Patton, the Academy's choice for Best Picture, boasts one of the greatest, most charismatic performances in film history from George C. Scott in the role of World War II hero General George S. Patton, Jr. The intense actor had already shown his skill at playing demagogic military figures in Dr. Strangelove, and he manages to elevate every scene in Patton in which he appears to a higher level by the sheer alchemy of his presence (it is hard to imagine that he was only cast in the role after Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, and Rod Steiger had turned it down). But take Scott (and the haunting musical score by Jerry Goldsmith) out of the mix, and Patton crashes to the ground as a forgettably acted, unimaginatively directed run-of-the-mill war movie. Particularly disappointing are the dramaless battle scenes, which look like they were thrown together on an empty lot in the San Fernando Valley. And the film's climax where a German beaurocrat takes the time from desperately destroying incriminating documents as Berlin falls to reflect on an 8"x10" glossy of the general is nothing short of laughable.

Not nominated for Best Picture was a far more courageous and cohesive film, Little Big Man. Not taken as seriously in its own time as the comparable Dances With Wolves, Little Big Man is actually far more successful at showing the humanity of the Native Americans because it avoids the Kevin Costner epic's path of maudlin sanctimoniousness in favor of laugh-out-loud comedy. The Native Americans depicted in Dances With Wolves are fabricated idols of nobility designed to manipulate. The ones in Little Big Man are flawed, soulful human beings who are designed to be alive. And unlike Patton (which lives and breathes on the powerful shoulders of George C. Scott), Little Big Man offers a dazzling ensemble of delightful performances surrounding Dustin Hoffman's brilliance in the title role: Faye Dunaway, Martin Balsam, Richard Mulligan, Jeff Corey and most especially Chief Dan George (who received the film's only nomination) all deliver wonderfully memorable characterizations.

The Academy tossed aside their usual preference for pretentious prestige pictures in 1971, selecting a slam-`em-up cop movie as the year's best. Bypassing more typical Best Picture nominees like the inspiring Fiddler on the Roof or the dreary Nicolas and Alexandria, they went with the exciting cop melodrama The French Connection, only the second Best Picture in history to feature a police officer as its central character (the first was In the Heat of the Night in 1967). Energetically directed by William Friedkin and wonderfully acted by Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider, The French Connection nevertheless seems like a lackluster Best Picture today in part because of the many derivative rip-offs that it spawned. But even taken on its own merits, The French Connection is a fairly empty diversion; a wonderfully made entertainment that features an almost incomprehensibly confusing plot and bone-rattling violence, and hardly a film that continues to reverberate inside you after the final credits role.

Film students would select Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange as the year's best, but it was a highly controversial in its own day (it and Midnight Cowboy remain the only X-rated Best Picture nominees); and while there is no denying its savage intensity, it continues to polarize its audiences. Some consider it among the greatest films ever made, while others think that its relentless brutality makes it unwatchable. Of greater universal appeal is Peter Bogdanovich's brooding coming-of-age drama The Last Picture Show. Only his third film after the chilling apogee to Boris Karloff's career, Targets and the best-forgotten Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, the limitless promise that Bogdanovich displayed with this moving tale of small town angst only sporadically materialized. But watching the stellar acting of Cloris Leachman, Ellen Burstyn, Randy Quaid, Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms, and (to a far lesser degree) Cybil Shepard and (to a far greater degree) Ben Johnson, it's exciting to imagine contemporary audiences' expectation of the greatness that was surely to come.

1972 was a very strange year for movie awards, as the Academy managed to honor The Godfather and snub it at the same time. One of the most eagerly anticipated films ever made, The Godfather didn't disappoint, featuring an iconic performance by Marlon Brando and star-making ones by Al Pacino, James Caan and Robert Duvall, dynamic direction by Francis Coppola, and one of the most quoted and memorable scripts in film history. After toppling The Sound of Music as the all-time box office champ, The Godfather was the overwhelming favorite at the Oscars and took home the Best Picture award. Yet the Academy's admiration for The Godafther was grudging at best, allotting its only additional awards to Marlon Brando as Best Actor and for the film's screenplay. The movie the Academy really seemed to prefer in 1972 was Bob Fosse's comparatively forgotten film of the stage musical Cabaret, giving it eight awards, the most ever awarded for a film that didn't go on to win Best Picture. With the landmark status now afforded The Godfather, some of the awards Cabaret was given seem very peculiar indeed (especially Fosse's selection as Best Director over DGA winner Coppola and Best Supporting Actor Joel Grey over Pacino). Cabaret is a fine film on its own merit, but compared with the masterpiece that is The Godfather, it simply ceases to exist.

