Revisiting the 1994 Academy Awards: Part 1 |  Part 2 | Part 3

The conclusion of the 1995 Oscar telecast contained all the categories we were waiting for most, which made it that much more irritating that the production team decided to throw not one but two more montages into the presentation:  one about comedy duos, the other just about…comedies? Julia Ormond, fresh off the breakout success of her performance in Legends of the Fall, introduced Elton John singing the third Lion King song, and while he sounded better than the previous performances, he still had issues with his microphone. Annette Bening introduced the Best Picture clip for Four Weddings and a Funeral, which we had forgotten was even nominated but, in the years since, is the movie from this whole list we’re all most likely to rewatch on a loop.  Sigourney Weaver showed up to present the annual Who Died reel and, not to be morbid, but the number of notable people who died since the previous year’s Oscars is impressive: Fernando Rey, Giulietta Masina, Peter Cushing, Woody Strode, Jessica Tandy, Jules Styne, Walter Lantz, Donald Pleasence, Harry Saltzman, Terence Young, Burt Lancaster, Henry Mancini, Martha Raye, George Peppard, Rossano Brazzi, Cab Calloway, Mildred Natwick and Raul Julia. Denzel Washington presented the last Best Picture clip, for The Shawshank Redemption, reminding us that it has won nothing and, unless Freeman can upset the odds-on Hanks victory, will likely go home empty-handed.

Somehow, the final hour also managed to hand out the most prizes and yet another Honorary award, the Thalberg to Clint Eastwood who, two years after sweeping with Unforgiven and despite a tasteful, efficient speech, doesn’t feel all that glorious. Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell strike comedy gold doing a bit before handing the Best Original Score prize to Hans Zimmer for The Lion King, which continued Disney’s domination of the music prizes in the nineties (though next year’s wins for Pocahontas would be their last double-win in the music categories). Also in this category, Thomas Newman earned his first two nominations of what is currently a streak of fifteen losses.  Jeremy Irons presented Best Foreign Language Film with the pomposity of a man who thought his microphone wasn’t working, referring to the recent controversy over Macedonia’s nomination amid the Yugolsav Wars, while the winner, Russia for Burnt by the Sun, reminded us that this category is always the most dire for producers of the Oscar show, as the winner often doesn’t speak English and it often results in him or her taking much longer to get off the stage (in this case, winner Nikita Mikhalkov, years before he’d become more famous as a good friend of Vladimir Putin, stretched things further by introducing us to his adorable little daughter). Sylvester Stallone presented the Best Original Song prize (forgetting that “And The Winner Is” was changed to “And the Oscar Goes To” six years earlier) to Elton John and Tim Rice for the most popular of the three nominated Lion King songs, “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” (always go with the ballad).

At last, Pulp Fiction got a moment, when Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary (has that feud been quelled yet?) won Best Original Screenplay over first-time nominees Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh.  Avary includeed in his speech that he had to pee, which only further reminded us that they’re not going to win Best Picture. Gump‘s Eric Roth’s won Best Adapted Screenplay and cemented that movie’s victory, delivering his speech directly down into the podium.  Two years after Michelle Pfeiffer was nominated for Love Field, a film shelved after Orion Pictures went bankrupt and saw the film held from release for over a year, Jessica Lange won Best Actress for another such case, paying tribute to a director (Tony Richardson) who passed away (of AIDS) before Blue Sky even came out. It is to date the last time she was nominated, and the smile Tommy Lee Jones delivered from his seat when she mentioned him was also likely the last of its kind. For some odd reason, Best Animated Short was presented very late in the show, perhaps because that’s how long it took presenters Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny to show up. They gave the award to the British/Canadian co-production Bob’s Birthday, created by a real-life British/Canadian married couple, which went on to inspire a short-lived animated television series, Bob & Margaret.

At last it was time for the big three, and while no film earned a major sweep (six awards is great but it’s hardly going to make history), Gump ruled the evening’s climax. Hanks entered history as one of the handful of actors (Spencer Tracy, Luise Rainer, Jason Robards, Katharine Hepburn) to win consecutive awards when he took Best Actor (Freeman would have to wait ten more years to get a statuette).  Hanks received, for some reason (and I say this as a fan), a standing ovation and gave an impressively presidential speech (“God bless you all around the world”). Kieslowski looked like he was barely paying attention when Spielberg opened the Best Director envelope and, instead of calling out the winner’s name, addressed Robert Zemeckis’ son (“Alex, your dad just won an Oscar!”). Zemeckis was there with actress Mary Ellen Trainor, to whom he was married until 2000 and who died in 2015. Kieslowski’s producer later said they both found the show excessively boring and kept drinking the free booze to get through it.

