Back to Travis #1: The King of Comedy

Abstract

The Academy Awards for 1980 saw Raging Bull receive eight nominations. This resulted in just two successes: Robert De Niro won the Best Actor Oscar, and Thelma Schoonmaker that for Best Editing. Apart from failing in the Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Cinematography and Sound categories,¹ the film lost out on the Best Picture and Best Director awards to Ordinary People and that film’s first-time director, actor Robert Redford. These decisions have been regarded as an evaluative travesty. They likewise have institutional and ideological resonance. On one hand, they imply an affirmation mutually of the Hollywood ‘insider’ as opposed to the ‘troublesome’ auteur and of near-classical norms as against an embattled modernism. On the other, whereas Raging Bull offers a critical representation of patriarchy and patriarchal determination, Ordinary People represents the same as stabilizing, supportive, necessary. Further, not only was Ordinary People part of a cycle of contemporaneous father—son melodramas, but another, similarly affirmatory film from the cycle, Kramer vs Kramer (Robert Benton), had won both Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for 1979.²