AWARDS AND HONORS

The Way We Were was nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Actress (Barbra Streisand), Best Original Score, Best Original Song ("The Way We Were"), Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography and Best Costume Design. It won in two categories: Best Original Song and Best Original Score.

The film received two Golden Globe nominations for Best Motion Picture Actress in a Drama (Barbra Streisand) and Best Original Song. It won in the latter category.

Barbra Streisand was nominated for a BAFTA Award as Best Actress.

The motion picture soundtrack for The Way We Were won a Grammy Award for being the Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture.

"The Way We Were" won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year.

The National Board of Review named The Way We Were as one of the Top Ten Films of 1973.

Screenwriter Arthur Laurents was nominated for a Writers Guild of America (WGA) Award for Best Drama Written Directly for the Screen.

In 2002 the American Film Institute ranked The Way We Were number 6 on its list of the 100 Greatest Love Stories of all Time, "100 Years...100 Passions."

In 2004 the American Film Institute ranked the title theme song to The Way We Were number 8 on its list of the top 100 Movie Songs of All Time, "100 Years...100 Songs."

Barbra Streisand's single of "The Way We Were" went to number one on the Billboard Top 100 chart as well as the Adult Contemporary Chart.

THE CRITIC'S CORNER - THE WAY WE WERE

"The film version of Arthur Laurents' book is a distended, talky, redundant and moody melodrama, combining young love, relentless 1930s and 1940s nostalgia, and spiced artificiality with Hollywood Red-hunt pellets. The major positive achievement is Barbra Streisand's superior dramatic versatility, but Robert Redford has too little to work with in the script...The overemphasis on Streisand makes the film just another one of those Streisand vehicles where no other elements ever get a chance. Redford's role is another instance of wasting his talent. Supporting players are virtual cameos." -- Variety

"Now comes The Way We Were, which is essentially just a love story, and not sturdy enough to carry the burden of both radical politics and a bittersweet ending...It's easy to forgive the movie a lot because of Streisand. She's fantastic. She's the brightest, quickest female actress in movies today, inhabiting her characters with a fierce energy and yet able to be touchingly vulnerable...The Redford character perhaps in reaction to the inevitable Streisand performance, is passive and without edges. The primary purpose of the character is to provide someone into whose life Streisand can enter and then leave. That's sort of thankless, but Redford handles it well." -- Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times

"It flows like velvet. That's why the movie is so likable. We lost a lot of innocence in the dark movie palace of our youth. The Way We Were reclaims it for us. Years from now, in some futuristic movie museum, it just might be one of the movies we'll be looking at and remembering with fondness." -- Rex Reed

"First-class love story." -- Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video Guide

"Barbra Streisand does something quite remarkable in The Way We Were. She acts." -- The New York Daily News

"I would trade many an art-film classic for the final exchange between Redford and Streisand in front of the Plaza." -- Molly Haskell, The Village Voice

"Like their relationship, the film works best when they are alone. But with the script glossing whole areas of confrontation (from the communist '30s to the McCarthy witch-hunts), it often passes into the haze of a nostalgic fashion parade. Although Streisand's liberated Jewish lady is implausible, and emphasizes the period setting as just so much dressing, Redford's Fitzgerald-type character, whose easy success carries the seeds of his possible destruction, is an intriguing trailer for his later Great Gatsby. It's a performance that brings more weight to the film than it deserves, often hinting at depths that are finally skated over." -- TimeOut Movie Guide. Compiled by Andrea Passafiume