Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Original Screenplay 1979

The Contenders:

…And Justice for All
All That Jazz
Breaking Away (winner)
The China Syndrome
Manhattan

Plea Bargain

Film: …And Justice for All
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

When you talk about actors in their heyday, you have to hand it to Al Pacino in the 1970s. The man did a lot of good work in that decade. I’m not going to take that away from him. In fact, I’ll even credit his work in …And Justice for All, because it’s a solid 1970s Pacino performance, perhaps even vintage. The problem here is just about everything else. Okay, the cast is solid. But the plot has real issues and the music, especially at first, is terrible.

A quick summary of the film would go like this: an honest lawyer who genuinely believes in the power of the law slowly realizes that the entire system is corrupt from top to bottom. He discovers this during a series of cases that all go bad in different ways but go bad for the same reason. In the end, he has to decide between his job and his conscience, and since this is a film about the law and lawyers, that decision naturally happens within the confines of a courtroom.