The F@&%ing G*#*@mn Best Picture of '77: Woody Allen's Annie Hall

 Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane, Paul Simon. Dir. Woody Allen, United Artists, 1977

In spring of 1978, Annie Hall won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1977. I was ten years old. Among Annie Hall's competitors in '78 was a little movie called Star Wars which was, as I knew perfectly well, the best movie of 1977 and every other year ever. When Annie Hall won Best Picture, I knew Satan owned the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. I cast a supremely disapproving and suspicious eye upon Annie Hall. Which, for a movie fan of the late '70s and early '80s, when Woody Allen did his most consistent work, soon became a problem. How did I avoid a movie everyone I met said was one of the funniest films they'd ever seen?

I got lucky, I guess. I managed to avoid Annie Hall until the late '80s. When I did see it, I had to agree - it's the best movie of 1977. It's ok, though. Star Wars is the best movie in all of recorded history. I hope Mr. Allen likes looking at his Oscar.

Again, the silence following a great movie. In a moment I'll write other things but what is there to say right now that Woody Allen didn't spend the last 90 minutes saying? What is there for me to add after, "We keep going through it...because we need the eggs"?

One of my favorite albums is Lou Reed's New York. The writing is Lou at his crispest and yet also warmest, the lyrical ideas and melodies sound fresh, his guitar playing has seldom been better, and his voice and how he uses it on a song are in top form. Still, the record devotes much of its concerns to issues topical in 1988, the year of its recording and a true hell-year in the US, which dates the record in ways a more contemporary audience might find offputting. If so, it's a loss, as New York represents the high water mark of Reed's career.

Annie Hall is my film equivalent of New York. It's a movie totally of its time. That's a time I witnessed, if not understood, and Allen's take on where we were at in '77 speaks to me in a way it may not to younger audiences. My friends obsess over finding therapists in-network, not over their analysis of my friends' sex lives. Do the preoccupations and cultural references of 1977 resonate with younger movie fans?

It's not hard, in either case, to see where they wouldn't, and in both cases it's a damn shame if true. Annie Hall is almost certainly Allen's best, most fully realized, most absurdly profound work. In it, he fuses his high- and lowbrow sensibilities, as perfectly summed up in his opening shot, where he uses a rather arty, faux-documentary style to tell two Borscht Belt groaners which he says define his approach to life. It's intellectual, it's crass, it's existential, and it's ludicrous. The ideal Allen cocktail. 

John Ford and Orson Welles both believed a production could, even should, encompass high art and low, broad, ribald comedy. Allen graduated from the same school, his rapidfire dialogue zinging from Marshall McCluhan references to dick jokes to Jewish-mother impersonations. Allen deconstructs late-20th century man while wearing a Groucho mask. It's a hard mixture to get right. Daryl F. Zanuck, Fox's head of production, despaired of Ford's fondness for the cruder comedy. Annie Hall measures up to Zanuck's standard, "farce, not hokum."

I hope Annie Hall still finds an audience, too, because it's one of those years Oscar got it exactly right. Star Wars was unlike anything we'd seen, it changed Hollywood overnight, and its aftershocks continued well into 1978. But it's not Annie Hall. 

It doesn't make me want to sit in the stillness and just vibrate like a struck tuning fork, the tremors from the experience fading out long and slow. Star Wars says a lot to me, means a lot, but it has never told me about life and love and men and neurosis what Annie Hall told me about them. Star Wars is historically relevant, economically relevant, even creatively relevant, but it's not emotionally or, dare I say it, spiritually relevant to me like Annie Hall.

Star Wars fulfills me in a very personal way. It rings bells and toots whistles with which I have adorned it in the first place. It's less a film than a personal talisman, playing its role in a ritualistic love affair. Annie Hall, on the other hand, is a great motion picture, a sublimity of form and an apotheosis of craft, all of film's elements blended in proportion so exquisite it feels like the reading of an epic poem by the conclusion. Like you've discovered art, and it is good. Star Wars is 100% adrenalized fun. Annie Hall is existential joy. Star Wars is one of my personal passions and compulsions. Annie Hall is one of America's finest movies.