Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 1980

The Contenders:

John Hurt: The Elephant Man
Robert Duvall: The Great Santini
Robert De Niro: Raging Bull (winner)
Peter O’Toole: The Stunt Man
Jack Lemmon: Tribute

Retirement, Kinda

Film: Tribute
Format: Internet video on the new internet machine.

As this project winds to a close, there are now only a couple of years (not count 2017) where I have more than one movie still to watch. Since the goal is to not do a bunch of movies from the same year right in a row, there’s got to be an effort on my part to get through as many of those doubled-up years as possible. Thus I watched Tribute today, a film that has been sitting on a flashdrive, downloaded off YouTube for a couple of years. I can’t admit to a great deal of anticipation for this. I like Jack Lemmon, and his nomination is the reason I watched this. But it also stars Kim Cattrall and Robby Benson. The last time I saw a movie with Kim Cattrall and Robby Benson, it was an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 called City Limits, and it’s truly wretched.

Tribute is going to start by jumping up and down on one of my pet peeves. Scottie Templeton (Jack Lemmon) works in the theater community as a press agent. While he seems to have a lot of friends, he’s divorced and has almost no relationship with his son. Scottie is in the hospital for some tests, and before the tests can happen, he sneaks on a doctor’s surgical gown and more or less attempts to pick up a patient named Sally Haines (Kim Cattrall), who is about 30 years his junior. And, we’re going to find out that this works—she goes home with him because that’s the way Tribute is going to work.