July 19, 2024
A few months ago, as I was writing one of my movie ramblings, I thought of Robert Redford’s 1994 film Quiz Show. I don’t remember why, and it’s not important. But the way my brain works is as follows: Oh, yeah – Quiz Show. Great movie. 1994. Best Picture nominee. Oooh, that was the year when the Academy actually nailed all five Best Picture nominations. Hmmm, that was 30 years ago this year. Great idea for a blog post. And here we are.
In case you missed last week’s post, I covered some of my favorite movies from 1994, and this week it’s time for part two, where we’re going to look at the five Best Picture nominees that year. Now, I don’t remember all of the nominees from every year, just certain iconic ones. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m making my way through all 601 movies nominated for Best Picture since the first ceremony in 1927. I’m over halfway there (doing this blog has been a big contributor to that progress), and while I may have a hard time finding a few movies (one in particular is lost to time), I’m hoping to get as close as I can to completing this (insane?) goal before the 100th Oscars in 2028.
Ok, on to this week’s topic. We’re going to start this look at the year the Academy (mostly) got it right with the winner of Best Picture.
The People’s Choice – Forrest Gump
In hindsight, it made perfect sense that this movie would be the one to take home the top prize, but for this (at the time) twenty-two year old, I was disappointed at the outcome, but we’ll get to that later. Forrest Gump was nominated for thirteen Oscars, winning six, including Picture, Director (Robert Zemeckis) and of course, Actor (Tom Hanks, who became the second back-to-back winner in Oscar history after winning for Philadelphia in 1993.) The reason that the win is obvious is not only because it was a runaway train that year, winning virtually every big award, it’s that the story is catnip for Oscar voters, especially those of a certain age – the Baby Boomers. The film delivered a nostalgia shot of fond memories from their formative years every fifteen minutes.
Thirty years later, you’ve probably seen this film at least once, and probably multiple times, given its popularity. When you read the iconic words “Life is like a box….” you know the rest. In fact, you probably just said it to yourself in the Forrest Gump voice, didn’t you?. So, I don’t need to recap the plot that Zemeckis adapted from a novel about an ordinary man who lives an extraordinary life. Gump’s experiences include brief interactions with many iconic people and events from the 1950s through the 1980s too numerous to mention here.
Hanks is magnificent in the lead role, and is joined by a stellar supporting cast that includes Robin Wright, Oscar-nominee Gary Sinise, Mykelti Williamson, and Sally Field. Forrest Gump also featured Zemeckis’s (at the time) groundbreaking special effects that inserted Gump into famous scenes in history, removed Sinise’s legs from scenes after his character’s injury in Vietnam, and created a large crowd at the reflecting pool in Washington, D.C, among other effects. But for me, the highlight of the movie is the stellar soundtrack, featuring timeless classics from the 60s, 70s and 80s. This soundtrack was one of those double CDs that everyone seemed to have, especially if you were a fan of that era in popular music.
Now, as much as everyone loved Forrest Gump in 1994, a funny thing happened over the years. There was some backlash that the movie was too saccharine and too melodramatic. It seemed that the sweetness of Forrest was at odds with the growing cynicism of the 2000s. I recently rewatched it for the first time in several years in preparation for this post and I think it holds up well. Yes, it’s on the long side and there are some questionable plot choices, like Forrest’s mother sleeping with the school principal (poor Sally Field), and the whole running across America sequence, even though I love Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty. The visual effects are still decent after thirty years, the music still hits all the right spots, and while the story is schmaltzy at times, Hanks’s everyman performance is sweet but not too corny. Is that because I’m now of the age that the Baby Boomers were when they first saw this film? Let’s not go there.
One interesting last note on Forrest Gump. Zemeckis, Hanks and Wright are reuniting for a new film coming this November. Here is based on a novel told from the perspective of one room in one house over hundreds of years. All of the people who come and go through that one location. From the looks of the trailer, Zemeckis is keeping the frame of the camera at the same angle the entire movie. It sounds like an intriguing premise and I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt (after all, this is the director of Back to the Future, Cast Away, and Flight), but the trailer has me concerned that it might be too corny. Who knows? Maybe these three can work the same magic they did with Forrest Gump thirty years ago.