But an overview of the awards given out that year is surprising: the only other major awards group that named The Godfather their Best Picture was the Golden Globes. Cabaret also won that honor from the Golden Globes (who split their classifications in two for drama and musical/comedy), as well as the BAFTA Awards and the National Board of Review (the New York Film Critics gave the award to Cries and Whispers, which was not eligible for the Oscars until the following year). Yet the AFI named The Godafther the third greatest film ever made on its 1998 compilation of the hundred greatest films and it is listed as number one on IMDb.com's list of the 250 top-rated films (Cabaret is not included on either list). It's difficult to come up with a reason why "experts" were so grudging in their appreciation of The Godfather when it came out, but time has settled the injustices and the film is now firmly settled in its place as one of the great works of art in movie history.

The Academy went Hollywood in 1973, awarding Oscars to big budget, big profit bubblegum flicks like The Exorcist, A Touch of Class, and the biggest and most enjoyable bubblelicious funfest of all, The Sting. This Depression-era tale of con men and their marks is a joy ride of cinematic delight, served up flawlessly by the charming performances of Paul Newman and Robert Redford, the fast-paced direction of George Roy Hill, and the hairpin corner-turning script of David S. Ward (who was unjustly accused of plagiarism for his wonderful screenplay, a scandal that sadly derailed his career), and cemented the trend for "Buddy" films started by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But as entertaining a movie as The Sting is, it is not a film that engages the emotions. It is diverting to see Redford and Newman outwit the cartoonishly sleazy Robert Shaw, but we always are very aware that the characters in the film are the slick creation of Hollywood's Dream Factory, not relatable human beings. Henry Gondorff and Johnny Hooker might have all the moxy and guile that Ward's typewriter could muster, but they lack a soul.

It's ironic that the Oscars were a testament to such trifles, because the year offered a wealth of soulful films about serious subjects that continue to resonate in the collective heart. Cries and Whispers, Last Tango in Paris, The Last Detail and Mean Streets were all powerful films (as opposed to the movies the Academy preferred this year) that are still enthusiastically viewed and discussed by discriminating cinémeastes despite their dismissal by the entertainment elite in their year of release. But the most affecting and adult movie of all is about a group of young people just on the cusp of adulthood, ironically made by the biggest popcorn filmmaker of all. George Lucas' American Graffiti is a tale of four recent high school graduates cruising the streets on a summer night in Modesto. Teenage audiences can relate to to the youthful soul-searching that their screen archetypes go through, while adult viewers know that the resolutions they come to are only the beginning of the journey, not the end. Lucas has directed only six films in his career, and with the exception of American Graffiti they have all been summer science fiction movies that are firmly rooted in a teenage mentality. It was only when he made a film about teenagers that Lucas ever showed his adult side.

The Academy may have been feeling a trifle guilty about giving their top award to an empty-headed entertainment flick in 1973, so they turned around the following year and awarded one that was stupefyingly somber. The success of The Godfather, Part II came as something of a surprise on Oscar night, as no sequel had ever won the big prize before (indeed the only sequel that had received a nomination for Best Picture was The Bells of St. Mary's in 1945, the film that Michael Corleone had ironically just seen when he learned of the assassination attempt on his father in the original). And while the continuation of the Corleone saga won the Best Director awards from the DGA and the National Society of Film Critics, it was not named Best Picture by any other major awards group prior to the Oscars. Still, it is a brilliantly acted film (equaling its predecessor's mark of three nominations for Best Supporting Actor for Lee Strasberg, Michael V. Gazzo and winner Robert DeNiro; with comparably superior work by the unnominated John Cazale and Robert Duvall) and a worthy successor to its unforgettable first part, although Coppola and Mario Puzo's Oscar winning screenplay takes the characters from being spectacularly successful thugs in the original to major players on the world political stage in the second, a leap that does not always defy credibility.

