The Classics Shelf: The 1994 Academy Awards, Part 3 - The Second Hour: I'm Sure They're Pissed Off About Something

The 1994 Oscars: Part 1 | Part 2 – The First Hour

More envelope-free presentations: Sally Field introduced the clip to “my boy Forrest” in her character’s accent, while Matt Dillon looked terrified (but still hot) as he welcomed Patty Smythe to the stage to sing “Look What Love Has Done” from the film Junior. When I watched the telecast that night with my two best friends, this was the point that one turned to me and said, “Do you get the feeling that they just didn’t want to nominate five Lion King songs?” (They’re both still my two best friends, by the way). Smythe sang off-key throughout the whole number, possibly her monitors weren’t working properly.

Then Gregory Peck came out to talk about Quiz Show and, in his light manner, ended with “Here…is a scene.” Letterman presented his best skit, a montage of actors auditioning for his cameo in the Chris Elliott bomb Cabin Boy, the best of them Paul Newman. He followed it with an underwhelming Top 10 list of “Signs Your Film Won’t Win an Oscar.” None of them was funny but the Hoop Dreams reference was appreciated. He also initiated a series of Janet Reno jokes before Angela Bassett came out to introduce the first two of three nominated songs from The Lion King, with David Alan Grier filling in for Nathan Lane as Timon. Singers in this number also had acoustic issues.

The second hour managed eight categories as well as presentations that are no longer on the main show: two honorary awards and a clip from the earlier Sci-Tech awards. The latter was introduced by Jamie Lee Curtis doing a cute entrance hanging from a helicopter, seeming like she’s both having a great time and remembering one. (She asked the audience to celebrate “all the men, and not ONE woman” who were honoured.) Jack Nicholson presented an honorary Oscar to the great Michelangelo Antonioni, whose inability to speak following a stroke in 1985 meant that his wife, introduced solely as “Mrs. Antonioni,” gave his speech for him (beautifully) after a gorgeous montage. Quincy Jones received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from Oprah Winfrey, who would be back on the Oscar stage to memorialize his passing thirty years later.

Anna Paquin returned from her surprise Oscar victory to present Best Supporting Actor (we wonder how many of the nominees she was allowed to watch) to Martin Landau for Ed Wood, who pointed out that his film bombed before he is cut off by the orchestra. What was likely a teleprompter error prevented Paul Newman from naming four of the five nominees for Best Cinematography, but John Toll, who won for Zwick’s Legends of the Fall, named them in his speech. Best Live-Action Short wasn’t a moment that anyone’s excited about even if three of the nominees are famous actors (Peter Capaldi, Sean Astin, JoBeth Williams), but Tim Allen, at the peak of his popularity, ended up inadvertently being part of Oscar history when he announced the winner to be the fifth-ever tie at that point, with Capaldi’s Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life sharing the prize with Peggy Rajski and Randy Stone’s Trevor. The latter was the film that got the Trevor Project underway, and the winners’ speech was our first hint that Jodie Foster, who co-produced, might someday come out of the closet.

Two years after they were banned from the show for going off script to plead for the rights of HIV-positive Haitian refugees, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins were allowed back on the stage. “I’m sure they’re pissed off about something!” said Letterman, but they stuck to the business at hand, making a light joke before giving Best Art Direction to the legendary James Bond production designer Ken Adam for The Madness of King George (it’s his second after Barry Lyndon in 1975). It’s an indication that the night would go on forever, because if keeping Susan Sarandon from making a political speech doesn’t make things fly by, nothing will.

Speaking of brief popularity, Steven Seagal presented the Visual Effects Oscar to Forrest Gump, one of the two films of the three nominees in that category to be dominated by CGI work. John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson came out to the band playing an instrumental version of “Jungle Boogie” to present the documentary prizes and deliver banter that referenced their famous “Royale with Cheese” scene from Pulp Fiction. Charles Guggenheim, who was nominated in both the Feature and Short categories, won the latter (his fourth!) and gave a speech about civil rights that had the producers awkwardly cut to a shot of Laurence Fishburne and John Singleton in the audience. Guggenheim’s son Davis would later win for An Inconvenient Truth.

