Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 1974

The Contenders:
Chinatown
The Conversation
The Godfather Part II
Lenny
The Towering Inferno

Burn, Baby, Burn

Film: The Towering Inferno
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

Before there was Michael Bay, there was Irwin Allen. While Allen directed a good number of films and won an Oscar for a documentary, in the 1970s, the name Irwin Allen meant one thing and one thing only: disaster movie. By this I don’t mean films that were terrible (although some no doubt were), but films about disasters. Every year or so, a film would appear about a group of diverse people trapped in an X or attacked by Y or surviving natural disaster Z. Not all of these were produced by Irwin Allen, but it sure seemed like it. Of these, The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno were the leading examples. The Towering Inferno got more street cred by being nominated for eight Oscars (including one for Fred Astaire as a Supporting Actor and for Best Picture) and by winning three: cinematography, editing, and (brace yourself) best song.

A film like The Towering Inferno is a masterpiece of high concept. “What if a fire broke out in the tallest building in the world?” Toss in a collection of A-list actors and you have quite the film. As it happens, it was released in a year when the actual Best Picture race wasn’t much in question; nominating this was pretty harmless since it didn’t have a hope of winning over The Godfather Part II.