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1984
The winner is listed first, in CAPITAL letters.
Actor:
F. MURRAY ABRAHAM in "Amadeus", Jeff Bridges in "Starman",
Albert Finney in
"Under the Volcano", Tom Hulce in "Amadeus",
Sam Waterston in "The Killing Fields"
Actress:
SALLY FIELD in "Places in the Heart", Judy Davis in "A
Passage to India", Jessica Lange in "Country",
Vanessa Redgrave in "The Bostonians", Sissy Spacek
in "The River"
Supporting Actor:
HAING S. NGOR in "The Killing Fields",
Adolph Caesar in "A Soldier's Story", John Malkovich
in "Places in the Heart", Noriyuki
"Pat" Morita in "The Karate Kid", Ralph Richardson
in "Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes"
Supporting Actress:
PEGGY ASHCROFT in "A Passage to India", Glenn Close
in "The Natural", Lindsay Crouse in "Places in
the Heart", Christine Lahti in "Swing Shift",
Geraldine Page in "The Pope of Greenwich Village"
Director:
MILOS FORMAN for "Amadeus", Woody Allen for "Broadway
Danny Rose", Robert Benton for "Places in the Heart",
Roland Joffe for "The Killing Fields",
David Lean for "A Passage to India"
 Most
of the nominations-totals for 1984's Best Picture nominees
were very close, and two 'prestige' pictures were tied for
eleven nominations each:
- Amadeus - eleven
- A Passage to India - eleven
- The Killing Fields -
seven
- Places in the Heart - seven
- A Soldier's Story - three
Ultimately, the 1984 awards were monopolized
by Amadeus with eight wins,
the Saul Zaentz-produced, Milos Forman-directed film. The musical
quasi-biopic/epic won the following awards: Best Picture, Best
Actor (F. Murray Abraham), Best Director, Best Screenplay Adaptation
(Peter Shaffer for the transformation of his own Broadway/London
stage hit), Best Art/Set Direction, Best Sound, Best Costume
Design, and Best Makeup. It became the 7th film in Oscar history
to win eight Oscars.
The Best Picture winner was visually and musically
superior and focused on the court rivalry between flamboyant,
genius composer (and scatologically-obsessed buffoon) Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart and the less-talented, intensely-jealous Antonio
Salieri, both composers for Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II. Its
tagline described: "The man... The music... The madness...
The murder... The motion picture...AMADEUS ... Everything
you've heard is true."
The other Best Picture nominees included strong
contenders:
- British director David Lean's A Passage
to India - the film was an imposing, triumphant return
to the screen (and last picture) for the 76 year-old director
(known for his two Best Director awards for
 The
Bridge On The River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence
of Arabia (1962)). The lavish epic film (with eleven
nominations and two wins - for Best Supporting Actress
(Peggy Ashcroft) and Best Original Score - for Maurice
Jarre - his third Oscar for a David Lean film) was
based on E. M. Forster's 1924 novel about the romantic
adventures of a young Englishwoman
- writer/director Robert Benton's Places
in the Heart (with seven nominations and two wins -
Best Actress and Best Screenplay by Benton himself), was
based on the director's own childhood memories in Waxahachie,
Texas where a young widow attempts to save her farm
- producer David Puttnam's and director Roland
Jaffe's The Killing Fields (with
seven nominations and three wins - Best Supporting Actor,
Best Cinematography (Chris Menges), and Best Film Editing),
was based on the experiences of NY Times correspondent
Sydney Schanberg during the Cambodian civil war and the country's
take-over by the Khymer Rouge; three years earlier, producer
David Puttnam's Chariots of Fire (1981) had won Best
Picture
- director Norman Jewison's A Soldier's Story (with
three nominations and no wins) was a murder mystery/drama
based on Charles Fuller's 1981 Pulitzer Prize-winning play
about racial hatred in a segregated, all-black Southern Army
Camp during World War II
Milos Forman's second Oscar win as director
for Amadeus was a follow-up to his successful collaboration
with Saul Zaentz nine years earlier in One
Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1975), a five Oscar
winner. Director Norman Jewison was the only director
of a Best Picture nominee who was denied a Best Director Oscar
nomination for A Soldier's Story. His spot was taken
by Woody Allen for Broadway Danny Rose (with two nominations
and no wins), a film about a legendarily hapless talent agent.
