Miloš Forman was an incredibly famous director in the 1980s, when his Amadeus (1984) won eight Oscars out of 11 nominations, and Ragtime (1981) also received eight nominations, period pieces about music’s potential for social transformation, overcoming prejudices or conventions, and making a new world. Similarly, in the 1970s he made very well-regarded pro-counterculture and antiwar movies like Taking Off (1971) and the musical Hair (1979), and especially his adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), which won five Oscars out of nine nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Jack Nicholson.
The beginning of Forman’s astonishingly successful Hollywood career, however, was a scandal about his 1967 film, The Firemen’s Ball, his last in his native Czechoslovakia. The comedy was a very popular satire, its success somehow connected with the collapse of Communist ideological censorship and terror (de-Stalinization) and the social revolution of the 1960s, the replacement of the older WWII generation by younger, more radically egalitarian 1968-ers. Forman also got an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film and an invitation to compete in Cannes (but the festival was shut down by radicals like Godard in support of the May 1968 riots).
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