1972: Cabaret
1973: The Exorcist
1974: Murder on the Orient Express
1975: Jaws
The first “summer blockbuster”.
1976: Carrie
1977: Audrey Rose, a horrible movie in every possible way.
1978: The Deer Hunter
1979: Apocalypse Now
1980: Ordinary People
It won four Oscars: Best Picture, director (Robert Redford, his debut), Lead Actress (Mary Tyler Moore) and adapted screenplay.
I just watched it yesterday. Seemed a little, um, ordinary.
1981: On Golden Pond
Some movies were really daring for their time. A movie about the ordinary family life of someone who had been in a mental hospital and then psychotherapy was a new idea at the time. Movies about people in mental hospitals were movies from The Snake Pit (a great movie in its own time) to One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest (a movie that presented a 1950s facility existing in the 1970s, and on a side note was the first R-rated movie I ever saw).
My favorite “Oh my gawd it’s dated” film is Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. It’s almost as laughable as Reefer Madness now. I’ll bet if you showed it to an auditorium full of millennials, they’d laugh all the way through it.
SPOILER: It’s two hours of people having extreme angst doing soul-searching over a mixed-race relationship. Yeah.
1982: E.T.
a
1982: Gandhi
[E.T. was already used]
1983: WarGames
1984: Repo Man
1985: Police Story
1986: Children of a Lesser god
1987: Moonstruck
1988: A Fish Called Wanda
1989: Do The Right Thing
1990: Ghost