Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actress 1986

The Contenders:

Sigourney Weaver: Aliens
Marlee Matlin: Children of a Lesser God (winner)
Sissy Spacek: Crimes of the Heart
Jane Fonda: The Morning After
Kathleen Turner: Peggy Sue Got Married

Retread

Film: Peggy Sue Got Married
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

What do you get when you take almost everything fun from Back to the Future and replace it with Nicolas Cage sporting a pompadour? What do you get when you take the concept of time travelling back to the 1950s/1960s and replace the directorial style of Robert Zemeckis with that of Francis Ford Coppola? You get Peggy Sue Got Married, a film that feels like a retread 20 minutes in and not in any good way. The concept behind the film is sound enough but aside from a couple of points, the concept is pretty much all it has.

Peggy Sue Bodell (Kathleen Turner) is stuck in a life she doesn’t like on the night of her 25th high school reunion. She married her high school sweetheart Charlie Bodell (Nicolas Cage) who went on to own a discount electronics store complete with crazy late-night television ads. He also turned out to be a frequent adulterer, which is the main reason he and Peggy Sue are getting a divorce. Peggy Sue attends the reunion without him, running into old friends Carol (Catherine Hicks) and Maddie (Joan Allen) as well as others from her past including high school nerd turned inventor Richard (Barry Miller) and local dentist Walter Getz (Jim Carrey). For some reason, the reunion elects a king and queen—Richard and Peggy Sue in this case—and shortly after the crown is put on her head, Peggy Sue collapses on stage.