This is one of those weirder stories. He SHOULD have won for Dog Day AFternoon but he lost to Jack Nicholson for One Flew oVER the cuckoo's Nest. The two were nominated against each other the previous year and Nicholson was the overwhelming favorite but in a huge upset Art Carney won out primarily due to sentimental for his work on Harry and Tonto. Its a very good performance to be sure, but when you compare to the other performances in the Best Actor category that year - (Dustin Hoffman was also nominated for his seering work in Lenny) - Carney's isn't in the same ballpark. Pacino and Nicholson went head to head four times in their careers - three times in the 1970s, again in 1992 - and it's interesting that on three of those occasions, both men were defeated to veteran actors. (Carney in 1974, Jack Lemmon for Save the Tiger in 1973, Gene Hackman for Unforgiven in 1993. Only in Hackman's case would I say that the superior choice was rewarded. Ah, the Academy)

De Palma was part of the group fo extraordinary directors who came up together in the 1970s and alone among them not only did he never get the credit he deserved, much of his career he was considered a sexist or guilty of glorifying violence by so many of the 'old guard'. I've never thought that fair and for the record, Roger Ebert considered him the equal of Coppola, Scorsese and Spelberg. I vividly remember a rave he gave for one of his later films Femme Fatale, which in its own way is a minor masterpiece. I also think that Snake Eyes, while s mess, hsd never been the disaster so many thought it was. But what can you say about a man who had such a style of filmmaking that one of his own movies was famously advertised this way. De Mentive. De Ranged. De Ceptive. De Palma. (Raising Cain, not one of his better films.)