“Oh God, they’re going to give an Academy Award to Rocky IV, aren’t they?”
~You, the Reader
We are now three articles and over 12,000 words into our ambitious attempt to re-award every single Academy Award from 1970 to 2009 while finding at least one way to screw over the favorite movie of every single one of our readers. It’s been a whirlwind ride, with some hard decisions and a lot of movies we had no clue even existed.
But now it’s time to dive deep into the mid-to-late 80’s, a decade which has seen a lot of awards not only changing hands, but going to movies that weren’t even originally nominated. But then again, they thought shoulder pads were a great idea in the 1980’s, so it’s not surprising that the Academy messed things up back then.
Once again to hash out the rules. Each year is listed not by the film’s release, but by the date of the ceremony (so 1985’s entry is for films released in 1984, etc). We’ll tell you the original winners, and nominees, along with their IMDB user rating, and then will re-award that year’s Oscar. It could go to the same movie, but more often than not it’ll be going to someone else.
So let’s dive in, shall we? There were some pretty competitive years in this batch.