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Ordinary People

(Best Picture, 1980)

What Should Have Won: Raging Bull

"The Official Story": "Some films you watch...others, you feel." Groan!

What We Think Happened: Only in Hollywood would a film like Ordinary People be even mentioned in the same breath as the other nominees in 1980. Raging Bull. Coal Miner's Daughter. The Elephant Man.  Tess. Maybe it's just me, but was this originally planned as some sort of test for the tots on Sesame Street? Sing with me now; "One of these is nothing like the others..."

Look; if you want to give a drama about family life the Academy Award for Best Picture, fine. But it had better show family life in a whole new light, never approached in film before. Instead, if you ask me, this is just another soap opera turned movie trying to convince dysfunctional families everywhere that  "all families suck," or worse, "ordinary people suck."

I could just go through the numbers and summarize every nominee's story that year. It is an easy pot shot, seeing as the story in Ordinary People is as simple as the title implies. But The Academy is not interested in superior stories (obviously), so what about superior...effort? Robert DeNiro gained 60 pounds to more effectively portray his Raging Bull character, later in life. I'm not saying that making Ordinary People was effortless, but come on; they certainly didn't gain 60 pounds during filming. That was the bigger effort.

It's not like this film didn't have emotion. It's just that the evoked emotions are not of the Raging Bull variety, and more of the "I never knew Mary Tyler Moore could so effectively portray a bitch" variety. To compare its emotion to Raging Bull's is, well...Bull. If it was released in a year without Raging Bull, maybe its win would make more sense. But it didn't, so it doesn't.

What Makes It So Embarrassing "Today":  After half a century of film critics demanding extraordinary movies about extraordinary things tackling extraordinary issues, how embarrassing is it to claim that the Best Picture of 1980 was a film so ordinary, it's very title was Ordinary People...?

Next in Line: If These Lambs Could Talk...

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