Bring on the Charm – Four Weddings and a Funeral
What a delightful romantic comedy and the type of movie that the Academy rarely nominates for Best Picture. Leave it to the Brits to figure out the secret formula. Leading the cast of Four Weddings and a Funeral is Hugh Grant, who achieved breakout stardom following the film’s successful release. He stars as Charles, who is constantly attending other people’s weddings, but never seems to find love himself. We meet his fun group of friends, who also navigate the ups and downs of looking for love. Early in the film, Charles falls for Carrie, an American played by Andie McDowell. Throughout the movie, as we see the friends gather periodically for another set up of nuptials, Charles and Carrie reunite, but the timing for a relationship never quite works.
Four Weddings is the kind of film that is so well-written, that it never goes out of style. Even thirty years later, the jokes all work, because this is the kind of story that can work in any decade. The film was written by Richard Curtis, who would go on to write a number of other iconic British romantic comedies, including Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’ Diary, and Love Actually. Curtis’s script develops characters that we get to know and love, even if they are not played by well-known actors. Instead of cheap jokes, the script focuses on the relationship of the friends, their idiosyncrasies, and how they all joke with one another. We feel genuine sadness when one of the group passes away, leading to the titular funeral, because we got to know the characters.
And let’s be honest – Grant is a home run in this role. His chemistry with McDowell is wonderful. It’s so easy to see why movie audiences fell in love with his “Aw shucks” charm as he tries to sweet talk one woman while an ex-girlfriend tears him apart for how they broke up. There are times when you cringe at how uncomfortable Charles is feeling, but it’s hysterical in the way Grant portrays the character. His charming performance is summed up perfectly when he struggles to tell Carrie how he feels about her, stumbling over his words, before he says “in the words of David Cassidy, while he was still with the Partridge Family, I think I love you”. Chef’s kiss.
The Scandal Was Televised – Quiz Show
The era of 1950s television was brought to life by director Robert Redford in Quiz Show, focused on a scandal that rocked the country. At the center of the story is Twenty-One, a game show in which two contestants answer trivia questions for big money prizes. We meet Herbert Stempel, who is the recurring champion, but not exactly photogenic for television. We then quickly learn that the show’s producers give the questions and answers to the contestants before the program, helping to shepherd a narrative story of lovable winners and heartbreaking losers week to week. The suspense helps build ratings and attract advertisers, bringing money to NBC. When the network brass and the head of the main advertiser (played by Martin Scorsese, in a fantastic cameo) get tired of Stempel, they decide they need a new winner. Enter Charles Van Doren, straight out of central casting.
The storyline of Quiz Show is focused on three main characters. Stempel (played wonderfully by the versatile John Turturro) who loves the attention when he is winning, but goes on a rampage when he is dumped by the network. Van Doren, played by Ralph Fiennes, is a college professor and member of a prominent literary family. He is smart and tries to play it honestly, but soon succumbs to getting the answers in advance and going along with the ruse. Lastly, we have Dick Goodwin, a government attorney who is charged with investigating the alleged fixed game shows. Goodwin is played by Rob Morrow, using a pronounced Boston accent that actually doesn’t bother me that much, primarily because I love his performance.
Quiz Show is an excellent look at what transpired over the course of several months as NBC fooled the country with a rigged game show. The producers argued “television is entertainment” but when the house of cards collapsed, people were outraged. For me, it was particularly interesting to watch the evolution of each of the three main characters. Stempel’s descent from hero to loser. Van Doren changes from someone desperate for his father’s attention to someone who feels guilty at what he’s done. And Goodwin, whose opinion of Stempel and Van Doren changes as he gets to know them through his investigation. When Goodwin realizes that television is too powerful of a business to be impacted by his investigation, he is crestfallen that money always wins.
Redford’s film received six Oscar nominations, including Director and Supporting Actor for Paul Scofield, who is excellent as Van Doren’s father. Ultimately, the movie didn’t win any awards that night, but that’s ok – it was a loaded year. I would have liked to see Fiennes receive a nomination for Best Actor, but he had no shot to win – not when he was going up against Tom Hanks and a nominee from each of our next two movies. Fiennes is an example of an actor who is nominated early in their breakout period, but doesn’t win, usually because people say “Oh, he has plenty of time. He’ll get one eventually. Let’s give it to someone else this year.” Fiennes was nominated for Best Supporting Actor in 1993 for Schindler’s List, but lost to Tommy Lee Jones for The Fugitive. Hard to argue with that one, but Fiennes probably deserved it. In 1996, he was nominated for The English Patient, but lost to Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire. Just kidding – that’s what the Academy should have done, but they gave Best Actor to Geoffrey Rush for Shine. Yeah, not good. Anyway, I’m hoping Fiennes eventually finds Oscar gold – he’s an excellent actor and has earned it over the last thirty years.
