What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1992

The Year: 1992
What the Nominees Were: The Crying Game, A Few Good Men, Howard’s End, Scent of a Woman, Unforgiven
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: It’s insane that Malcolm X was not even nominated. Aladdin and The Player should also have been up there (They’re certainly better than Scent of a Woman!) Over in indie-land, I love Simple Men, but that never would have been a nominee.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: Unforgiven
How Hard Was the Decision: An extremely hard choice between that and Malcolm X, which would be a richly deserving winner in most years. Ultimately, I’ve been awarding ties to the status quo, so I decided to stick with Unforgiven, which is also excellent.

Director: Clint Eastwood
Writer: David Webb Peoples
Stars: Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman and Richard Harris

The Story: Wild west outlaw Will Munny settles down to raise his kids, but then reluctantly takes a job to hunt down and kill two cowboys who slashed the face of a prostitute. He recruits his old friend Ned Logan and they do the job, but run afoul of a strict sheriff named Little Bill.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It won Picture, Director, Supporting Actor for Hackman, and Editing. It lost Actor for Eastwood, Original Screenplay, Art Direction, Cinematography, and Sound.
How It Won: With Malcolm X not even nominated, the competition wasn’t stiff. Eastwood had accumulated years of good will, and the movie was an unexpected box-office smash (It grossed over $159 million on a budget of $14.4 million.) That all added up to a fairly easy win.

Why It Won:

1. Eastwood famously directs script exactly as written with no rewrites, to the extent that writers are terrified Eastwood will buy their script because he’ll give them no chance to improve it. Luckily, in this case, Peoples’ script was ready for prime time, and nobody can object that other writers were never added to the process. Peoples (who is, other than this, best known for Blade Runner and 12 Monkeys) originally wrote this in 1976 (as The Cut-Whore Killings), sold it to Eastwood in the 80s, and Clint finally got around to making it in the 90s, which must have been an excruciating wait, but the eventual payoff could not have been better (and Eastwood had to wait until he was old enough to play the part.)
2. And indeed, Eastwood is staggering in the role, as a man with a lifetime of deeply-regretted-evil etched onto his craggy face. He infamously lost to Pacino’s terrible performance in Scent of a Woman, which was a legendary Oscar injustice (There are many years in which Pacino should have won, but this was not one of them.) (And, if it was up to me, I probably would have very reluctantly have given it to Denzel Washington’s Malcolm over Eastwood.)
   
3. There are different ways to puncture the myth of the west. You can make a counter-epic like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, in which traditional Hollywood morality is contrasted with carefree amorality, or you can make a grounded, grim, alternate-morality-play like this one. As opposed to Leone (to whom the movie is dedicated, along with Don Siegel) Eastwood goes for strict realism. By showing us how such a story would actually play out, he guns down the very notion of heroism and villainy.
4. In fact, he lets Hackman steal the movie as the sheriff who is seemingly in the right for most of the story (until he whips a fairly-blameless Black man to death.) His dying words, “I don’t deserve this, to die like this…I was building a house,” are a reminder that most villains are the heroes in their own minds, and can’t imagine that they’re villains from other points of view.
   
5. Jack Green’s cinematography also deserved to win over Philippe Rousselot’s work in A River Runs Through It. River was very pretty, but Green’s work is worthy of John Ford’s best. It can be beautiful and elegiac, but also hard-edged and brutal at the same time.
6. The always-wonderful Saul Rubinek didn’t make the poster, but he’s doing a lot of the work here as the professional hagiographer to the stars who’s got a lot to learn about the ugly reality of the West.
   
   
   

Ah, 1992! Who knew a whiff of this product would inspire one of the all-time great rock songs?

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1991

The Year: 1991
What the Nominees Were: Beauty and the Beast, Bugsy, JFK, The Prince of Tides, The Silence of the Lambs
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Richard Linklater’s Slacker is an indie masterpiece, but hardly the sort of movie that would have been considered.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: Silence of the Lambs
How Hard Was the Decision: Not really hard, because this is generally regarded as one of the best movies ever made. The only thing that affected the decision was that the movie’s intense transphobia has not aged well at all. But ultimately, the movie is so well made outside of that that I’ll reluctantly give it a pass.

