearing-impaired viewers that 10 of the girls were just spelling out random words; only one of them was deaf and the rest had only limited knowledge of sign language.

Host Bob Hope told the audience the girls were “affiliated with the John Tracy Clinic for the Deaf” (named for the son of actor Spencer Tracey) but their only affiliation was that a doctor from the clinic had chosen them and they were in fact students of a local elementary school. A spokesperson for the Academy later defended their actions by saying "nobody said the children were really deaf.”

"Geraldine slips on her lines several times in that clip. Woody should have re-shot it."

Because people sometimes do that in real life. Are you the Grammar Troll?

Jane Fonda won as an "apology" for Vietnam. Which is weird, considering she was far from the only Hollywood star who was vocally anti-Vietnam. Either way, her movie was shit. Ingrid Bergman should have won. If not her, Geraldine Page.

[quote]Because people sometimes do that in real life. Are you the Grammar Troll?

Do you know you are an idiot?

[quote] Richard looks thin.

It was the coke.

No mention of Jill Clayburgh for An Unmarried Woman, yet? She looked nice and very low key.

Ellyn B. - Same Time Next Year - was an awful film. They stuck in Alan Alda and he's such a slimy unsexy creep. Charles Grodin was in the play with her and she wanted him in the movie but the money people said no. In fact they took the sex out of the movie - so it was a movie about sex with no sex whatsoever.

Alan Alda was the most unsexy actor in the history of entertainment. Exactly what the fraus love.

Alda has the tall, lanky look of a guy with a long schlong and full bush.

r46 must have r11 r25 r27 and r31 on ignore.

I remember this as cringe because Jane pandered to the deaf community for no reason.

Agree Jill Clayburgh should have won.

[quote] Jane Fonda was so so ahead of her time. The original Woke Queen.

And now she’s on television talking about Latinx and how she’s reading books to educate her on the subject. lol

R38 How do you know she slipped on her lines? Were you the script girl on the film?

Such a stupid comment to make. Do you really think Woody Allen would have used a take where Geraldine Page had issues with her lines in the final cut of his film?

If the CHARACTER she is playing is being inarticulate, do you think that might be what the script/actor/director intended?

Jane Fonda had worn that paisley James Reva dress to the Oscars before. I forget what year it was.

I like that she’s never been afraid to repeat using expensive clothes. At the 2020 Oscars she wore a dress she’d debuted at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. And as early as the premiere of “9 to 5” she wore a Norman Norell dress she’d worn in “Klute.”

R16: Before the Comcast Gods discontinued my Turner Classic Movies, I got to see, "Autumn Sonata". While it takes a while to get going, I found the parent-child dynamic to be engaging.