A Masterpiece – The Shawshank Redemption
Last year when I was ranking my favorite movies of 2023, I had Killers of the Flower Moon at #1 and Oppenheimer at #2, but in reality it was really 1A and 1B. In fact, I would probably flip those two if I had to do it over today. The same is true for my two favorite movies of 1994 – both five star masterpieces. First we’re going to cover the most unlikely film based on a Stephen King novel. Well, maybe second-most unlikely after Stand by Me. When we consider “perfect movies,” the list is pretty short, but there’s no doubt that The Shawshank Redemption belongs on that list.
Director Frank Darabont adapted King’s short story about a banker convicted of killing his wife and her lover, leading to a life sentence at Shawshank State Prison in Maine. Tim Robbins plays Andy Dufresne, who was innocent of the crime, but forced to adapt to his new life behind bars. Fortunately, he becomes friends with Red (Morgan Freeman in an Oscar-nominated performance), a man who knows how to get things. As we see the many years go by, we learn the ways the men at Shawshank navigate dealing with the warden, the guards, and assaults by other prisoners. Red is resigned to spending his whole life in Shawshank, while Andy never gives up hope that he can someday get out and have his life back.
The Shawshank Redemption is on the one hand, one of the better prison films of all-time (up there with Cool Hand Luke and The Great Escape), but it’s also about the relationship between two men. Even though they come from different backgrounds, Red and Andy become close friends because they have a pragmatic way of looking at their life. Red accepts his fate and deals in contraband to keep the guards and prisoners happy. Andy does everything he can to try to live a “normal” life – doing tax returns for the guards, building a prison library and even helping the warden launder money. He’s still a “businessman,” even as a convict.
The film features two outstanding lead performances from Freeman and Robbins, a compelling screenplay depicting the lives of the prisoners over two decades, and a top-notch score from composer Thomas Newman. What’s best known about The Shawshank Redemption is, of course, the concluding sequence where we see (spoiler ahead if you’ve never seen the movie, but it’s thirty years old and one of the best films of all-time, so…..) how Andy escaped, Red finally getting out on parole and their reunion on a beach in Mexico. I can’t think of many prison movies you could describe as “feel-good” and “heartwarming,” especially coming from the mind of Stephen King, but when it all comes together on the screen, that’s the magic of movies.
The Best Picture of 1994 (if I Decided the Oscars) – Pulp Fiction
Who knows how many movies I’ve seen in my lifetime in a theater? Several hundred? I can only recall a handful of theatrical experiences more than five years ago (when I started this little hobby) that truly left an impact on me. Seeing The Commitments at the Academy of Music Opera House in Northampton, Massachusetts. My jaw literally dropping at the end of The Usual Suspects and saying, “I need to see this again immediately.” And one day in the Fall of 1994 when I felt an adrenaline rush you can only hope for when you see a new movie from an exciting young filmmaker. This was, of course, the premiere of Pulp Fiction from director Quentin Tarantino.
Thirty years later, I still wish this was the Best Picture winner of 1994, but it was not to be. Pulp Fiction was nominated for seven Oscars, including Director, Actor (John Travolta), Supporting Actor (Samuel L. Jackson), and Supporting Actress (Uma Thurman). While Tarantino didn’t win the big prize, he was awarded the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Looking back on it, it’s easy to see why if there was one award the film would win, it would be for the script, which crackles with clever dialogue, hysterical jokes, and a fierceness in Tarantino’s ability to tell us the story of gangsters without regard for any offense the viewer might feel. Yes, there are problematic lines in the movie, just like there are in many of Tarantino’s pictures. Coupled with the usual violence he includes in his movies, I understand why his stories are not for everyone.
The film was also nominated for Best Editing, which is interesting in that one of the more confusing aspects of Pulp Fiction is the nonlinear story. I remember the first time I saw the movie, when Vincent (Travolta’s character) appears in a scene shortly after he was killed by Butch (Bruce Willis’s character), I was confused, like many viewers probably were. I was a movie fan at the time, but was not overly familiar with this type of storytelling. Now, it seems like it’s common for films to open with a short scene, followed by a title card that says, “one week earlier,” and then we spend the rest of the movie learning how we got to the opening scene. In fact, I now think it’s an overused trope and I’m only interested when you get a film like Christopher Nolan’s Memento, which pushes the boundary of nonlinear storytelling in a way that challenges the viewer. I love that shit – if a movie makes you want to rewatch it immediately after it’s over, the director succeeded.
