We’re two days away from the 96th Academy Awards. Can you believe they’ve been doing this for nearly a century? And I think we would all agree that their track record is flawless!
But seriously, folks. At the end of the day, I still harbor generally positive feelings about the Oscars. Yes, it’s inherently silly to turn art into a competition when taste is subjective, but I love it when the culture at large pays closer attention to the movies, even if it’s just a handful of them. And I enjoy the many success stories that come from wins and nominations. Every year, many deserving filmmakers get to soak up that spotlight like it’s solar power and see how far the shine can take them.1
That said…they do “get it wrong” a lot, of course. So consider this the first of what might be an ongoing Oscars weekend newsletter project where I turn the calendar back 50 years and “correct” the Academy Awards of yore by changing just one win.
Before we go any further, let’s set the stage for the 46th Academy Awards. This is the last edition of the Oscars to feature the eventual top three at the box office—The Sting, The Exorcist, and American Graffiti—in the Best Picture race. Tatum O’Neal became the youngest Oscar winner at just under 10.5 years old, a record that she still holds today. Jack Lemmon was so confident that he wouldn’t win Best Actor for Save the Tiger that he bet his friend Walter Matthau $1000; he won the award and lost the bet. Katharine Hepburn made her first and only appearance at the ceremony to present an award to her longtime friend Lawrence Wiengarten. Perhaps most importantly, though, a guy with a mustache streaked across the stage while flashing a peace sign (among other things).2
It didn’t take me long to figure out which result to rewrite though. Because the answer is pretty obvious: I’m giving Best Picture to The Exorcist instead of The Sting.
This isn’t a clear-cut case of quality disparity, though. It’s easy to look back and say that one film has “aged better” than another, or has grown to become more beloved. Not only is that uninteresting to me—it’s easy to do, which is why plenty of sites and podcasts have done it over the years—it’s kinda beside the point. No year of Academy winners would be fully exempt from this kind of revisionist history. So let’s look a little bit closer and examine a loss that would’ve meant something if it’d gone another way.
This isn’t a Crash or CODA situation. The Sting is pretty beloved in its own right! It currently holds a sterling 4.2 average on Letterboxd and a nearly identical 8.3 average on IMDb, and George Roy Hill’s enduring legacy is clear: He knew that Paul Newman and Robert Redford were electric together on screen, reteaming them here after the breakout success of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Plus it’s fun when a story-driven caper film like this is thrust into the critical spotlight.
But a Best Picture win for The Exorcist would’ve made Oscar history. A history that wouldn’t be made for almost two more decades when a horror film finally won the top trophy.3
The Exorcist still made history. It became the first horror film to be nominated for Best Picture because it was impossible to ignore. It was a cultural phenomenon and a box office sensation, trailing only The Sting in box office sales throughout 1974 after word-of-mouth propelled it into theaters across the country.4 And even though The Exorcist was still gaining steam when the Academy announced its nominations on February 19, the glowing critical reception was enough to declare the film a big fat hit. Ignoring it would’ve been foolish.
But as we all know, nominations don’t always lead to wins. And in The Exorcist’s case, its 10 nominations only yielded two statues, both of which feel like hand-outs in retrospect: William Peter Blatty won for adapting his own novel into the screenplay, and the sound engineers won for creating a key component of the film’s terrifying atmosphere. It simply got caught up in a huge sweep for The Sting, which walked away with seven total wins. Aside from The Exorcist, The Way We Were was the only other film to win multiple awards, also taking home two trophies.
The Exorcist didn’t exactly open the door for horror films at the Oscars. Fredic March tied with Wallace Beery in the Best Actor category (a thing I didn’t know could happen) for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). Phantom of the Opera (1943) won for Best Art Direction (Color) and Best Cinematography (Color), the only classic Universal horror film to win on Oscar night.5 The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) won Best Cinematography (Black and White). Ruth Gordon won Best Supporting Actress for Rosemary’s Baby (1968).
But this was the most representation a horror film had ever received at the Academy Awards. And a Best Picture win would’ve ripped that door off its hinges, paving the way for horror films to command regular respect from awards bodies. I guess the genre will just have to settle for being the top box office draw for every decade since then.
I’ll tell you who didn’t settle, though: William Friedkin. He allegedly refused to attend the Oscars’ celebratory ball because he was “enraged” that The Exorcist didn’t win Best Picture. So there you go—not only does this one change positively alter the trajectory of horror films ever after, it makes the Academy afterparty way better. Just imagine how hard that legend would’ve thrown down. (Rest in peace to a real one.)
The Exorcist is now streaming on Paramount+ and Showtime, and it is available to rent elsewhere.
After this year’s nominations, I’m really excited to see where Celine Song, Cord Jefferson, Samy Burch, Lily Gladstone, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph go from here. I’ll throw in Dominic Sessa and Charles Melton too even though they weren’t nominated.
In a real sign of the times, a San Francisco columnist named Terrence O’Flaherty wrote this of the incident: “There’s only one trouble with streaking—the wrong people usually do it. The ones who should have removed their clothes were Cher Bono, Twiggy and Elizabeth Taylor.” Naked men are lame, but naked women are cool. Everybody knows this.
As I wrote back in October, The Silence of the Lambs is many things, but horror is definitely one of those things.
The Sting was released on Christmas Day in 1973, and The Exorcist was released just one day later (and only on a handful of screens), so both films made the majority of their money in 1974.
There wasn’t an award for visual effects until 1938. Had that category come around a few years earlier, I’m quite sure that my beloved The Invisible Man (1933) would’ve won.
I am very into this essay and also I want to thump you in the face because I was considering using this next week. Great minds!