Not everyone loved Forrest Gump, it turns out, as Ellen Barkin presented Best Sound with the old adage about no one hearing a tree falling in the woods and then added her own post-script: “If a tree falls on Forrest Gump,” she said, “will he still keep talking?” The impatience with which she delivered it still has me wondering if she was improvising or if Bruce Vilanch actually wrote that.

Films featured during this hour:

89mm od Europy (89mm from Europe)

Dir. Marcel Lozinski

This subtle, beautifully shot documentary takes eleven minutes to show, with very few words, the effects of the end of the Cold War: while European railroads were 1435 mm in width, those of the former USSR were 1524 mm, a difference of 89 mm that needs to be adjusted on the wheels of Russian trains. Haunting and hypnotic.

Nomination: Best Documentary Short

A Great Day in Harlem

Dir. Jean Bach

This warmhearted documentary goes back to a momentous day in music history when some of the greatest jazz artists of all time were gathered together for a now-famous photograph. The late Art Kane was responsible for assembling the who’s-who of musical greats in 1958, to have their picture snapped in front of a brownstone in Harlem for a piece he’d conceived for Esquire magazine. In this valentine chronicle to the music that has made such an indelible contribution to the sounds of the century, surviving subjects of the photo as well as family and friends share fond reminiscences of that day and the events leading up to it. Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, and Count Basie are just some of the famous names you’ll see, complemented beautifully by Quincy Jones’s narration.

Nomination: Best Documentary Feature

A Time for Justice

Dir. Charles Guggenheim

Guggenheim was nominated in both documentary categories but took the prize for this galvanizing short, one that sums up the key turns in the American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. The murder of Emmett Till, the Montgomery bus boycott, the integration of a school in Little Rock, Arkansas (which is one of the historic moments referend in Forrest Gump), Freedom Riders, the bombing of the Birmingham 16th Street Baptist Church, Mississippi voter registration, the three activists killed in Mississippi, the march from Selma to Montgomery and the climax of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are detailed through some file footage but mostly photographs overlaid with narration by those who were there. Most of the events it describes have been expanded upon in a number of popular feature films and documentaries, but in just forty minutes, this one makes for a terrific starting point for anyone looking to learn about America’s ongoing struggle for equality.

Winner: Best Documentary Short

Blues Highway

Dir. Vince DiPersio, Bill Guttentag

Guttentag and DiPersio focus their lens on the blues music that comes out of Mississippi earlier in the twentieth century and how the artform is intertwined with the experiences of black Americans from the 1930s onward. The subject is similar to A Time For Justice but this is a cultural documentary instead of a historic one, featuring rich footage of musical performances while talking heads describe horrifying events in surprisingly contained terms: “It wasn’t so good in my day,” states musician Eddie Burks, right before telling a story about how his brother was murdered for talking to a white girl. The mass migration from the Jim Crow South sees many go in search of the opportunities for work in the north during and after the war, namely Chicago in this film, and with it come musical traditions that flourish in the city’s neighbourhoods. Thoughtful, efficient and informative.

Nomination: Best Documentary Short

Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter

Dir. Deborah Hoffman

The documentary nominees in the nineties look totally different from those that came after the likes of Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock made it a form of filmmaking that could ignite the box office without a rock star as a subject. Many of the films cited by the Academy during this decade look a lot like this touching personal testimonial by Deborah Hoffmann about the experience of dealing with her mother’s decreasing health. Under an hour in length and shot on the grainy video of the era, it features Hoffmann narrating the various ways that her once highly intelligent (and intellectually snobby, according to her) mother has succumbed to the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease, playing her repetitive phone messages and filming her talking to her daughter as if she were a stranger. Frances Reid, Hoffmann’s partner in filmmaking and in life, holds the camera on the two subjects and makes a brief appearance as well, revealing the effect that becoming ill has had on Doris’s feelings about her daughter’s being in a relationship with a woman. It’s a poignant, powerful tale that will be a great comfort to anyone who has had cognitive illness in their family. Hoffmann and Reid would later be nominated again for their masterful documentary about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, Long Night’s Journey Into Day.

Nomination: Best Documentary Feature

D-Day Remembered

Dir. Charles Guggenheim

The difference between Guggenheim’s Oscar-winning short and this feature nominee is only about fifteen minutes, and the technique is more or less the same. Marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Allied forces landing on the beaches of Normandy and permanently turning the tide of the Second World War, it features a rich wealth of film footage over which disembodied voices give context, both about the political history as well as the personal experiences of living through it. Guggenheim is invaluable as a resource for learning about major historical events in a manner that is easy to digest, and this could still be used as a terrific resource for history students (though narrator David McCullough’s idea of the pronunciation of “Allied” does raise an eyebrow).