The Best Picture prize must be handed out by a Hollywood heavyweight, and this year, with the anticipation that they were finally appearing on screen together in Michael Mann’s Heat, the job is given to Robert De Niro, who complained that he can’t see the teleprompter because of his bad eyesight, and Al Pacino. They announced Gump as the winner and presented the Oscars to the three producers, among them the third woman to win in this category, Wendy Finerman (there have been fifteen since). At the end of awards season, Pulp Fiction‘s only other major televised victory was at the MTV Movie Awards (for Best Movie and Best Dance Scene) and Golden Globes (for Best Screenplay).

 

Nominees and Winners in the Final Hour

 

Before the Rain

Dir.  Milcho Manchevski

Controversy raged at the announcement of this film’s nomination in the Best Foreign Language Film category, the first feature made in the newly established republic of Macedonia, amid an argument with the neighbours to the south over its right to bear that name. At the time, it was nominated as being from the “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,” today known as North Macedonia, as was borne by the nomination for 2019’s Honeyland. All of this noise, which presenter Jeremy Irons referred to when presenting the award, helped obscure the fact that the film itself was somewhat overrated. Much like the same year’s Pulp Fiction, it tells its story in triptych, with the final chapter giving context to clarify the first: beginning in a remote mountain village, we meet an Orthodox monk who has taken a vow of silence (Gregoire Colin) and gives shelter to an Albanian Muslim girl hiding from the relatives of a man she has killed. In the second section, a journalist in London (the late, great Katrin Cartlidge) struggles with the end of her marriage while carrying on an affair with a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer (Rade Šerbedžija, who deservedly ignited a career as a successful character actor in Hollywood movies). In the film’s third and longest act, Šerbedžija travels home to Macedonia to see his relatives and arrives at a date with destiny connected with the events of the first story.  Manchevski’s hopes to encompass a great deal of historic weight and his narrative actually manages to do it, deftly handling the ancient tensions left over from centuries of Ottoman rule as well as the contemporary trauma of the Bosnian war, frequently emphasizing the theme of time as a circle to let us know that using violence to put an end to violence is simply a way to keep conflict going. Where his film falters, however, is in its manipulating too many of its situations to provoke reaction from its audience, happy to kill off any character to remind us that we are watching a deeply humourless tragedy that features more than its fair share of melodramatic cliches. The characters need to be far more interesting than what we have here to get away with being so sincere a tale, particularly when the overripe cinematography calls far too much attention to gorgeous landscapes, but for a film that has as many missteps as this one does, it does manage more than a few memorable moments as well.

Nomination: Best Foreign Language Film

 

Blue Sky

Dir. Tony Richardson

When introducing him as the presenter of the year’s Best Supporting Actress award, David Letterman joked that Tommy Lee Jones had followed his Oscar win for The Fugitive by appearing in every film made that year. Among them (it was actually only five) were two of the year’s Best Actress nominees, though their releases were in part because of Orion Studio’s failing the business part of show business. The studio had rushed Silence of the Lambs out in the spring of 1991 despite the fact that it should have been held back for Oscar season that fall (it won anyway), hoping to earn some cash before filing for bankruptcy and stranding its films on a shelf until MGM stepped in and bought their library. In 1992, the delayed Love Field earned Michelle Pfeiffer an Oscar nomination and in 1994, it was Jessica Lange in Tony Richardson’s last film, released after his death from AIDS in 1991. Jones plays a nuclear engineer in the military who works on radiation safety testing and Lange is his bombshell wife, the kind of woman we used to call a “free spirit” to hide our inability to nail down where we were between jealousy of her sexual passions and  pity for her emotional instability. The couple and their two daughters (one of them played by Amy Locane, who is visibly younger than she seemed in the other films she appeared in the same year) are moved from base to base. Lange’s outbursts cause embarrassment, culminating in serious trouble when she has an affair with his superior officer (Powers Boothe). This dalliance is conveniently used against her when Jones tries to speak up about the accidental exposure of radiation to two civilians during an atom bomb test in the Nevada desert. After she is manipulated into committing him to a mental institution to hush him up, Lange puts her outspoken nature to good use in trying to free him. It’s an elevated TV movie and Lange’s character is more or less a collection of Oscar clichés, mad scenes and outbursts and going as hyper glam as other Best Actress winners go plain.  Between her and Sarandon in The Client phoning in southern stereotypes that both could do in their sleep, the Academy didn’t pick the more rewatchable film to give the award to. Lange’s performance, however, is also a testament to her ability to give three dimensions to any character, the kind of Blanche DuBois riffing that she’d do a million more times to even greater acclaim for Ryan Murphy years later but still impossible to tear your eyes away from.