1974 was a wonderful year for movies that saw classics like Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, A Woman Under the Influence, The Three Musketeers, Harry and Tonto and Day for Night bypassed for a Best Picture nomination in favor of the powerhouses Lenny and The Conversation (the selection of the potboiler The Towering Inferno for the Best Picture final five can only be ascribed to the deep pockets of 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros., who co-produced the film). But the 800 pound gorilla of 1974 was Roman Polanski's Chinatown, one of the seminal films of the decade and arguably the greatest detective movie ever made. This spellbinding tale of incest and intrigue centering around Los Angeles' water crisis during the 1930s received only a single award, for Robert Towne's masterpiece of a screenplay. In retrospect it should have swept the awards, winning Best Picture, Best Director for Polanski, Best Editing (over the inexplicable win for The Towering Inferno), Best Art Direction, and particularly Best Actor for Jack Nicholson, who turned in the greatest performance of his blue chip career.

The Academy continued with its Serious is Superior philosophy in 1975, anointing the depressing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as Best Picture, a powerful film that finds its charismatic protagonist lobotomized and brutally suffocated by its end. It boasts a stunning performance by Jack Nicholson (who finally won the Oscar that had eluded him after a string of magnificent performances that is equaled only by the masterful half decade that jump-started Marlon Brando's film career), but is an incredibly somber work whose ultimate descent into tragedy and defeat is almost unbearable to watch. Three of the other Best Picture nominees are almost as grim (Dog Day Afternoon, Nashville and especially the breathtakingly beautiful but stupefyingly boring Barry Lyndon), with only the exciting blockbuster Jaws providing any entertainment (its failure to win the Best Picture Award was the first time that an all-time box office champ didn't win the prize, with previous record blockbusters Gone With the Wind, The Sound of Music and The Godfather all taking home the Oscar).

Almost completely overlooked in the nominations was John Huston's brilliant and madly enjoyable film adaptation of Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King. Huston had attempted for decades to get the project off the ground, originally as a vehicle for Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy and later for Paul Newman. But good things are worth waiting for, and the ultimate casting of Michael Caine and Sean Connery (and Christopher Plummer [pictured] as Rudyard Kipling) is so perfect that it seems inconceivable for any other actors to even be considered. The Man Who Would Be King was nominated for a paltry two awards (for art direction and Huston and Gladys Hill's screenplay), doubtless because of the perception that such an entertaining movie couldn't possibly have artistic merit as well.

Now it seems inconceivable to think there was a time when Sylvester Stallone was compared favorably to Marlon Brando, but that was precisely the impact he had on critics with his sensitive performance as Rocky Balboa. In the decades since, of course, Stallone has proved himself to be a woefully inept actor whose star-making characterization proved to be an aberration, with his leaden work on films like Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, Rhinestone, Driven, Rambo, and Over the Top proving to be a far better indication of his nonexistent dramatic abilities. Still, he was excellent as Rocky, and the film itself is an exciting, if somewhat manipulative diversion. Its spectacular, unexpected success upon its release was due in no small part to Stallone's brilliant marketing of himself as an underdog hero much like the protagonist of the film (a far cry from his subsequent career, in which he became famous for commanding massive upfront fees for movie duds that failed to even make his salary back at the box office). But based on its own merits, Rocky is little more than a highly formulaic sports movie chalk-full of clichéd characters with a 1940s sensibility. It is an entertaining movie, but more for its familiarity than for offering anything original to the history of film.

Original is the only word for Network, which provided a spellbinding blueprint for the future of network television that seemed nothing short of apocalyptic in 1976. But in our current age of the Fox network and reality television, the antics of Howard Beale and The Mao Tse-tung Hour seem more like an inevitability than the cautionary omen that screenwriter Paddy Chaevsky intended and has even more relevance with each passing year. The film also provides a showcase of brilliant performances, particularly a perfectly cast Faye Dunaway (pictured) giving the finest performance of her career, although the Oscars given to Peter Finch for his one-note secondary role as Howard Beale and Beatrice Straight for her forgettable cameo as William Holden's wife now seem like woefully bad selections for standout recognition. But with wonderfully complex work by Holden and Robert Duvall, an intelligent, clever screenplay by Chaevsky and precision-perfect direction by Sidney Lumet that should have finally won him the Oscar he had always been denied in his stellar career, Network is a genuinely unique film and a far better selection for the year's best.