Director: Jonathan Demme
Writer: Ted Tally, based on the novel by Thomas Harris
Stars: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine

The Story: Ambitious FBI trainee Clarice Starling is asked by her boss to interview the infamous serial killer Hannibal Lecter, in hopes that he can help them catch a new killer nick-named “Buffalo Bill”. Lecter detects that Clarice is ashamed of her rural past, so he insists on psycho-analyzing her in return for his help. Forced to tell Lecter everything, Clarice confronts her own past, which helps her track down and kill Bill, but Lecter escapes in the process.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: This became the first film since One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to win the big five: Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Adapted Screenplay. It lost Editing and Sound.
How It Won: It’s still really bizarre that this movie was recognized by the Academy, which doesn’t generally like serial-killer horror-thrillers, to put it mildly. It was just so damn good (whereas the only real Oscar-bait-y movie that year, JFK, was too controversial)

Why It Won:

1. In the DVD extras, Hopkins arrogantly says that no American actor could have played Lecter, because Americans are trained to make their characters organic and understandable, whereas British actors are willing to create characters externally, concerned more with the audience’s psychology than their own. His Lecter is essentially an inhuman devil: we’re not getting inside his head, he’s getting in ours. Crucially, Lecter remains three-dimensional and believable, because (novelist) Harris, (screenwriter) Tally, and (actor) Hopkins have given him a clear (albeit demonic) internal logic, but he’s not a character that you would arrive at by putting yourself in this situation, or even by reading the literature on typical serial killers. This story doesn’t “write itself”, because Lecter is an entirely original creation.
   
2. The DVD includes not only deleted scenes, but every line deleted from the remaining scenes, which is highly instructive when it comes to trimming movies down and keeping things moving. The editor is constantly snipping off the ending lines that would have provided a little “button” for each scene…But of course life is a lot more unpredictable and dangerous when things get unbuttoned. The finished movie is exactly two hours, which was obviously the producer-mandated length. If Demme hadn’t gone through and ruthlessly cut out every slack line and scene, it would have been 2:20, the standard length for today’s flabby, lifeless blockbusters.
   
3. Especially instructive are the two cut scenes that were obviously intended to provide a “launch into act three”. After Lecter escapes, the angry director of the FBI (played by Demme’s old mentor, Roger Corman) calls our heroes into his office where he summarily fires Crawford and kicks Clarice out of the Academy. As they leave (pictured below) Clarice says to Crawford that she’s now sure that the killer must be in Ohio, and she’s going to go there and find him, save the day, and get them their jobs back. These scenes were still in the movie for the early test screenings, but William Goldman (Princess Bride, Misery) attended one of those screenings and implored Demme to cut them, so Demme chopped them out and never looked back, which helps the movie immeasurably. We still feel that it’s all up to her now, but without her having to say that out loud, which was dreadful.
   
4. Demme always intended to shoot flashback footage of actual lambs to intercut with Clarice’s title-inspiring monologue, after first shooting the footage of Foster delivering it. It is both to his credit and Foster’s that he realized he had struck gold with her performance and couldn’t cut away.
5. Clarice’s first interview with Lecter is one of the greatest scenes ever written. She’s been given a series of rules about interacting with Lecter, only to realize she must break them one by one, in order to win his co-operation, (“Closer, Clarice…”) The number one rule she’s been given is “Tell him nothing personal. Believe me you don’t want Hannibal Lecter inside your head.” Only by breaking that rule can she win the day (though she does wind up empowering Lecter enough for him to eventually escape, and she wonders if it was all worth it.)