Nomination: Best Documentary Feature

Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life

Dir. Peter Capaldi

Peter Capaldi, best known as one of the actors who played Doctor Who as well as for film roles like Dangerous Liaisons and In the Loop, directs a tribute to German expressionism with style, precision and just the right flavour of bent humour, and it’s a shame that his film is currently so hard to find except for very poor transfers on YouTube. Richard E. Grant is marvellous as Franz Kafka, who spends Christmas struggling to complete the right first sentence of his Metamorphosis but, while cycling through the decision of what transformation to have his main character find himself in, is constantly interrupted by neighbours and visitors (among them a pre-Downton Abbey Phyllis Logan). The imagery is straight out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and it’s little more than a cute little piece of cheekiness, but is created with enough style and flair to warrant its finding its way to the Oscars for recognition.

Winner: Best Live-Action Short (tie)

Freedom on My Mind

Dir. Connie Field, Marilyn Mulford

During the harshest years of America’s Jim Crow laws, there was no more frightening a state to live in than Mississippi, and the fight for equal rights was remarkably difficult. As documented here, the very first Black citizen in the state to register to vote was shot and killed at the ballot box by a member of the Mississippi House of Representatives (who was also the victim’s friend since childhood, and who was acquitted on the grounds of self-defence). This is just the beginning of a long journey that leads towards the Freedom Summer of 1964, when university students from around the country come to the state to register disenfranchised voters and lead them to the Democratic national convention as their own separate party. Their victories, losses, speeches and protests are still being felt today after so many years, and interviews with countless participants are heartbreaking, inspirational and fascinating in this superb documentary, not to mention a wealth of stock footage from the time that still resonates with viewers today (the president of the American Psychological Association points out that ‘these people’ are only guests in this ‘European civilization’). Those who have seen Alan Parker’s film Mississippi Burning will also want to take a look, as it debunks some of the inaccuracies portrayed in that film (for entertainment’s sake) and truly educates its viewer on the subject it is presenting. A marvellous, unique experience.

Nomination: Best Documentary Feature

Interview with the Vampire

Dir. Neil Jordan

More ink was spilled than can possibly be recalled when an adaptation of Anne Rice’s bestselling 1976 novel finally began. Most of it came from the author herself, who reacted to the casting decision of Tom Cruise in the lead role by scoffing that he was “no more my vampire Lestat than Edward G. Robinson is Rhett Butler.” Who knows if Warner Bros lined her wallet to get a retraction from her, but after seeing the film ahead of its very highly publicized release in the fall of 1994, she had not only changed her mind but took out a full page ad in Variety, to apologize both for having doubted that the film would be worthy of her book but specifically to praise Cruise’s performance. Looking back, it’s not the casting of Cruise that dates this beautifully filmed, highly enjoyable, and mostly unimportant drama, but rather the fact that it was seen as “homoerotic.” An atmosphere of media so afraid of even the hint of queerness in a big budget feature had tongues wagging over the fact that two men have a parental relationship with a little girl, and for a scene in which Antonio Banderas sniffs Brad Pitt’s face a bit too long. (At the age of 17, I already knew I needed more before I was going to fly a Pride flag in the spirit of victory.) Cruise plays a member of the undead (looking, as Paul Rudnick wrote, like “Sarah Jessica Parker after she has just taken off a knitted hat”) who feasts upon the despondent young Louis (Brad Pitt) and turns him into a fellow bloodsucker. The latter is so unhappy about having to kill human beings to survive that he insists upon taking his sustenance from meagre animals like rats instead. When they come upon an orphaned child (Kirsten Dunst) who is close to dying during a New Orleans plague epidemic, Louis “saves” her by turning her as well, not realizing that he has condemned her soul to age while her physical body remains that of a child for eternity. Dunst was a breakout attraction when this film was released and she received a Golden Globe nomination, predicted to also be cited for an Oscar, although that didn’t pan out. (The film came to the awards show for two of its finest qualities, the production design and Elliot Goldenthal’s magnificent musical score.) The praise for her was justified, as Dunst, who had already been working in television commercials since the age of three, must give the impression of great maturity despite her youth, and holds her own against two impressive leads, one an established movie star and the other one in the early stages of becoming a Hollywood A-lister. (After this film and Legends of the Fall the same year, we were never going to hear the end of Brad Pitt.) Interview is still a good film and at the time made for a strong follow-up for director Jordan, fresh off the Oscar-winning success of The Crying Game, plus it manages to condense a more complex and detailed novel to feature length without cutting out its soul. Its only drawback is that an accurate adaptation of Rice’s book is something mainstream audiences (and Cruise’s representation) wasn’t ready for. A later television adaptation would put its tame nature to shame.