Winner: Best Actress (Jessica Lange)

 

Bob’s Birthday

Dir. David Fine, Alison Snowden

A character in Margaret Atwood’s 1988 novel Cat’s Eye jokes that Canadians are good at all the animated shorts and documentaries that accompany features in movie theatres, and her claim is borne out by looking at the amount of times that the National Film Board of Canada triumphed in the Short Film categories at the Academy Awards — so much so that the organization received an Honorary Oscar for its 50th anniversary in 1989. Among its triumphs (the last of which, to date, was in 2006) is this co-production with the United Kingdom, directed by real-life couple (and British-Canadian co-pro themselves) Snowden and Fine, about a dentist who comes home and laments to his wife about how boring their friends and social life is, not realizing that she has their whole social circle hidden behind the furniture waiting to throw him a surprise party. The insouciant humour is enlivened by colourful animation, and it’s no surprise that the film’s success (which included its being screened before features throughout Canada after the Oscars) led to an animated series.

Winner: Best Animated Short

Burnt by the Sun

Dir. Nikita Mikhalkov

The fall of the Soviet Union was followed by Russia’s first nomination for Mikhalkov’s Close to Eden in 1992, followed by his winning the prize two years later for this exceptionally good drama that takes place entirely on one single day.  Bolshevik hero Kotov, played by Mikhalkov himself, is spending a summery day at his country dacha with his devoted wife and daughter, surrounded by aristocratic in-laws straight out of Chekhov and confident that, whatever trouble comes, his friendship with Stalin will keep him and his comforts safe. It’s a world in which an investment in political ideology is an illusion, and trouble arrives in the form of an old romantic rival, Mitya, formerly of the White Army, who lost not only his fiancé to our protagonist but also his belief in his motherland thanks to Kotov’s actions against him in the past. Mitya, it turns out, works for the NKVD, the political police of the time, and is here to take advantage of his power to settle a personal grudge.  Mikhalkov returned to the Oscars once more, for his excellent adaptation of Twelve Angry Men in 2007, though in the years since his public devotion to Vladimir Putin has turned out to be something of an ideologically unreliable narrator himself. In 2010, he screened half of his six-hour sequel to this film at Cannes, a bombastic failure in which he rewrites the fates of many characters (including bringing some back from the dead) and seems to apologize for his biggest success.  A film about a Russia in which an autocrat causes atrocities in the name of strength and power couldn’t have been a convenient entry on his resume once he embarked on his very public friendship with Vladimir Putin.

Winner: Best Foreign Language Film

 

Eat Drink Man Woman

Dir. Ang Lee

Of the directors nominated for Best Foreign Language Film for 1994, Ang Lee has definitely had the most success since the winner was announced, going on to win this category (in 2000, for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) as well as receiving two Best Director prizes (for Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi).  Eat Drink Man Woman is also the best remembered and likely most rewatched of the nominees, a subtle but deeply felt heartwarmer that joins Babette’s Feast and Tampopo in the pantheon of the most celebrated films about food. Sihung Lung is remarkably good as Chu, known as the best chef in Taipei, semi-retired but still called in to take care of emergencies and disasters when needed by his former colleagues. His mastery in the kitchen is at odds with his ambivalence about his accomplishments as a father, constantly worried about his three daughters and their complicated personal lives: chemistry teacher Jia-Jen has found solace in devout Christianity after a heartbreak years earlier, middle child Jia-Chien ignores her personal life in favour of her ambition as an airline executive, and Jia-Ning, still in college and working in fast-food, gets involved with her best friend’s boyfriend. Communication between a widowed father and his children isn’t easy, however, so the affection and care come through the many (very sumptuous looking) dishes he prepares for their Sunday meals, which they make sure to always have together. As always an expert at controlled but deeply felt emotions, Lee’s deft handling of family dynamics never allows anything to spill over into mawkish sentimentality, which struck a chord with producer (and future studio head) Lindsay Doran, who hired him to helm her upcoming adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, for which Emma Thompson won a Screenplay Oscar. By the time we let the members of the Chu family go to enjoy their futures at the end of this film, we realize we have come to love them as our own. A jewel of a film, it was remade (to great and, for some, superior effect) in 2001 as Tortilla Soup, set in a Latine family in Los Angeles starring Hector Elizondo in the lead role.

