The Oscar-winning Songs Countdown: 1974

Before we move on to this week's story, let me wish you all happy holidays! Whatever your religion or personal belief, may you be always surrounded by people that you love and who love you, and may you be healthy enough and sane enough to enjoy the all the pleasures of life! Now, let's get on with it!

1974 was a glorious year for the Oscars: it had its fair share of great movies and great performances. Oscar eligible and nominated songs: not so much.

Such a gathering of film & TV stars of the past, present, and future, probably never before existed in such a concentrated form. Lumet's adaptation of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express had the strongest cast: led by Albert Finney in the role of Poirot, it included such luminaries as Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, Vanessa Redgrave, Lauren Bacall, Anthony Perkins, Richard Widmark, John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Rachel Roberts, Jacqueline Bisset, Michael York, Martin Balsam and Jean-Pierre Cassel. It was a smash hit and was the beginning of many star-studded Agatha Christie adaptations. The film's score by Richard Rodney Bennett also stood out:

Close behind in star power was perhaps the best disaster epic, the skyscraper on fire themed The Towering Inferno. Led by three of the hottest stars of the era, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, and Faye Dunaway, and supported by old Hollywood stars like William Holden, Fred Astaire and Jennifer Jones, as well as TV stars like Richard Chamberlain, Robert Wagner, Robert Vaughn and Susan Blakely, as well as football star O.J. Simpson, the film burned a glorious trail at the box-office. The score was composed by a musician who was on the right path to the top: John Williams.

Runner-up at the box-office was another disaster epic called Earthquake, which featured a gimmick called Sensurround, which made the theater tremble and shake to simulate an actual earthquake. It too had its fair share of stars, including Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, George Kennedy, Lorne Greene, Geneviève Bujold, Richard Roundtree, Barry Sullivan, Lloyd Nolan, Victoria Principal, and Walter Matthau.

Francis Ford Coppola had his fingers in many pies in 1974: his most famous endeavor, the sequel to his critical and box-office smash The Godfather: part II had a different kind of star power: lots of stars in their formative years, like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, John Cazale; Coppola's relatives like sister Talia Shire and father Carmine Coppola who was given a co-composer's credit along with the great Nino Rota; also casting oddities, like former teen idol Troy Donahue; B-movie producer Roger Corman; playwright Michael V. Gazzo; and Actors Studio guru Lee Strasberg. The film, although a sequel, garnered as much critical praise as the original and was a box office hit. Here's part of the great soundtrack:

Another Coppola endeavor was a film that was based on a screenplay he wrote back in 1969 about wiretapping - an activity recently popularized by the Nixon administration with Watergate and all. The Conversation, which starred Gene Hackman, won the Palme D'Or in the Cannes Film Festival and earned rave reviews, but was a box office failure. Coppola blamed the awkward distribution of the film.

Coppola's third film was a screenplay-writing assignment for a new edition of The Great Gatsby. The film, directed by Jack Clayton and starring Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, Bruce Dern, Karen Black, and Sam Waterston was hyped to death for more than a year before its release, but the end result left most people unsatisfied: the reviews were mixed to negative, and the box office was so-so. The soundtrack however, supervised and conducted by Nelson Riddle, was generally liked.

Robert Evans, who produced The Great Gatsby for Paramount, had recently lost his wife, Ali MacGraw, to Steve McQueen, after costarring with him in a movie that Evans urged her to make for her career's sake. Dissatisfied with his financial compensation and desiring to produce films under his own banner, Evans struck a deal with Paramount that enabled him to stay on as studio head while also working as an independent producer. The first movie he produced was Chinatown. Directed by Roman Polanski and starring two of the brightest stars of the era, Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway in their finest moment, as well as director John Huston as a memorable bad guy, the film revived the genre of Film Noir. It was successful and would become very influential in the history of cinema. Jerry Goldsmith's score was part of its charm:

A couple of years earlier Coppola won the Best Picture Oscar for The Godfather, but lost out for Best Director to Bob Fosse and his superlative work in Cabaret. (What a dilemma, between two masterpieces!) This year, Fosse was back again to challenge Coppola for the crown: this time it wasn't with a musical, but with a biopic; Lenny was about controversial comedian Lenny Bruce and it starred Dustin Hoffman and Valerie Perrine. The film had excellent reviews and was considered a contender.