Nominations: Best Art Direction-Set Decoration; Best Original Score

Legends of the Fall

Dir. Edward Zwick

Three brothers grow up with their father on a sprawling Montana ranch, living wild, boisterous lives until tragedy strikes each of them (and all of it brought about by a woman, go figure). The middle son, played by Brad Pitt, is the Rocco of these brothers, experiencing the most difficult losses of his family around him. (Cute boys with clean hair who brood endlessly for no reason are the best sex icons.) This beautifully photographed drama is emotionally rich and appropriately melancholy, but for some it might feel like it’s working too hard at its tragic grandeur, as if shiny (Oscar-winning) cinematography of a world gone by is the only way that its escapist levels of romance can win our respect. Still, it is good material and Pitt is excellent in the lead, receiving ample support from Anthony Hopkins as his father, Aidan Quinn and Henry Thomas as his brothers, and newcomer Julia Ormond as the beautiful lady who wins all hearts.

Winner: Best Cinematography; Nominations: Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Sound

Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision

Dir. Freida Lee Mock

This inspiring film charts the career of one of America’s most celebrated artists, who is primarily famous for her design of the Vietnam War Memorial. One of the most powerful works of art to be dedicated to the horrors of war, the memorial was also, from the time of its original inception, one of the most controversial. The film discusses Lin’s winning the design contest over thousands of other applicants, then shows footage of hearings where the matter was discussed further: veterans were outraged over the choice of a ‘gook’ to design their war memorial (Lin was actually born in Ohio to Chinese immigrants), not to mention their dislike of the style she chose, which they felt was downplaying the importance of the subject. What amazes the viewer most is seeing how strong a ground this then-twenty year old art school student maintains throughout the entire ordeal. Following her eventual success with the Vietnam piece, Lin designed the Civil Rights Memorial, a tribute to the Women of Yale and the Museum of African Art in New York City. Her passion for her work has not abated over the years, and her artistry has only become more challenging and powerful for both the creator and the audience. Mock has fashioned a memorable tribute to passion and dedication, and Lin is a perfectly appreciable subject.

