The best, most memorable movie rarely wins this sham of a ceremony, it’s a shame so much emphasis is put on Oscar wins, I’m sure Alfred Hitchcock would agree!

Kramer vs. Kramer is a solid enough winner and Apocalypse Now was never going to win. Kramer is not a great movie by any means, but it has sensational acting and some perceptive writing to lift it out of the 'TV movie' trough.

Truthfully, though, I prefer Breaking Away (among nominated films) and Manhattan (among the shockingly overlooked contenders) to both of them.

The Oscars have made many 'mistakes' and it's impossible to narrow down to the worst. A Beautiful Mind or Crash come to mind among recent examples, but many earlier winners are just as bad. The Greatest Show on Earth and Around the World in 80 Days are practically unwatchable.

I wonder how recent Oscar contenders and winners will be reevaluated...

From recent years i'm certain Spotlight and possibly Birdman will be forgotten as well... Or remembered as overrated...

But I think The Wolf of Wall Street won't be forgotten and will be reassessed favourably... Perhaps Interstellar as well, although sci-fi is a tough genre...

I wonder what other Oscar winners and contenders from recent years will be reassessed by movie fans and the passage of time...

Awards are kind of like box office - the greatest movies don't always win, and they certainly don't always do well at the box office; meanwhile, movies that aren't really all that good win awards as well as pull in big box office.

One other way of looking at it is: if I were the sole judge at the Oscars, you might not agree with the movies I would have declared as winners. But then, if you were the sole judge, the movies you might have declared winners might not jive with what I like. That's somewhat of a predicament the judges find themselves in. So, what we left with?

At the end of the day, awards are awarded based on...whatever the judges are smoking; and traditional "box office" (theatrical release ticket sales) is dying off anyway. Beyond all of this, each viewer is free to decide for ourselves - awards and box office be damned - what we like and don't like...and then argue about it here :-)

That said, back in 1979, Kramer vs. Kramer was one of those movies "everyone was talking about". At the same time, the Vietnam War was troublous to American's self-image and, having ended just a few years before in 1975, it was still too soon, too fresh, for any constructive clearing house on how to understand it. Consider The Deer Hunter, released a year before in 1978 - again, didn't do well at the box office and, only these years later, is recognized as a good depiction of the trauma of the Vietnam War vet. And that'd be it for a while - the Platoons and Full Metal Jackets and Casualties of War and Hamburger Hills of the world were still over half a decade away. Yes, there was First Blood, but it was styled much less an artsy critique of the war itself and more of an action vehicle (most unfortunately, because there is some good material there).

All in all, 1979 had several seminal films, so it's not hard to see Apocalypse Now lost in the shuffle.

This is the third oscar winning film on the bounce I've watched that I'd give 6/10. One each from the 70s, 80s and 10s. Seems they've a half century of routinely making pretty unusual choices. I've never watched a film just because it won an oscar, and I won't be starting any time soon.

This was a decent enough topic for a film, the struggles of a single-dad, but it just didn't really grab me for some reason, despite decent performances from the leads.