Woody Allen made his debut as a film writer/performer with 1965's What's New, Pussycat, and was never so much as considered for an Academy Award for the string of madly enjoyable screenplays and comic performances he supplied to films like The Front, Play It Again, Sam and Love and Death - films that were admired, but not taken as seriously as such Oscar-approved classics as Hello, Dolly!, Airport or Nicolas and Alexandria. But with the release of the masterpiece Annie Hall, he was suddenly hailed as one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of cinema who could do no wrong, turning out an almost nonstop string of unforgettable achievements like Manhattan, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Broadway Danny Rose, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Bullets Over Broadway and Radio Days. Then, just as suddenly, Allen could do no right and his subsequent output - Celebrity, Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Anything Else, Hollywood Ending, Melinda and Melinda - weren't only not up to his usual high standard, they were terrible. It's difficult to determine how Allen's gifts so suddenly blossomed and how they equally suddenly burned out, but it's safe to say that when he was at his best, there was never a more unique voice in American film. And it is a credit to the Academy that with such predictable Best Picture offerings as Julia, The Turning Point and the blockbuster Star Wars available to choose from, they selected a heartfelt little romantic comedy as the year's best. Annie Hall was the first comedy selected as Best Picture since the far more pretentious Tom Jones in 1963, but time has vindicated the selection as one of the decades' best.

1978 was by far the worst year in movie history, with the only truly memorable Hollywood release being the grandaddy of all teenage gross-out comedies, National Lampoon's Animal House. In the Oscar race, the battle was between the first two major studio release to deal with the Vietnam War, The Deer Hunter and Coming Home (a third Vietnam-themed film, Go Tell the Spartans, was also released that year - which made no impact in the Oscar race despite being more highly praised in some quarters than the two Award winners). Both films give the war the Hollywood treatment - Coming Home is a highly romantic love triangle centering around a handsome paraplegic war veteran whose sexual performance is strangely unaffected by his injuries, while The Deer Hunter takes shocking liberties with the facts, showing the American POWs being forced to play Russian Roulette for the amusement of their captors - a completely fictional device which depicts the Viet Cong as nothing more than subhuman barbarians and reduces The Deer Hunter into as much of a propaganda film as The Green Berets. This wouldn't matter if The Deer Hunter was the powerful statement on the war that it presents itself as, and not the pretentious bore that it really is. Coming Home is anything but boring - no less a glamorous soap opera than Peyton Place, it boasts powerful performances by Jon Voight, Jane Fonda and Bruce Dern and makes a brave stab at enacting the struggles real life veterans faced on their return home. In another year, a slick melodrama like Coming Home would have to battle for a nomination, but in the abyss of 1978, it was the best that Movieland had to offer.

Kramer Vs. Kramer was the overwhelming favorite for Best Picture in 1979, winning not only the Academy Award but being anointed by most of the other year-end movie awards as well. The film is a well-acted, diverting melodrama about a father trying to retain custody of his son (played by eight year old Justin Henry, who ludicrously received a Best Supporting Actor nomination over performances like Laurence Olivier in A Little Romance, Michael Murphy for Manhattan, Ron Leibman in Norma Rae and Paul Dooley in Breaking Away) after the boy's mother walks out on them. It is an engaging but highly conventional film that seems more important than it is because of the big name talent involved. In fact Kramer Vs. Kramer has a highly offensive aspect to it, as Hoffman's character is virtually deified in the film for assuming challenges that countless single mothers go through on a daily basis. But if Kramer Vs. Kramer had simply switched genders and been about a single mother trying to raise her son after the father walked out, there would have been no film because the premise would have been too commonplace to hold our interest.

1979 deserved a better Best Picture than this, and there were some astonishingly challenging films in the running that the Academy overlooked in favor of the ultra-safe Kramer Vs. Kramer. All four of the other nominees for Best Picture now seem stronger choices - All That Jazz, Apocalypse Now, Breaking Away and Norma Rae - and are much more courageous and powerful creations than the slick Kramer Vs. Kramer. None are perfect - the front-runner today would probably be Francis Coppola's Vietnam allegory Apocalypse Now - which for all its pictorial splendor is a pretentious muddle that doesn't seem connected with the real war in Vietnam in any way (it could easily have been set in World War II without missing a beat). The finest and most cohesive film of the year was Woody Allen's Manhattan, a brilliant drama about neurotic, self-involved New York intellectual elite. The film received the Best Director citation at the New York Film Critics Awards but received scant attention at the Oscars, receiving only two nominations for Screenplay Written for the Screen and Mariel Hemingway as Best Supporting Actress.