Annie Hall won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1977, beating Star Wars, and that is probably the last thing that needs to be said about the Oscars as an indicator of anything. Not because Annie Hall didn’t deserve to win. It did, absolutely. But because the reasons the Academy gave it the prize are almost certainly the wrong reasons. They rewarded it for being sophisticated, New York, intellectual, for looking like a serious film about adult feelings. All of this is true and all of it is beside the point. What makes Annie Hall the best romantic comedy ever filmed is not its sophistication. It is its honesty. And honesty, in film as in life, rarely wins prizes for the right reasons.
The film tells a simple story. Alvy Singer, a neurotic New York comedian, meets Annie Hall, a small-town girl from the Midwest who wants to be a singer. They fall in love, move in together, fight, break up, try to get back together, fail. That’s it. No twist, no revelation, no moment where one of them changes and saves the relationship. They love each other and they don’t understand each other, and both things are equally true at the same time.
What Allen did with that premise, with materials that in other hands would have produced a lesser film or a conventional one, changed the rules of the genre for good. And changed them in a particular way: he didn’t improve them. He ruined them. After Annie Hall you can no longer make an honest romantic comedy without it looking like an imitation, and you can no longer make a conventional romantic comedy without it looking like a lie.
What It Doesn’t Do
To understand what Annie Hall does, you have to start with what it doesn’t do, because what it doesn’t do is what every other romantic comedy did before and went on doing after.
It has no redemptive third act. In the classic romantic comedy, the structure is: they meet, they fall in love, a conflict arises, the conflict is resolved, they end up together. It is the structure of Shakespeare’s comedies, the structure of the screwball comedies of the thirties and forties, the structure of every Nora Ephron film and every Richard Curtis film. The conflict exists to be overcome. Love triumphs. The audience leaves the cinema feeling good.
Annie Hall has the conflict but not the resolution. Alvy and Annie break up and don’t get back together. There is no scene at the airport, no running through the rain, no final declaration that fixes everything. There is a scene where they bump into each other on the street years later, have lunch, laugh, say goodbye. And that’s that. Life goes on. The people who loved each other go on existing separately, in the same city, and it is neither tragic nor happy. It is what it is.
It assigns no blame. In most films about failed relationships, there is someone at fault. Someone cheated, someone lied, someone wasn’t good enough. The audience needs to know who was right in order to process the story. Allen withholds that satisfaction. Alvy is neurotic, jealous, controlling, unable to let Annie grow without feeling threatened. Annie is insecure, scattered, and eventually discovers there is a world beyond Alvy and that she’s more interested in it. Both are right. Both are wrong. The relationship doesn’t fail because someone did something bad. It fails because people change at different speeds and in different directions, and love is not enough to compensate for that. Which is, if you think about it coldly, the reason most real-life relationships fail.
It offers no moral. This is the strangest part. Films, even good ones, even those that consider themselves complex, tend to close with something resembling a lesson. The protagonist learned something. The audience takes something away. There is a meaning. Annie Hall ends with a joke. Alvy tells the story of a man who goes to a psychiatrist and says his brother is crazy, thinks he’s a chicken. The psychiatrist asks why he doesn’t have him committed. The man says he would, but he needs the eggs.
And Alvy says that’s how he feels about relationships: irrational, absurd, impossible, but we keep looking for them because we need the eggs.
It is the most honest and most devastating conclusion the cinema has ever produced about love. It does not say love is worth it. It does not say love is beautiful. It says love is a kind of madness we cannot stop committing because we are creatures who need the madness in order to function. A conclusion without comfort and without cynicism, which is a combination that is nearly impossible to pull off.
Allen in ’77
You have to place the film in its moment to understand why it was possible. 1977. New Hollywood was at its peak. Coppola had made The Godfather and The Conversation. Scorsese had just made Taxi Driver. Altman had made Nashville. There was a window, a brief one, when Hollywood allowed directors with a personal vision to make films that did not follow the rules of industrial entertainment. Annie Hall came through that window.
Allen had been making pure comedies, films like Bananas, Sleeper, Love and Death, which were essentially joke-delivery systems with minimal plot. They were funny, some of them very funny, but they were comedies in the most straightforward sense. With Annie Hall he did something different. He didn’t stop being funny, the film contains some of the best gags of his career, but he made the funny serve something larger. He used comedy as a tool to say serious things about relationships, identity, New York, the gap between what we want and what we can have.
The film was originally called Anhedonia, the psychiatric term for the inability to feel pleasure. Allen shot something enormous, sprawling, full of digressions, as much a film about a relationship as a film about the inside of Alvy Singer’s head, his obsessions, his fears, his relationship with death. The editor Ralph Rosenblum cut it down until he found the love story inside all that material, and what remained is the film we know. But traces of the original version are everywhere: the fourth-wall breaks, the subtitles showing what the characters really think while they say something else, the cinema-queue scene where Alvy produces Marshall McLuhan to win an argument, the animation. In another film these would be tricks. In Annie Hall they are the texture of a mind that cannot stop analysing itself even when it is in love.
