Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 1985

The Contenders:

William Hurt: Kiss of the Spider Woman (winner)
James Garner: Murphy’s Romance
Jack Nicholson: Prizzi’s Honor
Jon Voight: Runaway Train
Harrison Ford: Witness

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Director 1985

The Contenders:

Hector Babenco: Kiss of the Spider Woman
Sydney Pollack: Out of Africa (winner)
John Huston: Prizzi’s Honor
Akira Kurosawa: Ran
Peter Weir: Witness

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Original Screenplay 1985

The Contenders:
Back to the Future
Brazil
The Official Story
The Purple Rose of Cairo
Witness (winner)

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 1985

The Contenders:
The Color Purple
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Out of Africa (winner)
Prizzi’s Honor
Witness

Witness

Film: Witness
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

A pretty standard trope of the crime drama is the innocent witness. Have something bad happen, put someone completely unconnected in the area, and drama just happens. How do you twist things up? In the case of Witness, you make the innocent observer of the brutal crime as innocent as possible. In this case, our titular witness is a young Amish boy named Samuel (Lukas Haas). That little twist is enough to have garnered Witness eight Oscar nominations.

For what it’s worth, though, it really is an interesting premise. On his first trip to a big city, the young Amish boy and his mother Rachel (Kelly McGillis) are waiting in a train station when Samuel wanders off to the bathroom. It is there he sees a man assaulted and killed by two other men. The responding police officer is a man named John Book (Harrison Ford), who stashes his technologically backward witness and his mother at the house of his sister. The next day, he helps the boy look through mug shots with no success. During a lull, the boy wanders around the police station and finds the culprit he saw. The problem is that the murderer he saw is a police officer named McFee (Danny Glover).