1975's Oscar Nominees

3 Women for sure yes

MASH also, despite its raging misogyny.

Hellllllll no

A line must be drawn and I draw it at preferring MASH over Nashville

Cuckoo's Nest has the best soundtrack. Apparently the final theme was played at Jack Nitzsche's funeral and left everyone in bits:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L5SwisFSCE

xp I'm surprised at the reaction. The ensemble absolutely clicked, the script and editing (including sound) is fantastic, and it's funny as hell--despite, as I say, its raging misogyny. I'd watch it over Nashville any time.

(xpost) Love Nitzsche's crazy theremin music over the end credits.

I'd rather watch Prêt-à-Porter than MASH again.

Clem, I think that's a musical saw rather than a theremin (can't seem to find any online confirmation of this either way, tho).

Ah, here we go:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/jun/07/musical-saw

Inneresting (since it's Jack Nitzsche)! Always just assumed a theremin.

Barry Lyndon is just cold, remote, and weird to me.

Well sure, it's a Kubrick movie

I'm surprised at the reaction

I get it. Me? I'm always surprised that some people prefer watching Roadhouse to Showgirls

Maybe needs a theory of conscious vs unconscious camp

in which camp are you

Camp Arawak

Camp is Camp and it belongs to the audience not the klutz making their Art

Is broadly my take

My favorite Altmans are McCabe & Mrs. Miller, California Split, The Long Goodbye, Gosford Park and probably M*A*S*H. Misogyny's definitely there in M*A*S*H, but at the same time it's an honest (albeit unfortunate) reflection of both the military and '60s counterculture. I can't call it one of the film's merits, but it is a sad truth about the way women were treated across the sociopolitical spectrum.

FWIW, like I did with 1970, took a look and quickly came up with ten favorites from 1975 (only two of the Best Picture nominees though that's actually not bad for the Oscars) - pretty amazing year:

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles [Chantal Akerman]
Mirror [Andrei Tarkovsky]
Barry Lyndon [Stanley Kubrick]
Do Rah-e Hal Bara-ye Yek Mas’aleh (Two Solutions for One Problem) [Abbas Kiarostami]
Dog Day Afternoon [Sidney Lumet]
Welfare [Frederick Wiseman]
India Song [Marguerite Duras]
Manila in the Claws of Light [Lino Brocka]
The Passenger [Michelangelo Antonioni]
Night Moves [Arthur Penn]

Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman)
The Story of Adele H (Francois Truffaut)
Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
Love and Death (Woody Allen)
Night Moves (Arthur Penn)
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick)
The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni)
The Man Who Would Be King (John Huston)
Xala (Ousmane Sembene)
Jaws (Steven Spielberg)

Honorable Mentions: Shampoo (Hal Ashby), Mother Küsters' Trip to Heaven (Rainer Werner Fassbinder).

of the ones I've seen in the past few years, I'd go Lyndon > Jaws > Dog Day.

I haven't seen the Nashville or Cuckoo's since the '90s. back then I preferred the former to the latter, but I'd need to see them again to rank them against the other three.

(xposts) I'd probably put Welfare #1 for the year, partly a function of having seen my favourites from the list too many times.

in my high school production the audience roared when he attacked Nurse Ratched

i played mcmurphy last month; audiences invariably cheered billy saying he's not sorry but you could always hear a pin drop in the blackout after i strangled nurse ratched; energy rly seemed to lurch around in an uncomfortable way i enjoyed and made me reappraise a thing i loved in high school but decided in college was Too Schematic. (maybe i was just unsympathetic.) play def the worst of its three incarnations tho: strips away most of the book's hallucinatory subjectivity but without grounding it in naturalism as sturdily as the movie.

woulda voted for whichever of nashville/lyndon i'd last seen. don't rly get mash.