David Lean was nominated as Best Director, and for Best Screenplay
Adaptation and Best Editor for A Passage to India, but
he failed to win any of the awards.
The two winners of the lead and supporting
actor Oscars were basically unknowns - and both won for their first nomination!
The Best Actor award was won by F. Murray Abraham
(with his sole career
nomination and Oscar) in his remarkable role as Antonio Salieri,
a jealous, mediocre court composer who is consumed and made
insane by his distaste for a rival composer, 26 year-old prodigy
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Amadeus.
[Note: Abraham was the first actor
of Arab descent to win the Best Actor Oscar.] Another Best
Actor nominee was the title role character in the same film,
played by Tom Hulce (with his sole career nomination).
The other three Best Actor nominees were:
- Albert Finney (with his fourth nomination,
and second consecutive Best Actor nod) as self-destructive
alcoholic Geoffrey Firmin drinking himself to death in the
shadow of a Mexican volcano in director John Huston's Under
the Volcano (with two nominations and no wins)
- Sam Waterston (with his first nomination)
as Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Sidney Schanberg
in The Killing Fields
- Jeff Bridges (with his third nomination) as
the alien extra-terrestrial in director John Carpenter's
science fiction/love story, Starman (the film's sole
nomination)
With her second Best Actress nomination, Sally
Field won her second Oscar for her moving performance
(her first was for a similar role in Norma Rae (1979))
as a 1930s depression-era penniless Texas farm widow of a murdered
policeman, the determined, indomitable Edna Spaulding who must
face a bank foreclosure, a greedy cotton-dealer, and a tornado,
in Places In The Heart. She has become the best-remembered
and most-quoted Oscar winner ever (with the possible exception
of James Cameron's declaration, "I'm the King of the World" for Titanic
(1997)), with her exclamatory, infamous speech after the
win:
"The first time (referring to her Best
Actress win for Norma Rae (1979) five years earlier)
I didn't feel it, but this time I feel it. And I can't deny
the fact you like me - right now, you like me! You really like
me!"
Field joined two of the other Best Actress nominees
who were also playing strong matriarchal roles as rural women/farmers
who found themselves in life-death struggles to keep their
properties in male-dominated, chauvinistic circumstances:
- Jessica Lange (with her third nomination)
as 1980s Iowa farm-wife Jewell Ivy struggling to hold on
to the farm during foreclosure proceedings in Country (the
film's sole nomination)
- Sissy Spacek (with her fourth nomination)
as a member of a farming family battling a severe storm,
floods, and foreclosure in director Mark Rydell's The
River
The other two Best Actress nominees in the category
were:
- Vanessa Redgrave (with her fifth nomination
- her fourth unsuccessful Best Actress nomination,
out of a career total of six nominations) as suffragette
Olive Chancellor in the film adaptation of Henry James' novel
by director James Ivory, The Bostonians (with two
nominations and no wins)
- Australian actress Judy Davis (with her first
nomination) as the young Englishwoman Adela Quested in the
film adaptation of Forster's novel about sexual repression
and racial prejudice in early 20th century India, A Passage
to India
Among the five Best Supporting Actor nominees,
three were first-time movie performers. The Best Supporting
Actor winner was Cambodian native Haing S. Ngor (a non-professional
actor in his film debut who actually survived Cambodia's horrors)
as a Cambodian refugee doctor and advisor/interpreter Dith
Pran for a photojournalist (Sam Waterston) who miraculously
survives the horrors and tortures of war and Pol Pot's regime
in producer David Puttnam's British film The
Killing Fields. Ngor became the first Asian
performer to win a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. [Tragically,
he was murdered 12 years later in February of 1996 by a gang
of drug dealers in a Los Angeles parking garage.]
