OVP: Thank God It's Friday (1978)

Film: Thank God It's Friday (1978)
Stars: Jeff Goldblum, Debra Winger, Donna Summer, Ray Vitte, Andrea Howard, John Friedrich, Mark Lonow
Director: Robert Klane
Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Original Song-"Last Dance")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Similar to Sunday, we are getting to some weird nominees for the Oscars while I clean out the DVR on this quarantine, and perhaps there is no film weirder in terms of "Oscar-winning films" than Thank God It's Friday.  The film, from 1978 at the height of the disco movement, was eviscerated by critics at the time.  Leonard Maltin infamously said of the film "perhaps the worst film ever to have won some kind of Academy Award."  Because, it did, indeed, win the Oscar for Best Original Song, for the Donna Summer classic "Last Dance."  But what of the actual film that encompasses Summer's dance hit?  Let's take a look into whether Leonard Maltin was right.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film in a lot of ways mirrors pictures like Car Wash and Can't Stop the Music, and if we want to be technical, Nashville (though putting a movie as perfect in this sentence viscerally hurt my heart).  The movie is about a dance club, owned by Tony di Marco (Goldblum), and the people that are trying to get in and its culture.  We have Sue (Howard) and Dave (Lonow) out to a club after a disappointing anniversary dinner (he gave her a pepper grinder as a present), two girls trying to get into the club underage, another two girls trying to find a man, including Jennifer (played by, if you can believe it a very young, clearly pre-Oscar nominations Debra Winger in one of her earliest on-screen roles), and at the center of the club is Bobby Speed (Vitte), a DJ getting his big break that night, who is fighting off pleas from an aspiring singer named Nicole Sims (Summer) to let her have her own break with him in charge.

The film is, and I cannot stress this enough, boring.  It should be fun, in a campy way.  There's plenty of potential for camp here, but literally no one gets it, not even Goldblum, who has spent the past twenty years making a career of camp.  All of the guys save for Bobby and a sweetheart named Ken (Friedrich) are low-life scum who don't deserve any of the women in the picture, and sexism (and a solid dose of homophobia) run rampant over the film.  The movie alternates from one character to the next with little sense of who they are, and hope that jokes about breasts and date rape (I noticed at least a few allusions to it, including Dave pronouncing "since you're drunk I'll take advantage of you" to his wife), make you want to vomit.

That said, the soundtrack is fun, and I hate to say it-the Oscar might be earned (I have not yet seen The Magic of Lassie or Foul Play, so I cannot say for sure of that year's lineup who should have won).  Summer is awesome in what amounts to a cameo (even though she was used in virtually all of the promotions)-she can't act (many people compared her unfavorably to Diana Ross at the time, and they may have had a point), but she can sing and she rips "Last Dance" off of its hinges in what is the film's only high point.  If you want to relive that moment, maybe just buy her song on iTunes and avoid Thank God It's Friday-this movie is more akin to a Monday morning.