Oscar’s Best Picture line-up for 1986 offered the most varied slate in many years. In the running were a war movie; a complex adventure film, a sophisticated contemporary comedy, an even more sophisticated classic comedy and a high tension domestic drama.

Leading off the nominations were the war movie, Platoon, and the classic comedy, A Room With a View,with eight each, followed closely by the contemporary comedy, Hannah and Her Sisters,and the adventure film, The Mission,with seven each. The domestic drama, Children of a Lesser God,picked up the rear with five.

In the end, it was the war movie which won the Best Picture award and three other Oscars. Told from a grunt’s eye perspective, Oliver Stone’s gritty, often shocking Platoon featured stellar Oscar nominated performances by Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe as the respective representatives of good and evil in the life a young recruit, played by Charlie Sheen. Nominated as well for Best Original Screenplay and Cinematography, the film, in addition to its Best Picture win, took home Oscars for Best Director, Editing and Sound.

Set in the Edwardian England of 1908, E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View may have been the least successful novel published during his lifetime, but the screen version is so vibrantly alive that one finds it shocking that this could possibly have the case prior to his death in 1970.

The title refers not to the film’s main setting, but to a hotel in Florence in the opening and closing sections of the film where Best Supporting Actor nominee Denholm Elliot and his son, Julian Sands, switch rooms with Best Supporting Actress nominee Maggie Smith and her cousin, Helena Bonham Carter. Beautifully written and gorgeously presented, James Ivory’s film won three Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction and Costume Design. It had been nominated for Best Director and Cinematography in addition to those categories already mentioned.

Perhaps Woody Allen’s most ambitious film, certainly his most intricate family film, Hannah and Her Sisters is a wry comedy that takes place from one Thanksgiving to the next as relationships between three sisters and their husbands and lovers change. Allen, Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey, Max von Sydow and Oscar winners Michael Caine and Dianne Wiest star. Allen won for his screenplay. He was also nominated for Best Directorand the film itself also received nods for Best Editing and Art Direction.

Perhaps the year’s most complex film was Roland Joffé’s beautifully realized The Mission about 18th Century slave trading in South America and the attempts of a small group of Jesuit priests to protect native Indians from being exploited. Robert De Niro had top billing as the slave trader who repents and becomes a priest, but the heart and soul of the film belongs to Jeremy irons as the head of the mission with Ray McAnnally in an outstanding supporting performance as the Cardinal who must choose between protecting the mission and giving in to political expediency. Chris Menges won an Oscar for Best Cinematography while Joffé’s was nominated for Best Director, the legendary Ennio Morricone was nominated for Best Score, one of his best, and the film was also recognized with nominations for Best Editing and Art Direction.

Marlee Matlin’s Oscar winning performance as the hearing impaired woman who wants the world to accept her on her own terms was the centerpiece of Randa Haines’ Children of a Lesser God, but the film offers other pleasures in its richly observed details of her surroundings centered on her affair with the new teacher at her school, played by Oscar nominated William Hurt. Piper Laurie, an actress who could always do a lot with a little, gives another beautifully nuanced performance as the mother with whom Matlin has a strained relationship, resulting in her third Oscar nomination. The film was also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Other films that Oscar liked aside from the Best Picture nominees included Blue Velvet; Hoosiers; Stand By Me; The Color of Money; Mona Lisa; Salvador; ‘Round Midnight; Peggy Sue Got Married; Crimes of the Heart; The Morning After; Aliens and The Fly.

An awards winner with various critics groups, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet was under-appreciated by the Academy, garnering only one nomination, that of Best Director. They even failed to recognize Dennis Hopper’s career best performance as a raving lunatic sleaszebag, nominating him instead for the more benign role of a recovering alcoholic basketball coach in Hoosiers. Nevertheless this most quintessential of all of Lynch’s films has remained extremely popular in the quarter century since the world first encountered it.

Also undervalued by the Academy was Rob Reiner’s film of Stephen King’s Stand By Me, which also received just a single nomination, that of Best Adapted Screenplay. King’s childhood memoir was his best non-horror work and the film was one of the best coming-of-age films of its era, making stars of Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman and Jerry O’Connell.

Faring much better with the Academy, Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money received four Oscar nominations including Best Supporting Actress Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio; Adapted Screenplay and Art Direction. Paul Newman, on his eighth nomination, finally won a competitive Oscar the year after receiving a special Oscar for the totality of his career. In it he reprises Fast Eddie Felson, his character from 1961’s The Hustler. The film itself, however, is a bit on the dull side and Newman’s Oscar was clearly a catch-up one for having lost for far more impressive work done in the previous seven times at bat.

Newman’s chief competition for the Best Actor prize was Bob Hoskins who had won most of the critics’ prizes for one of his signature gangster roles in Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa. Also in the running were the previously mentioned William Hurt in Children of a Lesser God; James Woods as a down-on-his-luck journalist in Oliver Stone’s political thriller Salvadorand jazz great Dexter Gordon as a down-on-his-luck tenor saxophonist in Bertrand Tarvernier’s ‘Round Midnight.

Marlee Matlin’s competition in the Best Actress race consisted of Kathleen Turner as a woman who goes back in time in Francis Ford Coppola’s nostalgic comedy, Peggy Se Got Married; Sissy Spacek as the kooky younger sister in Bruce Beresford’s chick flick, Crimes of the Heart; Jane Fonda playing against type as an alcoholic struggling actress in Sidney Lumet’s underwhelming The Morning After and Sigourney Weaver reprising her career defining role as Ripley in James Cameron’s box-office behemoth, Aliens.

With seven nominations, Aliens was the most nominated film not to receive a Best Picture nod this year. It won for both its sound Effects and visual effects. The year’s other major horror film released this year, David Cronenberg’s The Fly won an Oscar in the only category in which it was nominated, that of Best Makeup.

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

This week’s new DVD releases include recent Oscar nominees Blue Valentine and The Illusionist.