9. Bound For Glory
Year: 1976 Fellow Nominees: Taxi Driver, Rocky, Network, All the President's Men Another film to feature in a Best Picture lineup replete with masterpieces (Taxi Driver, All the President's Men, and maybe even Network, too), Hal Ashby's Bound For Glory, the story of the early years of vagabond folk legend, Woody Guthrie, is the kind-of anomaly of the bunch, not in its quality (it's a great movie), but in that it's rarely mentioned when the '76 Oscars - arguably the most famous ceremony of all time - are discussed. Everyone was expecting a win for Taxi Driver or All the President's Men here, and if wasn't going to be one of those, then it had to be Network. There was a reported audible gasp when Rocky, that much-loved underdog story, claimed the award, and thus the '76 Best Picture race has passed into legend as an early example of a time when a populist crowd-pleaser surpassed a group of critical darlings to collect Hollywood's top honour. (Rocky's win can be seen as a reaction to Vietnam and Watergate, with the Academy choosing an escapist fantasy rather than awarding a picture that dealt directly with America's post-war problems.) Bound for Glory was nominated for six Oscars, winning two, including one for Cinematography for the late Haskell Wexler. Director Hal Ashby was not honoured, and Bound For Glory remains the only film of his to be nominated for Best Picture.