“Rocky” and “Network” – one about fighting your
way up and the other about fighting your way down – shared the honors Thursday
as the 49th annual Academy Award nominations were announced. Each won 10
nominations, including those for best picture, actor and actress.
“Rocky” was the story of a punk prizefighter
from Philadelphia who got a crack at the heavyweight title, and “Network” was
about a has-been newsman encouraged to go berserk on the air.
“All the President's Men,” a tense dramatization
of the Watergate crisis, placed second in the Oscar sweepstakes with eight
nominations. It was also nominated for best picture, along with “Taxi Driver,”
a harrowing and violent film about the underbelly of New York City, and “Bound
for Glory,” based on the life of folk singer Woody Guthrie. The Oscars will be
presented March 28.
The nominations represented upsets for some of
the year’s most highly touted blockbusters. “King Kong,” the year’s most
expensive and highly publicized film, crunched its way to only two nominations
in minor categories. “A Star Is Born” also was all but overlooked, and the
year’s biggest grosser, “The Omen,” was hexed with one.
The nominations for best actor mixed poignancy
with an overnight success. Peter Finch, who died of a heart attack two months
ago, was nominated for “Network;”” It was the first posthumous nomination
since Spencer Tracy got one for “Guess Who's Coming to Dinner” in 1968.
Sylvester Stallone, an unknown who became a star in the title role of “Rocky,”
also was nominated.
Other best-actor nominations went to Robert De
Niro, who played the violently disturbed loner in “Taxi Driver”; Giancarlo
Giannini, the scheming concentration camp inmate in “Seven Beauties,” and
William Holden, who played Finch’s boss in “Network.”
Nominees for best actress were Sissy Spacek, who
played a shy teen-ager with psychic powers In “Carrie”; Talia Shire, who was
the equally shy girlfriend in “Rocky”; Marie-Christine Barrault, a girl friend
who wasn’t shy at all in “Cousin Cousine”; Faye Dunaway, the savagely
competitive programmer in “Network,” and Liv Ullmann, who played a
psychiatrist contemplating suicide in “Face to Face.”
Stallone’s nomination for best actor was paired
with another one for best screenplay (he wrote “Rocky” and refused to sell it unless
he could star in it). That placed him in exclusive company. Only two others
have ever won acting and writing nominations in the same year: Charlie Chaplin,
for “The Great Dictator” in 1940, and Orson Welles, for “Citizen Kane” in 1941.
The nominations for best supporting actor went
to Burt Young, who played Talia Shire‘s brother in “Rocky”; Burgess Meredith,
who played Rocky’s veteran manager; Jason Robards, the hard-bitten executive
editor in “All the President’s Men”; Ned Beatty, the head of the international
corporation calling the shots in “Network,” and Sir Laurence Olivier, who was a
good spy but a bad dentist in “Marathon Man.” It was Olivier’s ninth
nomination, placing him far ahead of anyone else in total nominations (he won
as best actor for “Hamlet” in 1948).
Best-supporting-actress nominees were Jane
Alexander, who played a witness who helped crack the Watergate case in “All the
President’s Men”; Piper Laurie, making a comeback as Sissy Spacek’s fanatic
mother in “Carrie”; Beatrice Straight, who played Holden’s wife in “Network”;
Jodie Foster, the 13-year-old hooker in “Taxi Driver,” and Lee Grant, as a
Jewish refugee from Nazism in “Voyage of the Damned.”
The five nominees for best director included,
for the first time, two foreign directors: Ingmar Bergman, for “Face to Face,”
and Lina Wertmuller, the Italian director whose films were the year’s hottest imports,
for “Seven Beauties.” Other nominees were John Avildsen for “Rocky,” Sidney Lumet for “Network” and Alan J. Pakula for “All the President’s Men.”
The nominations for best original screenplay
included one case of poetic justice: Walter Bernstein, a victim of the 1950s
Hollywood blacklist, wrote “The Front” about it and was nominated. Other
nominees were Stallone for “Rocky”; Wertmuller for “Seven Beauties”;
Jean-Charles Tacchella and Daniele Thompson for “Cousin Cousine,” and Paddy Chayefsky for “Network.”
Nominations for screenplays adapted from other
material went to William Goldman, who based “All the President’s Men” on the
best-seller by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward; Robert Getchell, who based “Bound
for Glory” on Woody Guthrie’s autobiography; Nicholas Meyer, whose “Seven-Per-Cent
Solution” was, based on his own novel and the work of Arthur Conan Doyle;
Steve Shagan and David Butler for “Voyage of the Damned,” and Federico Fellini
and Bernardino Zapponi for “Fellini’s Casanova,” based on the exploits of the
most assiduous citizen of Venice.
Best foreign film nominations included one for “Nights
and Days,” a Polish epic that won the 1975 Chicago Film Festival. Other
nominees were “Cousin Cousine,” the French romantic comedy; Wertmuller’s “Seven
Beauties”; “Black and White in Color” from the Ivory Coast, and “Jacob the
Liar,” from East Germany.
The nominees for best song were “Ave Satina,”
which played at all the most ominous moments in “The Omen”; “Come to Me,” Peter Sellers‘ ill-fated plea in “The Pink Panther Strikes Again”; “Evergreen,” the
love theme from “A Star Is Born”; “Gonna Fly Now,” from “Rocky,” and “A World
that Never Was,” from “Half a House.”
Cinematography nominees were Haskell Wexler for “Bound
for Glory,” Richard H. Kline for “King Kong,” Ernest Laszio for “Logan’s Run,”
Owen Roizman for “Rocky” and Robert Surtees for “A Star is Born.”
All of the films winning major nominations are
playing in the Chicago area except for “Bound for Glory,” which was held back
from general release in the hope that it would get several mentions, as it did;
“Seven Beauties,” which ran here earlier and will be revived next month, and “All
the President’s Men,” which has had several runs here and win be re-released
March 26.