Let’s talk about the cast. Pulp Fiction was the comeback movie for John Travolta, whose career had faded after the 1970s success of Saturday Night Fever and Grease. The 1980s were forgettable, but after the resurgence of his career (with an Oscar nomination to boot), Travolta enjoyed a run of success in the 1990s and 2000s. Travolta played Vincent Vega, a gangster roaming around greater Los Angeles with his partner Jules Winnfield, played to perfection by Samuel L. Jackson. Vincent and Jules are charged with recovering a stolen suitcase for their boss Marcellus Wallace, the contents of which have been speculated about for thirty years. All we know is that it glows when the briefcase is opened, but it doesn’t really matter what the item is, because it’s the journey of these characters that’s important.
After recovering the briefcase in a sequence that lets Jackson shine as he delivers Tarantino’s dialogue, we shift forward to a vignette where Vincent takes his boss’s wife Mia (Uma Thurman) out for dinner to a restaurant he describes as a “wax museum with a pulse.” Staff dressed up as famous actors and singers decorate Jack Rabbit Slims, where Travolta and Thurman win a dance contest twisting to Chuck Berry’s You Never Can Tell. Their evening goes off the rails when Mia overdoses on Vincent’s heroin, leading to a heart-stopping (pun intended) sequence where he is forced to plunge an adrenaline shot into her heart to revive her.
The middle act is probably my least favorite portion of the movie, mostly because of its disturbing climax. Bruce Willis is excellent in a subdued role as Butch, the boxer whose plans to get out of town after rigging one of his fights takes a bizarre turn when he encounters two men best described as the worst kind of people on Earth. Butch and Marcellus (Ving Rhames) are tortured in a sequence that is more squirm-inducing than the ear (ahem) surgery scene in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, which I didn’t think was possible. As much as I like the acting here, I much prefer spending time with Vincent and Jules, which we get to in the third story.
Tarantino takes us back to the early sequence and we see the aftermath of the suitcase recovery. Jules is convinced that divine intervention prevented them from being killed by gunfire, but Vincent derails the conversation with an accident that sets off a chain reaction of disgusting and hysterical scenes to bring us home. Travolta, Tarantino (playing a homeowner forced to help the gangsters) and Harvey Keitel (playing a fixer arriving to clean up the mess) all shine during this story, but Jackson is on fire. His delivery of the outrage towards Vincent’s actions is downright hysterical. It’s worth noting that he received his only Oscar nomination for this performance, but lost to Martin Landau (for Ed Wood), which was more of a career-recognition Oscar. Jackson is on the short list of this year’s Oscar favorites for his upcoming role in The Piano Lesson. I expect that film to get a heavy awards season push from Netflix when it is released later this year. Maybe it will be Jackson’s turn to get the career-recognition Oscar he so richly deserves.
There is so much more I could write about Pulp Fiction. The soundtrack is outstanding, building on Tarantino’s talent of picking songs that are just right for the scene, but not so obvious, which he did again with 2019’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Contrast that approach with Zemeckis picking the obvious songs in Forrest Gump. As much as I love that soundtrack, it’s a bit on the nose to be playing Fortunate Son as Gump and his fellow soldiers touch down in Vietnam. Tarantino also made the brilliant decision to include snippets of dialogue on the soundtrack album in between songs. Listening to Travolta and Jackson talk about the Royale with Cheese makes you want to watch the film again. And the dialogue. So many memorable lines. Riffs about foot massages, Big Kahuna burgers, five dollar shakes, “Check out the big brain on Brad!,” coffee described as “some serious gourmet shit,” and Winston Wolfe asking, “pretty please, with sugar on top, clean the fucking car.”
I’m not sure when we will see Tarantino’s next (and allegedly last) film. He had planned to go into production on a movie he wrote called The Critic, but recently scrapped the idea and is back to square one. What I do know is that his next movie will likely feature a great story, a top-notch script, and a cast full of talented actors portraying characters that only Tarantino could create in his head, like he did with Pulp Fiction, my Best Picture of 1994.
That’s all for this week. I hope you enjoyed this look at an incredible movie year and found some films to check out (or rewatch for fun.) Next week, I’ll be back with my usual monthly look at some new releases, including A Quiet Place: Day One, Kevin Costner’s Horizon, the horror sensation Longlegs, the action movie Twisters, and much more. Thanks for reading and if you’d like to be notified of future posts, you can subscribe below.