“I think a lot of people hated the movie”: the Oscars snub that enraged Jack Nicholson
Starting his career in a series of low-budget movies – including various collaborations with the B-movie icon Roger Corman – the success of Jack Nicholson was buoyed by his Oscar-nominated performance in 1969’s Easy Rider. The counterculture film was a turning point in the New Hollywood era, reflecting an era of increased cinematic experimentation in the mainstream, and Nicholson soon became a leading figure of the movement.
The 1970s were a near-flawless decade for Nicholson, who appeared in many movies that have continued to receive acclaim decades later, from Five Easy Pieces and Chinatown to The Last Detail and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He won his first Oscar for the latter, although the aforementioned films all earned him nominations from the Academy, proving his popularity as one of the industry’s most coveted stars that filmmakers were practically dying to work with.
Nicholson would go on to earn two more Oscars for Terms of Endearment and As Good As It Gets, respectively, but at the start of the 1970s, he surely couldn’t anticipate the sheer amount of Oscars-related fame he would come to harness. In fact, the actor was annoyed when one of his performances failed to receive a nomination, not knowing that he would scoop up four nominations in the 1970s alone.
Yet, when an actor gives a performance they believe to be one of their best to date, it’s surely frustrating to receive little recognition for it, even worse when their co-star gets a prestigious nomination instead. For Nicholson, it was Carnal Knowledge, directed by Mike Nichols, that left him feeling as though he’d been snubbed, although he’d only been nominated the previous year for Five Easy Pieces.
Nicholson once explained in an interview, “I think a lot of people hated the movie, and when people hear that, they think it’s because it’s a bad movie. And in the conglomeration that goes on during any kind of an election, it’s mainly what you hear and not what you think.”
The actor also thought that there was some unfair favouritism going on, adding, “Many of the people don’t even see all the movies. A lot of people are voting for friends; a lot of people are doing a lot of things. But the movie’s a negative comment, and a fairly good one. Certainly honest, related to the artists, Mike Nichols and Jules Feiffer, who put together the concepts. Pretty well executed, I think. People resent Mike’s success very strongly. Some people do. That hurts the movies.”
While Ann-Margaret walked away with an Oscar nomination, Nicholson sadly did not. Still, he knew that people wouldn’t be that interested in seeing him receive his third nomination in three years, explaining that “People will get tired of seeing you get nominated. No one is particularly upset that I didn’t get nominated for an Oscar, even people that think that I should have been. They don’t go, ‘Ah, what a disaster this is.’ A certain part of them says, ‘That’s good, he’s been getting too much attention, anyway.’”
Nicholson evidently didn’t expect to earn so much Oscar success in the coming years, although it can’t be said that everyone was sick of his constant nominations. The actor earned these Academy nods with a string of flawless performances, and he is now one of the most respected and influential figures in Hollywood history.
