1977 was the year it all changed. We didn’t know it then, but the youth influenced success of George Lucas’ blockbuster science fiction epic, Star Wars,was to eventually drive movie marketing almost to the exclusion of everything else. I say almost, because there has/will probably always be room for cheaply made horror films and gross-out comedies and hopefully, passionately made independent films. What we don’t get any more are the high class women’s pictures as exemplified by Fred Zinnemann’s Julia and Herbert Ross’ The Turning Point.

Maybe the old-timers voting in the 1977 Oscars had a collective premonition. They nominated both Julia and The Turning Point,in what was essentially a fond farewell to that type of moviemaking, for eleven Oscars. The new guard, on the other hand, supported Star Wars with ten nominations. The other two Best Picture nods went to two New York centric comedies, Woody Allen’s beloved Annie Hall and Herbert Ross’ middling The Goodbye Girl.

Giving lie to the notion that the film with the most nominations wins, Annie Hall took home four Oscars for Best Picture, Actress (Diane Keaton), Director and Screenplay (both to Allen, though the second was shared with Marshall Brickman). Star Wars won six competitive awards in the technical categories as well as a Special Achievement Award for its Sound Effects. Julia won three for Best Supporting Actor (Jason Robards), Supporting Actress (Vanessa Redgrave) and Adapted Screenplay. The Turning Point went home empty-handed, the biggest loser in Oscar history, its record tied by The Color Purple eight years later.

Annie Hall’s triumph is generally attributed to the film’s having been shown incessantly on Los Angeles’ Z Channel during nominations season. The Z Channel was the precursor of the VCR and the current method of supplying voters with screeners. Although the film had won both the New York Film Critics and National Society of Film Critics awards, it had not done well with the other three extant precursors. The National Board of Review went with The Turning Point, while the newly inaugurated Los Angeles Film Critics gave their initial award to Star Wars. The Golden Globes gave their Best Picture – Drama award to The Turning Point and their Best Picture – Comedy award to The Goodbye Girl.

The focus this year, though, was on the Best Actress race. After years of decrying the dearth of decent roles for women, the category was so crowded that there was much speculation pre-nomination announcement, as to which of the year’s seven front-runners would be left off the list. As it turned out, only one, Sophia Loren in A Special Day,failed to be nominated. Vanessa Redgrave, who had the title role in Julia,was relegated to the supporting category where she, of course, won.

Anne Bancroft as an aging ballerina and Shirley MacLaine as the mother of a struggling ballerina were both nominated for The Turning Point; Marsha Mason as a struggling actress was nominated for The Goodbye Girl; Redgrave’s co-star Jane Fonda as writer Lillian Hellman was nominated for Julia and Keaton was nominated for her daffy Annie Hall over her own devastating turn as a murder victim in Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

Films that Oscar liked outside of the Best Picture race included the aforementioned A Special Day and Looking for Mr. Goodbar, as well as Saturday Night Fever; Equus; Close Encounters of the Third Kind; That Obscure Object of Desire and Madame Rosa.

Sophia Loren may not have made the cut playing the wife of a fascist in Ettore Scola’s A Special Day about the day Mussolini met Hitler, but Marcello Mastroianni playing against type as her frightened homosexual neighbor, earned his second career nomination for Best Actor. The film was also nominated for Best Foreign Film.

Mastroianni’s competition included Woody Allen more or less playing himself in Annie Hall; John Travolta as an aspiring dancer in Saturday Night Fever;Richard Burton as a psychiatrist in Equus and Richard Drefuss, who won, as a struggling actor in The Goodbye Girl.

Dreyfuss also had the lead in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, another science fiction blockbuster epic which, along with Star Wars, was seen as the future of the movies. Nominated for eight Os cars, it won for Best Cinematography and like Star Wars, won a Speicial Achievement Oscar for its Sound Effects. Speilberg had been a nominee for Best Director, along with Annie Hall’s Woody Allen; Julia’s Fred Zinnemann; The Turning Point’s Herbert Ross and Star Wars’ George Lucas.

While voters preferred Diane Keaton’s comic daffiness in Annie Hall to her promiscuous schoolteacher in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, they did like Supportign Actress nominee Tuesday Weld as her quirky sister. The film was also nominated for Best Cinematography.

While Vanessa Redgrave’s win for Supporting Actress as the resistance fighter in Julia was a foregone conclusion, the outcome of the Best Supporting race was not. Jason Robards’ portrayal of writer Dashiell Hammett in the same film made him just the fourth consecutive acting winner, following Luise Rainer, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Rainer had played the real life Anna Held in The Great Ziegfeld for which she won her first Oscar; Tracy had played the real life Father Flanagan in Boys Town for which he won his second and Hepburn had played the real life Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter for which she received her second. Robards was the first to win both consecutive Oscars for playing real life people, having won his first as the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee in the previous year’s All the President’s Men.

Robards’ strongest competition came from former Oscar winner Alec Guinness as the wise Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars and newcomer Peter Firth as the disturbed boy in Equus.

One of world cinema’s most acclaimed writer-directors, Luis Bunuel received his second and final Oscar nomination for his screenplay for That Obscure Object of Desire. The film was also nominated for Best Foreign Film.

The winner of the Best Foreign Film award was Moshe Mizrahi’s Madame Rosa starring Simone Signoret in her last great screen role as a retired prostitute. The film played for almost a year in 1978 when it was officially released in the U.S., but oddly enough did not receive any competitive nominations for which it was eligible under existing rules.

All films discussed except Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Madame Rosa have been released on DVD in the U.S.

This week’s new DVD releases include the latest from this year’s Oscar hosts, nominee James Franco’s 127 Hours and Anne Hathaway’s Love & Other Drugs, as well as the Blu-ray debut of the Disney classic, Bambi.