No, Breaker Morant wasn’t nominated. Its only nomination was for Adapted Screenplay (John Hardy, David Stevens and Bruce Beresford) but it lost to Ordinary People.
Here’s one for you:
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How many people can remember what “Ordinary People” was about?
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Going back five years to the 1975 Best Picture, how many people can remember what “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” was about?
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What does that tell you?
The nominated pictures were:
Ordinary People (won)
Raging Bull
Coal Miner’s Daughter
The Elephant Man
Tess
Breaker Morant was awesome, but Raging Bull is one of the greatest movies ever made; I would argue, in fact, that except for possibly Citizen Kane, Raging Bull is the BEST movie to not win the Oscar. Incidentally, “Tess” is based on “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” and is probably the best ever film adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s work.
Gallipoli was terrific, too, but my choice that year would have been Raiders of the Lost Ark. The winner was Chariots of Fire (yawn.)
After I posted my list of 1980 winners, I went back and looked at the 1970’s winners, and I thought they actually did a good job in that decade. I wonder what happened.