Jack Nicholson's R.P. McMurphy. The film that swept all five major Oscars — only the second in history to do so.
Oregon, early 1960s. Randle Patrick McMurphy, a small-time criminal with multiple convictions, has himself committed to a state mental hospital to avoid serving his sentence at the work farm. He arrives at the ward run by Nurse Mildred Ratched, a quietly punitive disciplinarian whose authority over the long-term patients is unquestioned. McMurphy's energy and refusal to defer disrupt the ward's equilibrium across roughly six weeks.
The film tracks McMurphy's progressive collisions with Ratched. He organises an unauthorised fishing trip. He arranges a card game and a basketball game. He bribes a night guard to bring in two women and a bottle of vodka for a Christmas party. By the film's end, McMurphy has been lobotomised in response to a final violent confrontation; Chief Bromden, the silent Indigenous patient McMurphy has befriended, smothers him with a pillow and escapes through the window.
Cuckoo's Nest won all five major Academy Awards in 1976 — Best Picture, Best Director (Forman), Best Actor (Nicholson), Best Actress (Fletcher), and Best Adapted Screenplay. Only two films in Academy history have won the Big Five: It Happened One Night (1934) and Cuckoo's Nest (1975). Silence of the Lambs would later become the third (1991).
The sweep was, in 1976, a structural statement by the Academy. Forman was a Czech émigré who had escaped the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague; Cuckoo's Nest was his second American film. The Academy was honouring an Eastern European filmmaker working in English on an explicitly anti-authoritarian American novel. The decision aligned with the broader New Hollywood political shift the late-1960s and early-1970s Academies had been part of.
Jack Nicholson had been nominated for Best Actor four times before Cuckoo's Nest — for Easy Rider (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970), The Last Detail (1973), and Chinatown (1974) — and had not won. McMurphy is the role that finally landed the Oscar. The performance is, by general critical consensus, among the three or four greatest American film performances of the 1970s.
Louise Fletcher had been a journeyman television actress for fifteen years. Cuckoo's Nest is the film that made her career. Nurse Ratched is one of the most-imitated American film villains of the post-war period. The performance works because Fletcher refuses to play Ratched as openly cruel — she plays her as a competent professional whose institutional authority is, from her own framing, in the patients' interest. The horror is in the framing, not in the performance's villainy.
The film's most-quoted scene is the World Series broadcast that Nurse Ratched refuses to allow the patients to watch. McMurphy, blocked from the television, sits in front of the dark screen and improvises a baseball-broadcast play-by-play to a fictional game. The other patients gather behind him. The scene runs roughly three minutes.
What the scene establishes — and what the rest of the film progressively develops — is that McMurphy's effect on the ward is contagious. The patients begin to imagine, briefly, that they are watching a real game; they cheer; they engage. The film's argument is that the institution has, over years, taught the patients to suppress exactly this kind of imaginative engagement, and that McMurphy's gift is that he can switch it back on.