Format: Internet video on laptop.
I don’t remember the 1984 Oscars because I didn’t really care that much about them toward the end of my senior year in high school. I do remember some of the music and events of that time, though. I remember that 1985, the year of those Oscars, was the year for Farm Aid in Urbana-Champaign, where I happened to be a student at the time. It was also the year John Cougar Mellencamp released Scarecrow, an album that, at least in part, talked about the fading of the American dream. The title track was very specifically about the fading of the American family farm. As it happens, 1984 was a year for movies about a similar theme. Three of the Best Actress nominees were for stories focused on farms. There was The River with Sissy Spacek, Places in the Heart with Sally Field, and finally Country featuring a nominated performance from Jessica Lange.
And guess what? Country is about a family that is about to lose a farm that has been handed down for generations for more than a century. They simply can’t make the farm work because of the drop in crop prices and the rise in costs of operation. The villain of Country is not a specific person, but the FHA, who loaned money to farmers based on inflated land prices and then came to collect when those loans couldn’t be paid off. I’m not kidding when I call this the film’s villain. Evidently, Ronald Reagan took this film as a personal attack on his administration’s farm policies.