It wasn't only Coppola who liked to work with family and friends; John Cassavetes did too. His latest drama, A Woman Under the Influence, starred his wife Gena Rowlands and his best buddy, Peter Falk, who helped fund the film so that Cassavetes would have final cut control rather than the studio. A harrowing tale of a working class housewife's descent to madness was elevated to high art by Cassavetes' true to life direction and Rowlands' majestic performance - she was the best in a year of so many excellent performances.

Another arthouse film was last year's Foreign Oscar winner: Day For Night (La Nuit Américaine) by French auteur François Truffaut, starring Jacqueline Bisset, Valentina Cortese, Jean-Pierre Aumont, and Jean-Pierre Léaud. The film within a film had had a regular run in the US, so it was now eligible for the other Oscars as well.

Since Scorsese's muse, De Niro, was otherwise occupied with Coppola, Scorsese decided to work with Ellen Burstyn, Kris Kristofferson, Diane Ladd, Harvey Keitel, and Jodie Foster in a road movie called Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. The movie received good reviews and had a decent commercial run.

The Nominations

The Godfather: part II led the pack with eleven nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Pacino, Best Supporting Actress for Talia Shire, and not one but three Best Supporting Actor nominees; De Niro, Gazzo, and Strasberg.

Chinatown was close behind with ten, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Nicholson, and Best Actress for Dunaway, while The Towering Inferno had eight, including Best Picture, and Best Supporting Actor for Fred Astaire.

Lenny had six, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Hoffman, and Best Actress for Perrine. Murder on the Orient Express also had six, including Best Actor for Finney, and Best Supporting Actress for Ingrid Bergman. Earthquake had five technical nominations, while with three nominations each were: The Conversation (including Best Picture), Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (including Best Actress for Burstyn and Best Supporting Actress for Ladd), Mel Brooks' comedy Blazing Saddles (including Best Supporting Actress for Madeline Kahn), and Day For Night (including Best Director and Best Supporting Actress for Cortese).

A Woman Under the Influence had two, for Director, and Best Actress for Rowlands. The Great Gatsby also had two, for Best Costumes and for Original Song Score and/or Adaptation. In this category, it was competing against The Little Prince, a musical adaptation of the classic children's book (nominees: Alan Jay Lerner, Frederick Loewe, Angela Morley, Douglas Gamley). Here's I Never Met A Rose:

The third nominee was a Rock musical by Brian De Palma that would soon achieve cult status: Phantom of the Paradise (nominees: Paul Williams, George Aliceson Tipton).

The Best Original Dramatic Score nominees were: The Godfather: part II, Chinatown, Murder on the Orient Express, The Towering Inferno, and a little horror movie called Shanks, about a mute puppeteer who controls dead bodies like puppets. The score was composed by an outstanding master of the craft, Alex North, who to this day has the unwanted record of having the most Oscar nominations (15), without ever winning the award itself. Here's Shanks:

What about the five songs? Not a very interesting bunch, I'm afraid. One nominee was from The Towering Inferno: We May Never Love Like This Again, music and lyrics: Joel Hirschhorn & Al Kasha.

It was the same duo of composers who won two years earlier for The Morning After (from The Poseidon Adventure). This was quite similar, but not as good.

