Ellen Burstyn won a Best Actress Academy Award for her performance in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. Other Oscar® nominations went to Diane Ladd (Best Supporting Actress) and Robert Getchell (Best Writing, Original Screenplay).

The British Academy (BAFTA) gave the movie awards for Best Film, Actress (Burstyn), Supporting Actress (Ladd), and Screenplay (Getchell). It was also nominated for Best Director (Martin Scorsese), Supporting Actress (Lelia Goldoni), and Most Promising Newcomer (Alfred Lutter III).

Martin Scorsese was nominated for a Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Burstyn and Ladd received Golden Globe nominations for, respectively, Best Actress-Drama and Supporting Actress.

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore was included in the National Board of Review's list of the Top Ten films of the year.

Robert Getchell received a Writers Guild of America nomination for Best Drama Written Directly for the Screen.

The Critics Corner: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

"One of the most perceptive, funny, occasionally painful portraits of an American woman I've seen. ... The movie's filled with brilliantly done individual scenes." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, December 1, 1974

"Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore takes a group of wellcast film players and largely wastes them on a smaller-than-life film--one of those 'little people' dramas that make one despise little people. ... The last half of the film is, indeed, a picture; but as a whole it's a distended bore." -- Variety, 1974

"One of the rare films that genuinely deserve to be called controversial. I think people will really fight about it. It's the story of a woman who has a second chance thrust on her; she knows enough not to make the same mistake again, but she isn't sure of much else. Neither is the movie. Alice is thoroughly enjoyable: funny, absorbing, intelligent even when you don't believe in what's going on--when the issues it raises get all fouled up." - Pauline Kael, The New Yorker, January 13, 1975

"Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore seems especially remarkable because it was directed by the man who first smashed into our consciousness with an entirely different kind of movie, Mean Streets [1973], a male-dominated melodrama about life in New York's Little Italy. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is an American comedy of the sort of vitality that dazzles European film critics and we take for granted. It's full of attachments and associations to very particular times and places, even in the various regional accents of its characters. It's beautifully written (by Robert Getchell) and acted, but it's not especially neatly tailored. ... At the center of the movie and giving it a visible sensibility is Miss Burstyn, one of the few actresses at work today (another is Glenda Jackson) who is able to seem appealing, tough, intelligent, funny, and bereft, all at approximately the same moment." - Vincent Canby, New York Times, January 30, 1975

"Even at the comparatively pleasant moments of Alice, Scorsese's insecurity as a director works to cripple the narrative. He seems so utterly enamored of Ellen Burstyn (or perhaps intimidated by doing a 'woman's story') that he allows the leading lady to do anything she wants--pout, mug, mutter, soliloquize, reminisce--and for as long as she wants. Burstyn takes full advantage, putting her whole repertoire of raw emotions on proud display. Yet without properly controlled direction (the kind Cukor gave Hepburn, for example), this woman's intuition often proves completely wrong. Her Alice is strictly a non-character--floating, undefined, inconsistent--veering this way and that, depending on Burstyn's whims in any particular scene." - Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary, Jump Cut, No. 7, 1975

"The filmmakers seem to think that they actually made a feminist film. They may have started out to do so. But Alice is more regressively chauvinist than a Russ Meyer softcore B simply because it pretends to be something it's not. The preoccupations that Scorsese imposes on it don't help much either. The quotes from old films and old music helped greatly to develop the atmosphere of Mean Streets. They belonged there. They don't belong here, unless the suggestion is meant that this is really a forties woman's movie which will teach the old lesson that you're nothing without a man. It's Mildred Pierce [1945] all over again, except that Mildred actually owned the restaurant." - James Monaco, American Film Now (Oxford University Press, 1979)

"Burstyn is excellent as the eponymous heroine.... Her encounters, and those of her precociously witty 12-year old son, are observed with great generosity and a raw realism, while Scorsese typically makes wonderful use of music to underline character and situation. Bitter-sweet and very charming." - Geoff Andrew, Time Out, 2000

by Rob Nixon