The Errant Æsthete

The 1979 Oscars were a showdown between two Vietnam masterpieces, Hal Ashby’s Coming Home and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter. In the shadow of another unpopular war, Peter Biskind of Vanity Fair revisits the firestorm.

In 1978 even though three years had passed since the panicky evacuation of U.S. personnel and some South Vietnamese friends from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon, the two pictures, which seemed to come down on opposite sides of the conflict, brought the war home with a vengeance, reopening old wounds and inflaming passions long thought spent. As Bruce Gilbert, associate producer of Coming Home, puts it, “The war may have been over, but the war over the interpretation of the war was just beginning.” Both movies vacuumed up Oscar nominations—The Deer Hunter nine, Coming Home eight—setting the stage for the war to be refought at, of all places, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, in Los Angeles. It was a battle that would echo the real one in its bitterness.