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