in the San Juan Islands in Washington state. He and Rayette go on a road trip to Washington, picking up two hippie hitch-hikers along the way and in the film's most notorious highlight, Bobby unsuccessfully battles with a waitress in a diner for an omelet with wheat toast. The scene ends with a violent sweeping of Bobby's arm clearing the table. "Do you see this sign!?" he blurts. True, it is derivitive of Brando's close to precise action in A Streetcar named Desire but Bobby may have been channeling, as a trope, someone's behavior he'd seen in the movies. (To cool a possible dim view of Rafelson's suggested plagiarism, in 1996 in Blood and Wine a cinematic debriefing occurs where Nicholson accompanied by Michael Caine, in seeking a clear table for them both in a cafeteria, effects it by picking up a tray containing used utensils from one table and drops it to the floor in nonchalant simplicity.) Rafelson described Bobby as "a guy who is out of touch with his emotions." The film was a financial hit, earning $18 million at the box office, was widely admired by the critics, and was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor (Nicholson), Best Supporting Actress (Black) and Best Original Screenplay. As a producer and co-writer of the film, Rafelson was nominated for two Oscars. It also received the New York Film Critics Award for Best Director and for Best Film of 1970. Film critic David Robinson called Rafelson "a new director who uses film with the subtlety of a novelist, but without losing any of the concentration and economy potential in the cinema's unique mixture of image and sound." In his original 1970 review in the Chicago Sun-Times, film critic Roger Ebert called Five Easy Pieces "a masterpiece of heartbreaking intensity," adding, "The movie is joyously alive to the road life of its hero. . . . Robert Eroica Dupea is one of the most unforgettable characters in American movies." And, in his "Great Movies" essay on the film, Ebert reflected on seeing the impact of having seen it for the first time: "We'd had a revelation. This was the direction American movies should take: Into idiosyncratic characters, into dialogue with an ear for the vulgar and the literate, into a plot free to surprise us about the characters, into an existential ending not required to be happy." Ebert