Nomination: Best Foreign Language Film

 

Farinelli: Il Castrato

Dir. Gerard Corbiau

Corbiau started out as a television producer for Belgium’s national network before making a handful of feature films, most of them period pieces that often encompassed themes of the musical arts, two of which brought him to the Oscars. After the low-key charmer The Music Teacher in 1988, he returned to the competition, in my mind inexplicably, for this well-intentioned but poorly achieved film about Farinelli (aka Carlo Broschi), often referred to as the greatest castrato singer of all time. Broschi and his brother Riccardo are deeply devoted to each other from childhood and particularly since the loss of their father, the elder Riccardo a serviceable but not particularly inspired composer whose popular but, for the high-minded artistic set, rather overdone operas are written as vehicles to show off the talents of his massively popular younger brother. Carlo is the most famous of the castrati, male singers who would have undergone a brutal procedure to prevent puberty from altering their larynx and deepening their voices (mostly in Europe in the eighteenth century) if they were discovered as children to have a beautiful voice.  The boys make a promise to always stick together, even tag-teaming their female conquests in the spirit of being one soul in two bodies, but Carlo’s eventually embracing Riccardo’s nemesis George Frideric Handel (Jeroen Krabbe) threatens to drive them apart for good.  Carlo’s singing voice was reportedly created by digitally mixing a female soprano and a male countertenor, but the result actually has the familiar sound of a female opera singer and Stefano Dionisi, in the role of Carlo, does such a poor job with lip-syncing (including not knowing the shape of his mouth around most words) that it feels like bad drag (and makes the attention drawn to his yellow teeth, likely meant to show the result of the character’s being, like many castrati, reliant on drugs to quell lifelong pain, that much harder to look at). Enrico Lo Verso doesn’t fare much better as Riccardo, the emotional crises on his face often coming across like he smells something bad. It’s a sumptuous film to look at and obviously had its fair share of fans (it won the Golden Globe before losing the Oscar to Burnt by the Sun), but while the mostly fictionalized screenplay has nothing particularly preposterous about it (very little is known about Broschi’s actual life), whatever we’re meant to learn about the cost of artistic success never really comes across.

Nomination: Best Foreign Language Film

 

Four Weddings and a Funeral

Dir. Mike Newell

This hysterical comedy hit from England launched the careers of most of the performers involved. Goofy Hugh Grant and his many wacky friends experience the titular events while trying to survive their own relationship landmines in the process. At the first wedding, Grant meets an American visitor (Andie MacDowell, whose timing isn’t always spot-on) with whom he is immediately smitten; unfortunately, the third wedding in the story is hers. Line after hilarious line is tossed out at you from Richard Curtis’ solid script, but then comes a funeral that earns your deepest sympathy and affection. Kristin Scott Thomas is brilliant as the haute couture member of the social group, and audiences will be delighted to see some of their worst wedding nightmares lived out on screen in blazing colour.

Nominations: Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay

 

Heavenly Creatures

Dir. Peter Jackson

The awe-inspiring thriller from New Zealand that gave rise to the mainstream success of Peter Jackson, who had already won over the grindhouse with his exploitation flicks Meet the Feebles and Dead Alive (aka Braindead). Here he applies his Grand Guignol methods to the true-life story of two schoolgirls who committed murder of the one girl’s mother in order not to be separated. When lonely Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) meets new student Juliet (Kate Winslet, both making astonishing film debuts), the two hit it off and end up becoming inseparable friends.  It’s not long before they’re doing everything together, including spending all their time coming up with imaginary characters and stories of their own design that they play out until the line between reality and fiction seems to blur. Their parents start to believe that their relationship might not be healthy considering how close they are; when Juliet’s parents decide that they are moving to another country, Pauline insists that she is going with them, but her parents object and won’t allow her, and a murder plot is formed. Jackson’s brilliant direction and the Oscar-nominated script, co-written with Fran Walsh, take us into the minds of these young ladies, never excusing their terrible crime but trying to provide a little insight into the intensity of the age that could lead them down this path. Not long after the film’s release, it was revealed that Winslet’s character was based on the successful mystery novelist Anne Perry.

