(Editor’s Note: Due to the Oscar nominations, The DVD Report is being posted a day early)

Oscar went retrograde in 1973 and gave the Best Picture award to the rousing caper film, The Sting, set in the 1930s with the music of an earlier time, ragtime, which became popular all over again thanks to the film. Superstars Paul Newman and Robert Redford ensured big box office, with Redford accounting for one of the film’s ten nominations, but not one of its seven wins. In addition to Best Picture, it garnered awards for Best Director (George Roy Hill), Original Screenplay, Editing, Art Direction, Costume Design, and of course, Adapted Score (Marvin Hamlisch). There isn’t anything wrong with the film, but its big wins over much edgier fare seemed somewhat puzzling then, almost ridiculous now. Its competition included a celebrated horror film, a teenage comedy with a classic rock soundtrack and a somber Swedish film about death and dying, but they were hardly the things that Oscar was ready to embrace. Except for one later exception, it still isn’t.

Horror films were pretty much ignored by Oscar prior to 1973. Until this year, Fredric March was the only performer to win an Oscar for one, 1931’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,and only Janet Leigh in 1960’s Psycho,Bette Davis and Victor Buono in 1962’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Agnes Moorehead in 1964’s Hush, Hush…Sweet Charlotte were subsequently nominated. No horror film had ever been nominated for Best Picture. With ten Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Director (William Friedkin), Actress (Ellen Burstyn), Supporting Actor (Jason Miller) and Supporting Actress (Linda Blair), The Exorcist made Oscar history. While it would tie The Sting in nominations, it would win only two Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Sound. It would take another eighteen years for a horror film to take home the top prize.

Classic rock music permeated the soundtrack of American Graffiti, a marvelously engaging comedy about the last night of car cruising in a small town by two high school buddies before they go their separate ways. The film, which was produced by Francis Ford Coppola, was George Lucas’ second feature film and the one that made everyone sit up and take notice. It also either established or enhanced the careers of its entire cast, including Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Paul LeMat, Cindy Williams, Mackenzie Phillips and Oscar nominated Candy Clark. The film was nominated for five Oscars in all, including Best Director, but lost them all. Its best selling soundtrack album remains popular to this day.

Sweden’s legendary writer-director-producer, Ingmar Bergman, had received two previous nominations for writing and the distinguished Thalberg Award for producing two years earlier, but had never been nominated for his direction until now. Cries and Whispers, about the sibling rivalries of three sisters at the deathbed of one of them in turn-of-the-century Sweden was the backdrop for Cries and Whispers, a New York Film Critics award winner for Best Picture the year before, but because of the oddities of film distribution, ineligible for Oscar consideration until now. The film, which starred Liv Ullmann, Harriet Andersson and Ingrid Thulin as the sisters, was nominated for five Oscars and won one for Sven Nykvist’s exquisite cinematography.

The fifth nominee, A Touch of Class, was even more retrograde than The Sting. A smarmy comedy about an illicit affair between American George Segal and Brit Glenda Jackson, the film was completely devoid of class, and had very little charm. What little charm it did have was in Jackson’s bemused performance, which seemed to say “what am I doing here?” It was enough to win her a surprise second Best Actress Oscar over four much more deserving nominees. It was the film’s only win out of five nominations.

Other films that Oscar liked this year included The Way We Were; Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams; Cinderella Liberty; Paper Moon; The Paper Chase; Last Tango in Paris; The Last Detail; Serpico; Save the Tiger and Bang the Drum Slowly, but not Mean Streets.

In addition to The Sting, Robert Redford and Marvin Hamlisch also had a hit with Sydney Pollack’s The Way We Were, for which Hamlisch won two more Oscars, one for Original Score and one for Original Song, the latter shared with Marilyn and Alan Bergman. Co-starring Barbra Stresiand, whose recording of the Oscar winning title song was a career high, the film has a strong beginning and ending, with a rather wobbly mid-section. That wobbly mid-section wasn’t enough to keep it from receiving a total of six nominations, including one for Best Actress.

Streisand’s chief competition for the win, until Glenda Jackson’s shocking victory, was yet a third former Oscar winner, Joanne Woodward, who had won her second New York Film Critics Award for her portrayal of a difficult woman going through a mid-life crisis in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams. Veteran actress Sylvia Sidney received the first nomination in her long career as Woodward’s abrasive mother.

The fifth Best Actress nominee was newcomer Marsha Mason as a waterfront prostitute raising a child on her own in Mark Rydell’s Cinderalla Liberty, which was also nominated for Best Song and Best Original Score.

Sixty-three year-old Sylvia Sidney lost the Supporting Actress award to ten year-old Tatum O’Neal in Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon. The Depression Era comedy was also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Sound and O’Neal’s fellow supporting actress nominee, Madeline Kahn. Tatum’s father, Ryan O’Neal was top-billed. Tatum, though, was the film’s real star, with her category placement stirring somewhat of a controversy in retrospect, btu not then. She was a hugely popular winner.

The year’s most controversial film, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris about a young French woman’s uninhibited affair with a middle-aged American businessman, received only two nominations, for Best Director and Actor (Marlon Brando). Brando’s competition, in addition to the afore-mentioned Robert Redford, included Jack Nicholson as a sailor escorting a prisoner to the brig in Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail; Al Pacino as an a real-life undercover cop who blows the whistle on corruption with the NYC police department in Sidney Lumet’s Serpico and Jack Lemmon as a middle-aged garment factory owner on the verge of bankruptcy in John G. Avildsen’s Save the Tiger.

Lemmon’s performance was the least impressive of the lot, but he was the favorite going into the race as he hadn’t won since his first nomination in the Supporting Actor category for 1955’s Mister Roberts and although he had three subsequent Best Actor nominations, he hadn’t been nominated since 1962’s Days of Wine and Roses. Sometimes the back story counts more than the performance with Oscar voters.

The Last Detail was also nominated for Best Supporting Actor (Randy Quaid) and Adapted Screenplay; Serpico for Adapted Screenplay and Save the Tiger for Supporting Actor (Jack Gilford) and Original Screenplay.

The supporting actor winner was producer John Houseman in his first major acting role as the stern professor in James Bridges The Paper Chase, which was also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Sound.

A supporting actor nomination had also gone to veteran stage actor Vincent Gardenia in his most substantial screen role to date as a big league baseball club’s colorful manager in John D. Hancock’s Bang the Drum Slowly, which starred Michael Moriarty and Robert De Niro. De Niro also scored in Martin Scorsese’s breakthrough film, Mean Streets, which failed to be nominated for anything.

All films discussed have been released on DVD within the U.S.

Thsi week’s new DVD releases include Secretariat on Blue-ray and standard DVD; the Blue-ray debuts of Broadcast News; The Color Purple and A Beautiful Mind, and the Criterion standard DVD release of Basil Dearden’s London Underground featuring four of the acclaimed directors’ best films (Sapphire; The League of Gentlemen; Victim and All Night Long).