What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1994

The Year: 1994
What the Nominees Were: Forrest Gump, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Pulp Fiction, Quiz Show, The Shawshank Redemption
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: That’s a pretty good list, but surely Tim Burton’s Ed Wood should have taken one of those spots. Over in New Zealand, Heavenly Creatures could have gotten a nod.

What Did Win: Forrest Gump
How It’s Aged: Poorly. It’s on the wrong side of history in all kinds of ways. Let’s admit it: Jenny dies of AIDS because she embraced the counter-culture and had it coming. Great soundtrack, though.

What Should’ve Won: Pulp Fiction
How Hard Was the Decision: This was supposed to be a hard year but I found it pretty easy, because I’ve never been a fan of Forrest Gump or The Shawshank Redemption. I mean, Shawshank is fine. It’s gone on to become the internet’s favorite movie (highest ranked on user reviews on IMDb), so I rewatched it recently to see what I missed the first time. I thought it was decent. About as good as other movies from that era like Fried Green Tomatoes or The Client. A solid three stars. Certainly not the best movie ever made, nor the best movie of 1994.

Director: Quentin Tarantino
Writer: Tarantino, from a story by Tarantino and Roger Avary
Stars: John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Ving Rhames, Christopher Walken, Bruce Willis

The Story: Multiple storylines interweave, jumping around in time. In one, two hitmen accidentally kill a man, have to clean things up, and end up getting held up in a diner. In another a boxer kills a man in the ring in a match he was supposed to throw. I’ve barely begun, but I’ll end there.

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Original Screenplay. It lost Picture, Director, Actor for Travolta, Supporting Actor for Jackson, Supporting Actress for Thurman and Editing (which is crazy)
Why It Didn’t Win: Forrest Gump was a feel-good movie and this very much was not. As for Shawshank, that wouldn’t gain its current reputation until many years later. (I’m convinced that a big part of Shawshank’s latter-day rise is the internet’s abiding love for movies with all-male casts.)

Why It Should Have Won:

1. What this has in common with our last movie was that I’m not an unreserved fan of the filmmaker. Spielberg will probably end up with three movies on the list, though, whereas this will be the last we see of Tarantino. What this movie had going for it, more than anything, was that it was fresh. Possibly the freshest movie in this book. A bold new voice that challenged accepted notions of what a movie could be. It was thrilling to see this movie in the theater. You walked out with a spring in your step into a new world of possibility.
2. Of course, the freshest thing about this movie is the dialogue. One of the many rules it breaks is to have pages of dialogue that has nothing to do with the plot, but is just fun to listen to. They included chunks of the dialogue on the soundtrack album (almost as good as Gump’s) interspersed with the songs, and we happily listened to it again and again.
   
3. Indeed, Tarantino has always been king of the needle drop. He’s discovered more great-but-disregarded music than you have and he’s watched more great-but-disregarded movies than you have, and now he’s crunched them into insane mash-ups of pop-culture fun.
4. Only Tarantino saw that Travolta was a national resource that was lying fallow.  Only Tarantino saw the greatness that had gone untapped in Uma Thurman and Samuel L. Jackson.  He knew that his words could bring out the best in potentially-great actors.  He’s remained a great discoverer of talent ever since.  (Look at the cast list for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood!)
   
5. Most movies are about the solving of a large problem. It takes a great screenplay to get us to care about characters who aren’t facing one big problem which focuses all the action. This movie blows that notion out of the water. Amazing, Travolta dies (ignominiously) halfway through the movie, and then when we jump back in the timeline, we still worry that something bad will happen to him! Even though we know he lives and gets killed later! Tarantino knew he was an innate master of getting us to care, and he was flaunting that in our faces.
   
6. The movie is more fun once you realize what’s in the case: the Holy Grail. Have I really never laid out my Holy Grail theory on this blog? In short: It’s a glowing gold object that everybody recognizes, especially a British guy. Of the two people that find it, one becomes a holy wanderer (Jules / Galahad), the other (Vincent / Lancelot) cannot be redeemed because he had (or considered) an affair with his boss’s wife. The Lancelot character revived the Guenevere character from death by laying hands on her, etc. It all lines up.
   

Ah, 1994: Interesting for the price, but more interesting for the fine print, because in 1994 Denny's agreed to pay $54 million to settle lawsuits filed by thousands of black customers saying they were denied service. Sorry, folks!