The Oscars (and other awards)

With the official trailer for Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens receiving over 13 million views in the first day of its release last Monday, it is safe to assume that full-scale Star Wars hype has settled in. The film, directed by J.J. Abrams, looks poised to break box office records when it finally hits theaters this December, but it may also be a Oscar contender, just as George Lucas’ original film in the iconic sci-fi series was nearly 40 years ago.

Traveling back to 1977, the year Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (then simply titled Star Wars) was originally released, the landscape of film was far different from today’s plethora of box office franchises. Lucas took audiences to a galaxy far, far away and was rewarded with the highest grossing film ever at that time as well as 10 Oscar nominations, including best picture.

The epic of Luke and Darth Vader has become legendary, but the story of how the film lost out to Woody Allen’s Annie Hall for best picture at the 50th Academy Awards is significantly lesser known.


Star Wars was groundbreaking at its time for its use of visual effects and though it may have been light on story, or as New York Times film critic Vincent Canby remarked in his review of the film, “The story could be written on the head of a pin and still leave room for the Bible,” it managed to score the third most total nominations that year (Julia and The Turning Point both had 11).

When the nominations were announced for the 50th Academy Awards in Feb., 1978, many were surprised by the lack of a best picture nomination for the other sci-fi blockbuster of the previous year, Steven Spielberg‘s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Films set in space and dealing with sci-fi elements have never had much success with the Academy, but Star Wars seemed to be the film that may have finally bucked that trend. It was not only a commercial success, but a hit with critics as well and was considered by many to be the frontrunner that year. Canby himself called it, “the most elaborate, most expensive, most beautiful movie serial ever made.”

Legendary film critic Roger Ebert, in his 1977 review of Star Wars noted, “Every once in awhile I have what I think of as an out-of-the-body experience at a movie . . . Star Wars works like that.”

So, how did such a well-reviewed, financially successful film fail to take home the biggest prize of the year? According to Scott Feinberg, one of the main factors at work against the film’s campaign was a pay-cable television station in Hollywood that broadcast films in contention for best picture. One of these films was Annie Hall. Star Wars was not. In fact, the first time Lucas’ film was broadcast on television was on a small pay-per-view station with less than half a million subscribers in Sept., 1982.

The exposure that Annie Hall received from its television broadcast helped it to be seen by a large number of Academy voters who may have not seen Star Wars or only seen the film once in theaters. Coupled with the established Oscar bias against genre films, this may have done Lucas’ film in and paved the way for Allen’s success.

That is not to say that Annie Hall was not also well received by critics. Canby, who also reviewed Allen’s film, said, “the film, at last, puts Woody in the league with the best directors we have.”

Undoubtedly, Star Wars: Episode VII will succeed at the box office. Whether or not the film can redeem its predecessor come Oscar night is much harder to predict, however, and we can only wait and see how the latest film in this iconic franchise is received by critics and audiences alike.