Ah, 1991: An ad as gorgeous as it was provocative

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1990

The Year: 1990
What the Nominees Were: Awakenings, Dances With Wolves, Ghost, The Godfather Part III, GoodFellas

Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan is one of my favorites. In China, Zhang Yimou had Ju Dou and in Poland Agnieszka Holland had Europa Europa both of which deserved Oscar nominations (certainly over The Godfather Part III!)

What Did Win: Dances With Wolves

How It’s Aged: It now seems overlong and self-important, with ill-considered white savior tropes. Well-intentioned and beautifully shot, but ultimately an empty vanity project for Kevin Costner.

What Should’ve Won: GoodFellas
How Hard Was the Decision: Easy. This is another widely acknowledged injustice. (Europa Europa was the only other one I would have considered, but it didn’t have a reasonable chance.)

Director: Martin Scorsese
Writers: Nicholas Pileggi and Scorsese, from Pileggi’s non-fiction book “Wiseguy”.
Stars: Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco, Paul Sorvino

The Story: Teenager Henry Hill joins the mafia and over the course of many years tries to become a made man alongside his friends Jimmy and Tommy. Instead, he ends up becoming a rat and testifying against everyone.

Any Nominations or Wins: It just won Supporting Actor for Joe Pesci. It lost Picture, Director, Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay, and Editing.
Why It Didn’t Win: The win for Dances With Wolves was perceived as a chance to heal a historical injustice (Hollywood’s treatment of Native Americans.) Whether it achieved that is dubious, but the Academy’s heart was in the right place. Goodfellas, though clearly the superior picture, was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Ray Liotta falls into the category of actors who must have been difficult offscreen, because onscreen, his work was always flawless, and yet he never found another showcase as good as this one. Why did Scorsese work with DeNiro and Pesci over and over but Liotta only once, when Liotta absolutely kills it in this movie (particularly when he’s coke-addled)? A mystery I’ve never solved.
   
2. That said, it’s no secret that Pesci steals the movie as the pint-sized hothead Tommy, until Tommy gets (shockingly and brutally) killed off. (You would think that Pesci’s unexpected Oscar for this movie must have earned him the right to a starring role in his even-better acting showcase My Cousin Vinny, but that movie was actually already in the middle of production when he won his Oscar.) Pesci famously wrote his own “Funny how?” scene based on a razzing he’d really gotten from a mobster when he was a waiter. Scorsese could tell it was gold and didn’t tell the other actors what was going to happen in the unscripted scene so that their shocked and nervous reactions would be genuine.
   
3. Many of the weakness of Scorsese’s later pictures are already here in abundance: there’s tons of voice-over, popular music needle drops, and frenetic cutting, but at this earlier stage these tropes were still working wonderfully, before he began to overly rely on them (possibly in a fruitless attempt to recreate the artistic peak of this movie)
4. Usually, classic rock radio stations cut out the coda of the Derek and the Domino’s song “Layla.” When it plays in this movie’s greatest montage, it’s just familiar enough to hit that nostalgic feeling, but unfamiliar enough that it’s far from over-exposed. As the co-conspirators of the Lufthansa heist meet their fates, the plaintive piano and guitar riffs elevate the tragedy of it all. 
5. This is another movie that benefitted from being highlighted in the great cinematography documentary Visions of Light, which pointed out the brilliant use of a “zoom in, dolly out” shot (aka the Vertigo shot) when Henry is having a conversation with Jimmy in a diner and realizes he’s going to get whacked. The framing remains the same, but the background perspective subtly shifts to become an abyss. Non-film students don’t notice what’s going on, but they feel that something is somehow very wrong.
   
6. Other mob movies, such as the Godfather films, had used the mob as a metaphor for America, in a way that elevated the nobility of the participants, but Scorsese is interested in exposing the reality of the institution in all its ignoble ugliness. The description of a how a bust-out works is as educational as it is entertaining (and was later edited into a vicious video paralleling Hill’s activities and those of Mitt Romney in his vulture-capital days.)

Ah, 1990: Eventually, those surgeon general warnings would become a lot more graphic