Winner: Best Documentary Feature

Quiz Show

Dir. Robert Redford

A powerful true story, a highly successful Oscar-winning director, and a supercharged cast and yet, for some reason, nothing happened at the box office when Quiz Show came out. The attempt to turn Ralph Fiennes into a thinking person’s sex symbol and capitalize on John Turturro’s Barton Fink success were also efforts that flatlined. The one consolation to this film’s poor financial reception was the fact that it toured all of awards season as a perpetual bridesmaid, coming to the Oscars with four nominations and with zero hope of winning any of them. If any of the film’s creative team were at the show that night, they were not visible until the last few minutes when the film’s producers were shown in their seats for their Best Picture nomination. Based on the section of Richard Goodwin’s memoir covering his investigation of a rigged, highly rated television quiz show called Twenty-One, it stars Turturro as Herbert Stempel, the reigning contestant who is told to throw his winning streak and allow a more camera-friendly competitor, Charles Van Doren (Fiennes) to take over. An instructor at Columbia and the son of prominent poet and professor Mark Van Doren, played in a potent, Oscar nominated performance by Paul Scofield, Charles is dazzled by the opportunity to be on the cover of Time Magazine and purchase a swanky New York penthouse, agreeing to everything coming his way and given the answers in advance because the sponsors (represented by Martin Scorsese as the head of Geritol) have noticed that contestants who stay on the show and keep winning raise the ratings. Rob Morrow plays Goodwin, at the time a lawyer for the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, who notices that Stempel’s lawsuit against the producers of the show has its results sealed by, it is heavily implied, a corrupt judge and looks further into the matter, eventually revealing a scandal that, while not legally complicated (putting on a fake game show isn’t against the law, most of the crimes involved perjury and obstruction of justice), took down the careers of all involved and changed the face of television forever. (Trivia rarely found its way into the makeup of game shows in the decades to follow.) It’s a story of veiled antisemitism and unabashed greed. It’s a story about the realization that more money could be made invoking people’s nosy curiosity than inspiring them artistically. In short, it’s a movie that would have been a big hit were it made thirty years later: reality television is a gleam in Twenty-One‘s eye and Van Doren’s nepo baby apology at the end would make much more sense to the jaded, post-truth Trump era than it did when Clinton was in power and everyone thought things were finally under control. Looking back at it now, Quiz Show is not a film whose style has stood the test of time–it looks and moves like a movie from the nineties in ways that Pulp Fiction and Red do not–and it’s easy to see why a lack of star power kept it from connecting with the masses. Fiennes is over-determined in his desire to look and feel like a vacuous golden boy, you can see his hair dye every time he tosses his head and the performance comes off as vacuous in itself. Turturro, who was never going to be a sex symbol on his best day, is a bit too good at alienating the viewer with Stempel’s manic frustration, and Morrow, capitalizing at the time on his brief stardom on TV’s Northern Exposure, might be accurate with that Boston accent but that doesn’t change the fact that it is unintentionally funny. What makes the film worth holding on to is, firstly, the appearance of cast members who would go on to bigger things and cameos by the already established of which there are many: Scorsese, Griffin Dunne, Hank Azaria, David Paymer, Christopher McDonald, Elizabeth Wilson, Illeana Douglas, William Fichtner, Ben Shenkman, Mira Sorvino (terrific as Goodwin’s wife), Paul Guilfoyle, Harriet Sansom Harris, Calista Flockheart, Mario Cantone, Douglas McGrath, Debra Monk, Ethan Hawke, Allan Rich, Timothy Busfield, Bruce Altman, Ernie Sabella, Barry Levinson, and Matt Keeslar. More important, though, is that Redford laments the death of integrity without being simplistic about it, and to watch it so many years later, when the film’s warnings about media have gone decidedly unheeded, its message sticks in the gut.

Nominations: Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Paul Scofield), Best Director (Robert Redford), Best Adapted Screenplay

Red

Krzysztof Kieslowski

The third part of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours trilogy is far and away the best of the group and can be watched as a film on its own. A Geneva model (Irène Jacob) becomes acquainted with a crusty old judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant) after she accidentally runs over his dog, and discovers that he has a nasty habit of spying on his neighbours’ phone calls. Meanwhile, her own neighbour is an aspiring judge who is having an ill-fated romance with a telephone weather operator. These characters all have more serious connections than they realize, culminating in a fateful meeting in the end that has more to do with predestination than anything they could have pulled off themselves. Stunningly photographed and perfectly acted, this is among Kieslowski’s best works and, unfortunately, it was his last.

Nominations: Best Director (Krzysztof Kieslowski), Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography

School of the Americas Assassins

Dir. Robert Richter

Richter lays out a devastating history in thirteen riveting minutes in this exposé of one of the military’s most dubious programs, the School of the Americas. From its graduating classes have come a wealth of dictators and their supporters, among them Manuel Noriega and members of the Contra scandal. Three of the four culprits charged with murdering four nuns during the civil war in El Salvador were graduates, as were suspects connected with the assassination of Archbishop Romero and the massacre of El Mozote. It appears that the school, once located in the Panama Canal Zone but later moved to Fort Benning, Georgia, trains soldiers in techniques for subverting governments and to suppress “insurgents” (activists) in Latin American countries, which this documentary suggests (and later scandals seemed to confirm) is an American-backed program to commit human rights violations that have brought the Human Rights Campaign to its door. In the years since this film, the school has been rebranded (it’s now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation and more oversight is, reportedly, applied to its techniques), but the devastating information in this potent film does not feel like it exists in a very distant past.

