Movies of 1986 Bracket Game!: Platoon vs Hannah and Her Sisters

http://lebeauleblog.com/2016/01/02/movies-of-1986-bracket-game-platoon-vs-hannah-and-her-sisters/

Our first matchup comes from the quarter of the bracket that I identify as the “Oscar bait” group. Both Platoon and Hannah and Her Sisters were, in fact, nominated for the little gold man in the Best Picture, as well as other prime categories.

Woody Allen was inspired to develop Hannah and Her Sisters as a story about three sisters after reading Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, telling his wife Mia Farrow that she could play any one of the sisters she liked. The film received enthusiastic critical acclaim from the beginning and remains one of his most highly-regarded movies. In fact, in his television review of the movie right after its release, Roger Ebert called it Allen’s best. Despite both Allen and Farrow having misgivings about the depth of the script and its semi-autobiographical elements, Hannah and Her Sisters won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and brought home Oscars for supporting performances by both Michael Caine and Dianne Wiest. It is his second most successful film at the box office, behind only Midnight In Paris, which opened more than twenty-five years later.

Facing off with Allen’s comedic drama about self-involved New Yorkers is Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War drama Platoon, which focuses on more obvious human monstrosity. Stone claims that he wrote the script which would eventually morph into Platoon shortly after returning from his own tour of duty in Vietnam and intended to counter the more romanticized account from the John Wayne vehicle The Green Berets. His initial script, Break, went unproduced and is rumored to have been in Jim Morrison’s possession at the time of his death, having been personally sent by Stone with the hope that Morrison would star in it. The messy nature of the Vietnam experience, as dramatized in the film, was indeed more in line with the memories and impressions of the baby boom generation which came to support Platoon both critically and at the box office, making it the number three hit of 1986 and winning it four Academy Awards, including for Best Picture and Best Director for Stone.