The Elephant Man (film) Out" (where it placed 19th) and "Paste" (56th). The film also received five votes in the 2012 "Sight & Sound" polls. "The Elephant Man" was nominated for eight Academy Awards, tying with "Raging Bull" at the 53rd Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Actor in a Leading Role (John Hurt), Art Direction-Set Decoration (Stuart Craig, Robert Cartwright, Hugh Scaife), Best Costume Design, Best Director, Best Film Editing, Music: Original Score, and Writing: Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. However, the film did not win any. People in the industry were appalled that the movie was not going to be honored
The Elephant Man (film) favorable. Roger Ebert gave it 2/4 stars, writing: "I kept asking myself what the film was really trying to say about the human condition as reflected by John Merrick, and I kept drawing blanks." In the book "The Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture", Nadja Durbach describes the work as “much more mawkish and moralising than one would expect from the leading postmodern surrealist filmmaker” and “unashamedly sentimental”. She blamed this mawkishness on the use of Treves’s memoirs as source material. "The Elephant Man" has since been ranked among the best films of the 1980s in "Time