The losing nominees for Best Supporting Actor
were:
- John Malkovich (with his first nomination
in his debut film) as the blind boarder Mr. Will in Places
in the Heart
- Adolph Caesar (with his first and sole
nomination, and his film debut) as the tough and hated black
drill Sgt. Waters who is murdered and the subject of an investigation
in A Soldier's Story [A year later, Caesar died of
a heart attack on the set of the Kirk Douglas-Burt Lancaster
film Tough Guys (1986)].
- Noriyuki 'Pat' Morita (with his first nomination)
as sage Japanese handyman/karate tutor Miyagi in director
John Avildsen's The Karate Kid (the film's sole nomination)
- Ralph Richardson (with his second unsuccessful
nomination and in his final film role) as Tarzan's
eccentric grandfather - the 6th Lord of Greystoke - in director
Hugh Hudson's Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of
the Apes (with three nominations and no wins - and faithful
to the classic Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp books). [Richardson
died on October 10, 1983, just before he would have learned
that he was nominated for the Best Supporting Oscar.] [Note:
Writer Robert Towne used the name of his sheepdog P.H. Vazak
for the screenwriter credit - and received a nomination --
an Academy first!]
Talented British stage actress Peggy Ashcroft
(with her only nomination and Oscar win) won the Best
Supporting Actress award as Judy Davis' prospective mother-in-law
Mrs. Moore, a Raj matron in frail health in A Passage to
India. [At the age of 77, Ashcroft's win made her the oldest
winner of the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in Academy history.]
The other four nominees were:
- Geraldine Page (with her seventh unsuccessful
nomination of a total of eight career nominations) - as a
corrupt policeman's mother in The Pope of Greenwich Village;
with this nomination, Page joined both Richard Burton and
Peter O'Toole as the most nominated performers in
Academy history with no Oscar wins; however she went
on to win Best Actress the following year for The Trip
to Bountiful (1985)
- Christine Lahti (with her first nomination)
as Goldie Hawn's neighbor Hazel Zanussi in the 1940s-era
romance - director Jonathan Demme's Swing Shift (the
film's sole nomination)
- Glenn Close (with her third consecutive nomination)
as Iris (Robert Redford's virtuous childhood sweetheart and
naive girlfriend) in the film adaptation of Bernard Malamud's
novel about the world's greatest baseball player, director
Barry Levinson's fairy tale The Natural
- Lindsay Crouse (with her first nomination)
as Margaret Lomax (the sister of Sally Field's character)
in Places in the Heart
This year, all five nominees for Best Original
Song were well-known radio hits, something fairly rare. Stevie
Wonder won for his song "I Just Called to Say I Love You," from
the film The Woman in Red, thereby becoming the first blind
Academy Award winner. The Best Song category was fiercely competitive,
with nominees including Phil Collins' title song ("Against
All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)") from Against All
Odds (its sole nomination), two nominations from Footloose (for "Footloose"
and "Let's Hear It For the Boy"), and the title song
from Ghostbusters.
This year's honoree with an Honorary Oscar was
the venerable James Stewart, who had won a Best Actor Oscar
forty-four years earlier for The
Philadelphia Story (1940) - his only win out
of five Best Actor career nominations (he had also been nominated
in 1939, 1946, 1950, and 1959). He was honord for "his
fifty years of memorable performances. For his high ideals
both on and off the screen. With the respect and affection
of his colleagues."
Oscar Snubs and Omissions:
Writer/director James Cameron's low-budget, science-fiction
action film The Terminator -
with Arnold Schwarzenegger as the threatening, leather-clad
cyborg, and Linda Hamilton as the rescued Sarah Connor by Kyle
Reese (Michael Biehn) was entirely absent from any awards categories.
So was Australian director Paul Cox's touching yet kinky Man
of Flowers, as was writer/director/star Rob Reiner's quasi-documentary
spoof This Is Spinal Tap about an aging British heavy
metal band. And Sergio Leone's final film, Once Upon a Time
In America, went completely unnominated, with its lead
performances by Robert DeNiro (as 'Noodles') and James Woods
(as 'Max') as childhood friends/rivals spanning four decades,
Elizabeth McGovern's supporting role as Deborah, and Ennio
Morricone's score. Its neglect by Academy voters was attributed
to a disastrous studio cut which severely truncated the film
-- had the original nearly four hour running time version been
released, the film might have been given far more consideration.