Diane Keaton
We need to talk about Diane Keaton, because without her the film doesn’t work.
The character of Annie Hall could easily have been a satellite of Alvy, an object onto which the protagonist projects his neuroses. That is what happens in many of Allen’s later films, where women exist as functions of the man, as mirrors or as problems to be solved. Annie is not that. Annie is a complete character with her own arc, her own transformation, her own autonomy. And that is Keaton’s achievement as much as Allen’s.
Keaton does something very difficult here: she plays a woman discovering herself in real time. Annie at the start is awkward, unsure, says “la dee da” when she doesn’t know what to say, laughs nervously, apologises for everything. Alvy finds her charming, and so does the audience, because Keaton’s awkwardness is genuinely magnetic. But as the film goes on, Annie changes. She becomes more confident. She starts having her own opinions about things, opinions that don’t line up with Alvy’s. She discovers she can sing. Discovers she’s interested in Los Angeles, which Alvy despises. Discovers, in the end, that she doesn’t need Alvy to be who she is. And that is what destroys the relationship: not an external conflict but Annie’s internal growth, which carries her to a place where Alvy cannot follow.
The irony is perfect and it is cruel. Alvy, who considers himself a progressive intellectual, who goes to a psychoanalyst, who reads Kierkegaard, who thinks himself sophisticated, cannot handle the fact that the woman he shaped, the one he gave books to and sent to therapy, has become someone who no longer needs him. It is the Pygmalion paradox: you create your ideal partner and your ideal partner discovers she can exist without you.
Keaton won the Oscar for this role, and she deserved it. What she did is subtle in a way that doesn’t call attention to itself: there are no screaming scenes, no dramatic monologues, no moment where Annie confronts Alvy and tells him her truths. The change is gradual, organic, nearly imperceptible. It is the way people actually change, not through sudden revelations but through a slow accumulation of small differences that one day become an unbridgeable distance.
Why It Would Be Impossible Today
There is a question that interests me more than the analysis of the film itself: could Annie Hall be made today?
I don’t think so, and not only for the obvious reasons having to do with Allen and his personal life, which everyone processes as they see fit. I don’t think so for reasons that have to do with what contemporary culture demands of art.
Annie Hall doesn’t take sides. It doesn’t say who is right. It doesn’t punish anyone for their mistakes. It offers no lesson on how to be a better person or have better relationships. It is a film that observes and presents, and trusts that the viewer is adult enough to draw their own conclusions. In 2026, that is almost unthinkable.
Contemporary culture needs art to take a position. It needs to know whether Alvy is toxic. It needs to know whether Annie is a victim. It needs a clear moral reading that tells the audience how to feel. Current cinema, even supposedly independent cinema, operates under constant pressure of moral legibility: characters must be classifiable as good or bad, situations must have a correct interpretation, films must make clear which side they are on.
Annie Hall is on no one’s side. Alvy is brilliant and unbearable. Annie is charming and exasperating. The relationship is beautiful and dysfunctional. Allen holds all these contradictions in the air at once, without resolving any of them, and that is the source of the film’s honesty. Resolving them would have been more comfortable for the audience but it would have been a lie, because real relationships don’t resolve. They are lived.
There is another reason Annie Hall would be impossible today, and it is more prosaic. The romantic comedy as a genre is dead, or at least in terminal condition. The ones that get made are streaming products designed by algorithm, with interchangeable actors and plots that follow a template unchanged since the nineties. The window that allowed Annie Hall, that brief confluence of creative freedom and individual talent, has closed. Hollywood today would not make a romantic comedy where the couple doesn’t end up together, where there is no villain, where the conflict is internal and subtle, where the conclusion is a joke about eggs. It isn’t profitable. It isn’t algorithm-friendly. It can’t be summarised in a one-line pitch.
The Final Joke
I come back to the joke because the joke is the film.
A man goes to a psychiatrist and says his brother thinks he’s a chicken. The psychiatrist says have him committed. The man says he would, but he needs the eggs.
It is a joke about irrationality. About knowing something doesn’t work and doing it anyway because the alternative, pure rationality, a life without the madness of love, is worse. It is the most elegant and saddest defence of love I know, because it doesn’t defend love for what it gives but for what we are without it: rational, lucid, alone.
Allen placed that joke at the end of the film as if it were a comic punchline, but it is a philosophical declaration. It says love makes no sense. It says we know this. It says we don’t care. And it says that this, the decision to keep searching for something we know won’t work, is not stupidity but the most human thing we do.
After Annie Hall, every romantic comedy that promises a happy ending is, in a sense, a white lie. It can be a well-made lie, it can be charming, it can be exactly what the audience needs on a Friday night. But it is a lie. And we all know it. Because Allen, in 1977, told the truth, and the truth, once told, cannot be untold. It can only be ignored. And you still need the eggs.