Nomination: Best Original Screenplay

 

Junior

Dir. Ivan Reitman

When genetic scientists Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito can’t get their anti-miscarriage drug approved by federal authorities, they decide to try it out on a test subject in order to have proof that it works. Realizing that they can never find a woman who would agree to endangering her pregnancy with an unapproved drug, they shift priorities and put the bun in Schwarzenegger’s oven with the intention of only going for the first trimester, unaware that the egg they stole for this experiment belongs to the new scientist (Emma Thompson) working in their lab. Romance between Arnold and Emma blooms, and his desire to keep going with the pregnancy only adds to the complications of this rather juvenile, illogical and strangely often very funny comedy. Audiences stayed away in droves upon its release, the premise of which turned many an audience member off: I have distinct memories of one male friend and my dad being beside themselves at the suggestion of being forced to watch it, reactions worth including in a sociological study. That it wasn’t up to the level of better comedies featuring these actors and by this director cannot be denied, but the chance to see what was, at the time, the world’s toughest action man developing a convincing and very charming soft side is still worth the effort. Where they put that baby in his body and how it feeds is a question for the pedants, for the most part it’s a fun caper highlighted by a marvelous turn by Thompson, coming off her Oscar win for Howard’s End (1992) and double nominations for The Remains of the Day and In the Name of the Father (1993) and revealing her lighter talents for the first time in a mainstream film after a series of high-minded dramas.

Nomination: Best Original Song (“Look What Love Has Done”)

Nell

Dir. Michael Apted

Jodie Foster gives an endearing performance in this half-baked drama about a backwoods wild child who is discovered by a psychiatrist (Liam Neeson) after her mother dies. Foster’s Nell was raised in complete seclusion and, thanks to her mother’s stroke, has never learned to speak properly; as a result, she expresses herself in a childlike mishmash of English words and completely made-up ones, marking her as something of an anthropological find for her community. Neeson brings in a big-city doctor (Natasha Richardson, who married Neeson shortly after this movie was made) to help him observe Nell and decide what should be done about her. In the process, they learn about each other and themselves through their relationship with this rare individual. It’s easy to see where it goes from there, boiling down to a melodramatic courtroom scene complete with tear-inducing confessional by the superstar. Foster is marvelous, more personal than she had ever been on screen before, while Neeson is less appealing, his character a tough moralizer who never lets the icy veneer crack.

Nomination: Best Actress (Jodie Foster)

Nobody’s Fool

Dir. Robert Benton

Paul Newman plays a construction worker who abandoned wife and kids decades earlier when life got too complicated, and lives under a heavy cloud of regret ever since. Now he’s blocks away from his family in a rooming house with an old lady (Jessica Tandy) who believes that he still might one day live up to his potential, plus interacts with the former town beauty (Melanie Griffith in a jewel of a performance) who is now in a stagnant marriage with the head of a construction company (Bruce Willis, also marvelous). Benton’s direction is backed up by his fantastic script about this small town where everyone lives a big life in a small way, where no one is a hero or a villain but people muddle through as best they can. A gem of a film.

Nominations: Best Actor (Paul Newman), Best Adapted Screenplay

 

Strawberry and Chocolate

Dir. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Juan Carlos Tabío

Cuba received its first (and, to date, only) nomination in the Foreign Film category for this deceptively light-hearted but poignant tale of friendship and sexual frustration under Castro in the late seventies, adapted by Senel Paz from his own story The Wolf, The Forest and The New Man. A staunch communist university student named David is dealing with his misery over his girlfriend’s marrying another man, when he is hit on by an individualist gay artist named Diego, who convinces him to come home with him and check out his book collection. David soon realizes that Diego has other plans in mind and gets away from him as soon as possible, but when his friend Miguel convinces him to stay in touch with Diego in order to get evidence of counterrevolutionary subversion, David seeks Diego’s company out and becomes his protégé in all things cultural. What ends up happening, however, is that a genuine sympathy is born between two very opposite people that is threatened by a repressive regime that does not in any way favour connection over conformity. The film stoked a fair amount of controversy in its home country but was open-heartedly embraced abroad, winning prizes around the world. This many years later, the acting and unobtrusive direction have aged well, and while it’s a film that keeps its political mind constantly active and alert, it never abandons its generous view of emotional humanity.