Tri-Star, a new studio, released its first film
- Barry Levinson's sports drama The Natural, with four
unsuccessful nominations - Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography,
Best Original Score, and Best Supporting Actress. And the biggest
box-office earner of the year, Beverly
Hills Cop, with Eddie Murphy in a star-making role
as Axel Foley, was overlooked.
Although Jeff Bridges received a Best Actor nomination
(the film's sole nomination), director/co-screenwriter John
Carpenter's Starman was neglected in these other categories:
Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Karen Allen as Jenny
Hayden), Best Supporting Actor (Charles Martin Smith as scientist
Mark Shermin), Best Original Score (Jack Nitzsche) and Best
Original Screenplay. [Bridges' nomination was the only nomination
ever given to any of John Carpenter's films.] British director
and co-writer Michael Radford's faithfully-adapted Nineteen
Eighty-Four was also overlooked in all categories with
zero nominations, bypassing performances by John Hurt (as Winston
Smith), Richard Burton (as O'Brien), and Suzanna Hamilton (as
Julia), and the cinematography of acclaimed Roger Deakins.
Many other actors were denied award opportunities:
- Robert Englund in a unique, infamous, otherworldly
role as burn victim terrorizer Freddy Krueger in Wes Craven's A
Nightmare on Elm Street (with no nominations)
- Victor Banerjee as Dr. Aziz in A Passage
to India
- Steve Martin as mind-body switched lawyer
Roger Cobb (possessed by his dying wealthy client Lily Tomlin)
in director Carl Reiner's All of Me
- Howard E. Rollins, Jr. as black investigating
officer Capt. Davenport and Denzel Washington as Pfc. Peterson
in Norman Jewison's A Soldier's Story
- Keir Dullea in a difficult reprise of his 2001 Dave
Bowman role and Bob Balaban as Dr. Chandra in 2010 (with
five unsuccessful nominations)
- George Burns in a dual role as God and the
Devil in the third (and final) film of the series - Oh
God! You Devil (with no nominations)
- Tom Hanks as Allen Bauer and Daryl Hannah
as mermaid Madison in director Ron Howard's Splash
- two actors in the Coen Brothers' un-nominated
debut film - a modern day film noir titled Blood Simple -
M. Emmet Walsh as sleazy private detective Visser and Dan
Hedaya as repugnant Texas strip-bar owner Julian Marty
- Kathleen Turner as romance novelist Joan Wilder
in the entertaining action-adventure film Romancing the
Stone and as prostitute China Blue in Ken Russell's violent
and sexually-explicit Crimes of Passion
- Taxi TV sitcom star Danny DeVito's
star-making role as diminutive, foul-mouthed, sarcastic Brooklyn
mobster Ralph in Romancing the Stone
- Molly Ringwald as alienated, teenaged high
school student Samantha Baker in director John Hughes' debut
film Sixteen Candles
- Lesley Ann Warren as small bar owner Eve
in Alan Rudolph's romantic comedy/drama Choose Me
- Elizabeth Berridge as Constanze Mozart, and
Jeffrey Jones as Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II in Amadeus
- Mia Farrow - unrecognizable as Tina Vitale,
a NJ mobster moll in Broadway Danny Rose
- Robert Preston (in his last major film role
and screen appearance) as intergalactic, alien recruiter
Centauri (modeled after his Harold Hill character in The
Music Man (1962)) in The Last Starfighter
Like TRON (1982) two years earlier, the
innovative CGI effects of The Last Starfighter, with
its use of CGI to replace model miniatures for all its spaceship
shots -- were overlooked. Ivan Reitman's Ghostbusters was
nominated in two categories (without winning either): Best
Song (Ray Parker, Jr.) and Best Visual Effects. It should have
been recognized in other categories as well - Best Actor (Bill
Murray), Best (Supp.) Actress (Sigourney Weaver), Best Original
Screenplay (Aykroyd, Ramis, and Torokvei), Best Production
Design (John De Cuir), and Best Cinematography (Laszlo Kovacs
and Herb Wagreitch).
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