The Little Prince had the song of the same title in the top five (music: Frederick Lowe • lyrics: Alan Jay Lerner):

There was also the same-titled song from Blazing Saddles (music: John Morris • lyrics: Mel Brooks):

The perfect film for dog lovers, Benji, had Benji's Theme (I Feel Love) (music: Euel Box • lyrics: Betty Box):

Finally, an adventure set in South Africa and starring Roger Moore called Gold had Wherever Love Takes Me (music: Elmer Bernstein • lyrics: Don Black):

If I were forced to choose, I would choose the latter. There was an eligible song, however, that was better than these, but failed to get nominated: from a charming little film called Claudine, which managed to earn a Best Actress nomination for Diahann Carroll. The song was On and On and was written by Curtis Mayfield:

The Awards

The award ceremony had its fair share of controversy: Best Documentary Feature winner was Hearts And Minds, an examination of the conflicting attitudes of the opponents of the Vietnam War. When coproducer Peter Davis went to collect the award, he read a (concilliatory) message from the delegation for the Viet Kong at the Paris peace talks. That threw one of the presenters, Bob Hope, in a tizzy. He demanded (backstage) that another presenter, Frank Sinatra, would read a note of reprimand that Hope had quickly drafted. Yet another presenter, Shirley MacLaine, was dead set against it. It appears that what was happenning backstage was much more interesting than what was happening onstage. Sinatra, did read the reprimand, which caused half the audience to cheer and the rest to boo. Most of the press reprimanded Hope and Sinatra.

Otherwise, The Godfather: part II was the big winner of the night with six awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Original Dramatic Score, and Best Supporting Actor for absentee Robert De Niro, who defeated his two co-stars in The Godfather: part II, sentimental favorite Fred Astaire and Jeff Bridges, who spent much of Thunderbolt And Lightfoot dressed as a woman, and clearly had the hots for Clint Eastwood's Thunderbolt. This was the first successful film by Michael Cimino.

Chinatown only managed one win, Best Original Screenplay. Lenny, The Conversation, and A Woman Under the Influence walked away empty handed. On the other hand, The Great Gatsby went two for two, winning for Best Costumes and for Original Song Score and/or Adaptation.

Ingrid Bergman won Best Supporting Actress for Murder on the Orient Express: in her speech she said that Valentina Cortese deserved to win. Best Foreign Film went to Federico Fellini's wonderful Amarcord.

The Towering Inferno ended up with three awards: Best Cinematography, Best Editing and Best Song. Earthquake got Best Sound and Visual F/X (Special Achievement).

It was third time lucky for Ellen Burstyn: she won as Best Actress for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. Burstyn was so sure that she wouldn't win, that she decided to stay in New York, where she was appearing on Broadway, rather than attend the ceremony. Scorsese accepted the award for her.

The biggest surprise of all was the winner of the Best Actor race: against such prestigious names such as Pacino, Nicholson, Hoffman, and Finney, the winner was Art Carney, a TV actor (The Honeymooners), practically unknown outside the US, for Harry And Tonto, a "small" film, a road movie by Paul Mazursky about an old widower travelling with his cat. This sounds preposterous, but there is an explanation: during the voting period, Dustin Hoffman declared that "The Academy Awards are obscene, dirty...  no better than a beauty contest."

Al Pacino had said: "I'm the same now as I've always been - sort of a recluse. People resent me for remaining myself when they think I should be acting like a superstar. I never wanted to be an actor and I don't particularly enjoy it. I have to act. There just isn't anything else for me." Albert Finney made it a point to ignore the Oscars: he never appeared in any of the five times that he was nominated.

It seems that the Academy, which saw George C. Scott refusing to accept his Oscar four years earlier and Marlon Brando who two years earlier had sent Sacheen Littlefeather to pick his award up with a speech against the treatment of American Indians by the film industry, had learned its lesson: they wouldn't award anybody who wouldn't appreciate the honor. That left Nicholson and Carney. Nicholson had to share the vote of younger and more progressive members with Pacino and Hoffman, while Carney got all the older/conservative members' vote. So he won. They would make up for it to Nicholson in the following year; To Hoffman, four years later; To Pacino in the early 90s; Finney is still waiting...