Nomination: Best Foreign Language Film

 

The Big Story

Dir. Tim Watts, David Stoten

Less than two minutes is all it takes to enjoy this curious stop-motion short that features three characters who are all based on Kirk Douglas (mainly inspired by Ace in the Hole). A reporter argues with his editor about a big story, begging for his chance to have a major break in his career. The animation is exceptionally well achieved.

Nomination: Best Animated Short

 

The Client

Dir. Joel Schumacher

The best John Grisham novel adaptation is this excellent thriller featuring one of Susan Sarandon’s most bewitching performances. Newcomer Brad Renfro is a young Louisiana pre-teen who witnesses a suicide by a prominent big city lawyer, who it actually turns out was the advocate for a known leader of a crime syndicate. There is a possibility that the dead man told the kid a few tales before taking his own life, which means that both members of the mob and the State’s loud-mouthed and ambitious District Attorney (a perfectly cast Tommy Lee Jones) are desperate to find him for different reasons. He takes refuge in the arms of a small-time, recovering alcoholic lawyer (Sarandon) who makes it her job to protect him and his impoverished family in and out of court as the danger comes closer to them all. Tons of fun.
Nomination: Best Actress (Susan Sarandon)

The Janitor

Dir. Vanessa Schwartz
A number of nominated animated shorts have set a recorded interview or performance to images, as is the case with Schwartz’s four minute curiosity that uses a monologue by the late actor Geoffrey Lewis (father of Juliette) from which to inspire its imagery. Lewis embodies a character who calls himself “God’s janitor”, a devoted worker whose attempts to keep too many plates spinning in the air has resulted in the majority of human history and most of the events of the Bible. Monochromatic drawings come to vivid, spontaneous life in this inspired number.

Nomination: Best Animated Short

 

The Lion King

Dir. Rob Minkoff, Roger Allers

Disney’s box office reign (and domination of the music Oscars) begun in the late eighties reached its peak with this animated classic whose subsequent sequels and remakes have never outshone its appeal. A lion cub (voiced by Jonathan Taylor Thomas) is exiled from his pride after his father’s death when his scheming uncle decides to usurp the throne for himself. Growing to maturity (and voiced by Matthew Broderick) under the watchful eye of a neurotic meerkat (Nathan Lane) and jovial warthog (Ernie Sabella), he is inspired to return to his people and reclaim his birthright, though the quest is a dangerous one. This animal Hamlet works beautifully thanks to a smooth combination of elements, its serious drama compounded with the comic relief of supporting characters as well as a gorgeous, endless song score by Elton John and Tim Rice (with incidental music by Hans Zimmer).

Winner: Best Original Score, Best Original Song (“Can You Feel The Love Tonight”); Nominations: Best Original Song (“Circle of Life”), Best Original Song (“Hakuna Matata”)

 

The Monk and the Fish

Dir. Michael Dudok de Wit

Michael Dudok de Wit is responsible for some of the most cherished animated films of the last few decades, this charmer later followed by his deserved Oscar winner, and one of the most touching films ever made, Father and Daughter, as well as his remarkably good feature (and also Oscar-nominated) The Red Turtle.  The Monk and the Fish brought him to the Academy Awards for the first time, a beautifully drawn caprice in which a highly passionate monk discovers a fish in the water reservoir at his monastery and becomes obsessed with catching it. His attempts to do so grow more and more dedicated and elaborate until they reach the realm of the supernatural, the activity all set to the strains of La Follia by Arcangelo Corelli. de Wit’s animation style is colourful but elegantly spare, characters move through large, open spaces and we rarely get more than a glimpse of eyes, and yet so much character is transmitted through movement and narrative subtlety.

Nomination: Best Animated Short

 

The Paper

Dir. Ron Howard

Michael Keaton is excellent as a tabloid reporter whose one twenty-four hour day is the subject of this fast-paced comedy/drama. He has to contend with a hot, breaking story involving a murder in downtown New York, a bitchy editor (Glenn Close) who prefers sales over integrity, a severely pregnant wife (Marisa Tomei) who goes into labour, and an interview with a swanky newspaper for a job that could change his life forever. Featuring quick, relentless editing and tight direction by Howard, this one gets so intense it will leave you with an ulcer.
Nomination: Best Original Song (“Make Up Your Mind”)

Triangle

Dir. Erica Russell

The animated short category almost always includes at least one pure art selection, in this case a gorgeously animated experiment in image and sound that watches as two figures transform and blend into each other to the tune of a beautiful musical score. It’s mesmerizing and elegant.