Nomination: Best Documentary Short

The Mask

Dir. Chuck Russell

Colin Biggs: Jim Carrey’s launch to superstardom began in 1994 when he starred in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Dumb and Dumber. His third film that year, The Mask, was the only one of his films nominated for an Oscar (it, along with True Lies, lost to Forrest Gump in the visual effects category). The audacity of rendering the chaos of a Tex Avery cartoon into live-action was bold. Getting Carrey to create an unhinged protagonist to match the energy was genius. Maybe the Academy assumed that Carrey was responsible for all of the physical contortions of the Mask character and passed it over for visual effects. It wouldn’t be the only time the Academy overlooked Jim Carrey. While time has not been kind to all of the laughs in The Mask, the effects still look amazing.

Nomination: Best Visual Effects

Trevor

Dir. Peggy Rajski

Randy Stone and Peggy Rajski were brought up to the podium along with Peter Capaldi and Ruth Kenley-Letts for one of the Academy’s historically rare ties. While it’s ridiculous that voters couldn’t see their way to picking one or the other, there are enough similarities between the two to suggest they fit together as a double-bill. While both tread on dramatic subjects (writer’s block in one, suicide in the other), they both indulge in uses of fantasy and dark humour to transmit their tales. Brett Barsky plays the title character in Trevor, a sweetly naive preteen boy who isn’t afraid to show how much he loves Diana Ross and doesn’t understand sports, but who enters the mire of adolescent drama when he becomes best friends with the school’s affable, popular jock, Pinky Farraday. Trevor loves Pinky without necessarily knowing what that means, but when word gets around and the rumour mill gets underway, Pinky stops talking to him and Trevor turns to dark thoughts, his once humorous pranks of pretending to commit suicide becoming a serious consideration to end his life. The film’s Oscar win led to its being included in the theatrical release of the omnibus feature Boys Life 2 (though it was replaced on the DVD release), but more historically significant was its inspiration for The Trevor Project, a charity focused on suicide prevention for LGBTQ+ youths. Rajski and Stone were preparing to premiere the film on HBO in 1998 and went in search of an LGBTQ+-oriented helpline whose number they include in the credits; when they found that none existed, they created one, which continues (against all odds) to this day.

Winner: Best Live-Action Short (tie)

True Lies

Dir. James Cameron

Colin Biggs: The “little” film that James Cameron made between The Abyss and Titanic lost its only nomination at the 1994 Academy Awards. Somehow, with all the technical ingenuity Cameron displays in each of his films, it lost out to splicing Tom Hanks throughout time in Forrest Gump. The third act features an escalating series of set pieces that improve each time, going from Jamie Lee Curtis dangling from a helicopter to Arnold Schwarzenegger piloting a Harrier Jump Jet around a Miami skyscraper. I don’t know how you can watch Cameron convincingly shoot a villain attached to a missile through a building and give the Oscar to Forrest hanging out with Nixon, but here we are.

Nomination: Best Visual Effects

Wyatt Earp

Dir. Lawrence Kasdan

Two movies about the Gunfight at the OK Corral came out within a year of each other, and while neither of them measured up with either John Ford’s or John Sturges’ films around a similar theme. The one that was deemed sillier and more escapist, Tombstone by George Pan Cosmatos, was a hell of a lot more entertaining than this bloated epic. Kasdan overdoes his attempt at a serious version of Silverado which, it turns out, no one needed, reuniting with Kevin Costner (who gives a bland performance) as Wyatt Earp, who is driven to attempt suicide by the death of his young wife (Annabeth Gish) before ending up a lawman in Dodge City and later Tombstone. When he’s not shooting people, he spends a lot of time grunting with his brothers about other family clans and their no-good ways, later befriending the loudmouthed Doc Holliday (Dennis Quaid, who steals the whole show) and has the big, historic (and I’m sure largely fictionalized) showdown at the famed horse depository. Fans of the genre won’t get much out of it as the pace is uneven and the running time ridiculous, and Kasdan includes more characters and situations than he knows what to do with. It looks beautiful, with superb cinematography by Owen Roizman and detailed costume and set work, but the best characters (Quaid and feisty Catherine O’Hara) are given too little screen time in favour of the emotionally invisible Costner. Also features great supporting work by Isabella Rossellini (underused as well), Mare Winningham, Joanna Going, Michael Madsen, Tom Sizemore, a wonderful JoBeth Williams and a unnecessarily high-billed Gene Hackman.

Nomination: Best Cinematography