The Classics Shelf: The 1994 Academy Awards, Thirty Years Later

In his entertaining, insightful and delightfully dishy memoir Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions, filmmaker Edward Zwick states that a film’s success depends on three factors: box office, awards and its longevity, and if you have achieved the third in the list, the other two don’t matter one bit. The Academy Awards are frequently looked back on in later years and litigated for whether or not their capturing the flavour of the moment has held up over time (among the most cited, the victory of How Green Was My Valley over Citizen Kane and the fact that 2001: A Space Odyssey and Some Like It Hot weren’t even nominated for Best Picture).

At the 2025 Academy Awards, the voters anointed five awards upon Sean Baker’s masterful Palme d’Or winner Anora, a generous promotion for the plight of independent cinema and a daring choice from a voting body made up of a fair number of major studio employees. One wonders how well this will hold up in the future, my guess is it will, but no one really knows. Since 1993, there have been way more anniversary screenings of Howard’s End than Clint Eastwood’s Best Picture winner Unforgiven and, exactly thirty years ago, the biggest mainstream hit of the year went up against the revolutionary indie blockbuster of the decade and the choice, for my money, doesn’t look so hot. As if to remind us that Pulp Fiction should have won, Quentin Tarantino presented an Oscar at the ceremony two months ago, Robert Zemeckis did not.

The 1995 Academy Awards were held on March 27 and handed out prizes to celebrate the best films of 1994. It was a ceremony in the tradition of those that followed Allan Carr’s debacle in 1989: still overlong and glamorous but, in its own way, toned down and solely concerned with the two things that producer Gilbert Cates and director Jeff Margolis often emphasized in the shows they supervised: awards and montages. Frequent musical director Bill Conti lorded over the orchestra and David Letterman was given the job of hosting for the first, and so far only, time. (I am aware that it is not likely to happen again.)

Among the nominees in the acting categories, eight had never been nominated before (compare that with fourteen this year). From the list of eight, only Helen Mirren (who later won for The Queen) have been nominated again. The veteran among all the acting nominees was Paul Newman, receiving his eighth nomination (he would get one more, for Road To Perdition nine years later), who is also one of the four nominees that night who are longer alive (Martin Landau, Paul Scofield and Nigel Hawthorne, the others; Rosemary Harris is still with us at 97!).

Notably left of the list from those predicted by experts in advance were Jennifer Jason Leigh, for her critically acclaimed but not overly commercially successful Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, Terence Stamp’s remarkable career comeback in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of The Desert, Ralph Fiennes, in the otherwise highly lauded Quiz Show, and Linda Fiorentino, the most celebrated female performance of the year, in The Last Seduction, which the Academy disqualified on the basis that it premiered on cable television before its theatrical run. All the eventual winners from that night are, as I write this, still with us except for five who have passed away: Randy Stone, Martin Landau, Charles Guggenheim, Ken Adam, Arthur Schmidt.

There were five Best Picture nominees, that would not change for fifteen years, but anyone tuning in to the show was more or less rooting for one of two: Paramount’s Forrest Gump was released in the July heat despite not looking like your average blockbuster, as the story of a sweet and simple young man who unwittingly stands at the centre of all the significant cultural shifts of the last half of the twentieth century (although, as writer Michael Gebert pointed out, he is responsible for the stuff that doesn’t matter, while anything actually significant is something bad that happens to Robin Wright). Gump took the box office by storm and by December was the biggest hit of the year. Two months before its release, Tarantino’s breakthrough masterpiece was crowned with the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (under Clint Eastwood as jury president, who reportedly kept making the jurors vote new rounds until they chose his preferred favourite). When it finally came to movie theatres in October, Pulp Fiction was the most critically lauded film of the year and its violence streaked with witty, intelligent nihilism became incredibly popular with younger audiences (particularly young men). The majority of the critics groups chose it as their Best Picture, but the televised shows began and Gump seemed to be the favourite choice.

At the Oscars, Fiction and Gump were the only two nominees for Best Picture to win anything at all, while The Shawshank Redemption, Four Weddings and a Funeral (which stood no chance with only two nominations) and Robert Redford’s Quiz Show (most of whose team didn’t seem to be present at the ceremony) went home empty-handed. For the second time in Oscar history, three of the four acting winners were previous winners, accepting their trophies on a set designed to look like a camera iris but which actually seemed like an unintentional tribute to James Bond. The show was a mammoth test of endurance, as the needless montages added to the main categories as well as three of the special awards, the Honorary Oscar, the Thalberg AND the Hersholt, which at the time were still presented on the telecast. None of the drawbacks seemed to kill the show’s chances as popular television in the pre-internet age, as it drew in 48 million viewers, the most since 1983.

Reviews are by Bil Antoniou except where noted. Thanks to Colin Biggs for his generous contributions.