Nomination: Best Animated Short

 

Forrest Gump

Dir. Robert Zemeckis

Once in a while, the Academy decides to go with an audience favourite even if it isn’t the one that is most lauded by the critics (ex: The Sound of Music), which certainly must have helped the ratings for the show in the spring of 1995 when the year’s box office champion was also crowned with six Oscars. Tom Hanks stars as a charming simpleton who manages to experience all the important events of the last half of the twentieth century without even realizing it: meeting Elvis and teaching him how to swing his hips, getting involved in the Vietnam war, becoming a ping-pong champion (that’s important?) and even starting the ‘Shit Happens’ logo trend.  What matters more to him, however, is the woman he loves (Robin Wright), a free spirit who can never stay still long enough for Forrest to love her. Zemeckis’ epic film is incredibly funny and even features a few touching moments, but for the most part it is racked up in its own self-importance and more often than not gets a bit too gooey for its own good. Sally Field is the highlight of the experience as Forrest’s loving mother, one who is willing to do anything for her son to get a fair crack at life.

Winner: Best Picture, Best Actor (Tom Hanks), Best Director (Robert Zemeckis), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing, Best Visual Effects; Nominations: Best Supporting Actor (Gary Sinise), Best Cinematography, Best Makeup, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Sound, Best Sound Effects Editing, Best Original Score

 

Pulp Fiction

Dir. Quentin Tarantino

The American independent film movement got a major boost with the success of sex, lies and videotape in 1989, but the movement changed the face of mainstream cinema when Tarantino’s juggernaut epic began its long journey from the Palme d’Or at Cannes to box office success, critical acclaim and, eventually, a night at the Academy Awards, with a lot of controversy and heated debates about violence in entertainment along the way. The film turned Tarantino into the guru of both film making and film loving, and it spawned no end of imitations, as the next few years of Sundance featured an overwhelming plethora of gritty, low-budget crime-oriented films in which people held guns sideways for effect. Thirty years later, we find ourselves wondering, was it all worth it? It turns out that despite the fact that Tarantino’s most popular film won over both the kind of people you relate to (“cineastes”) and the people you loathe (straight guys who think film history begins at Star Wars), at the very core of all this noise is a magnificent film that still gleams. The three act structure begins with a glamorous tale of a low-level hood (John Travolta) who is asked to escort his boss’s wife (Uma Thurman) on a night out where they take part in a dance contest. The second tale tells of a boxer (Bruce Willis) who fails to throw a fight as planned. This inspires the anger of the kingpin gangster (Ving Rhames) whose wife we met earlier, but the boxer’s insistence on going back to his apartment to get a family heirloom throws the destiny of a number of characters into a fascinating blender. The third story takes place before the first two, in which Travolta and his fellow hood Samuel L. Jackson accidentally kill a person of interest in their car and need the help of a cleaner to make the evidence go away. Within these narratives are other plot strands, a rich array of unforgettable characters and a visual style that gleams. Tarantino has only further built on his mastery of all these elements since. The film’s detractors, disturbed by the intense violence, ignored the power of the auteur’s talent for plot construction, while Pulp’s imitators mistook the film’s success as being located in its milieu of guns and gangsters, and never lived up to the quality of this one’s writing and direction. Further projects such as the relatively low-key Jackie Brown, the exciting two part Kill Bill films and his trio of historical revenge fantasies (Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood) have kept Tarantino top of mind with film lovers (and nervous censors), but what of Forrest Gump? It’s still beloved but only as an artifact, its cultural relevance is no longer contemporary. Zemeckis, for my money, outdid himself with Contact, and Cast Away was nothing to sniff at, but his projects since the turn of the millennium have been heavy on the technological innovation (particularly in animation, such as Beowulf and A Christmas Carol) but wanting as exercises in storytelling. Allied failed to make a splash, Welcome to Marwen was thoroughly ignored and, thirty years after his triumph with Gump, he reunited with stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright for Here, which went, sorry for this, Nowhere.

Winner: Best Original Screenplay; Nominations: Best Picture, Best Actor (John Travolta), Best Supporting Actor (Samuel L. Jackson), Best Supporting Actress (Uma Thurman), Best Director (Tarantino), Best Film Editing

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Introduction: The 1994 Academy Awards
The First Hour: The Hollywood Variety Show
The Second Hour: I’m Sure They’re Pissed Off About Something