What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2001

The Year: 2001
What the Nominees Were: A Beautiful Mind, Gosford Park, In the Bedroom, The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, Moulin Rouge
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: In retrospect, the most acclaimed movie of this year is now David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. The Coen Brothers turned out one of their weirdest but best with The Man Who Wasn’t There. Wes Anderson almost equaled Rushmore with The Royal Tenenbaums. Donnie Darko was a great one-hit wonder. And then of course, there’s Memento…

What Did Win: A Beautiful Mind
How It’s Aged: Anyone who knows anything about mental illness was going to feel very frustrated here, wanting to shout “that’s not how that works!” An honest portrayal of the life of John Nash, who was not a very good person, would have gone down very differently.

What Should’ve Won: Memento
How Hard Was the Decision: This is another hard year because the general consensus is that the Academy was wrong and that the best movie of this year was Mulholland Drive. But I just can’t get behind that choice. The movie started as a TV pilot, and I’ve always felt it would have been a great TV show, but the decision to tack on an ending and try to wrap things up quickly was ultimately a mistake. Don’t get me wrong, the movie is great, and maybe if I didn’t know the history, I wouldn’t notice this at all, but once you know it, it’s tremendously obvious. So I decided to go with Memento. (I should point out that Memento was released in festivals in the year 2000, and won some awards that year, but didn’t have a wide release until 2001 and that was the year it was eligible for Oscars, so I’m counting it as a 2001 release.)

Director: Christopher Nolan
Writer: Christopher Nolan, based on the short story “Memento Mori” by his brother Jonathan Nolan
Stars: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano

The Story: A former insurance investigator named Leonard Shelby, who cannot make new memories, makes the extremely bad decision to hunt down his wife’s killer. A femme fatale named Natalie manipulates him into killing a sketchy cop named Teddy …Or that’s what we eventually figure out, but every scene in the movie is in reverse order, making everything very confusing, and putting us in his shoes.

Any Nominations or Wins: It was nominated for Original Screenplay (despite being adapted) and Best Film Editing, but lost both.
Why It Didn’t Win: An “inspiring” “true story” like A Beautiful Mind beats this gritty mindbender any day of the week.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. This is the ultimate puzzle box of a movie, and you feel very smart as you snap the jigsaw pieces together (and occasionally dumb as you fail to do so.) It’s a very satisfying reveal when we find out that the one really jerking Leonard around is neither Natalie or Teddy, but he himself. Like most of us, Leonard is his own worst enemy.
2. One of the enduring mysteries of Hollywood: why wasn’t Guy Pearce more of a star? He made a big splash with L.A. Confidential, then he had this masterful performance, and then… very little. He was lucky to get a villain role in Iron Man 3. But why wasn’t he playing Iron Man himself? Is it a case where he was picky in his roles, or was he difficult to work with, maybe? I don’t know. (For that matter, Carrie-Anne Moss should’ve gotten more parts too.)
   
3. The bizarre DVD requires you to take a psychological test to get to the menu, and if you answer it in just the right sequence it’ll give you the ultimate easter egg: the movie rearranged in chronological order. Massively edifying to see it that way, and it is possible to cheat using the internet, so check it out!
4. It’s funny to watch today. For a movie from the 21st century, the plot is very reliant on outdated technology (landlines and a polaroid camera). Leonard Shelby may still be out there killing the wrong people, but hopefully he’s doing it more efficiently these days with the help of a smartphone.
   
5. I can’t say for sure whether or not we’ll be seeing Christopher Nolan again, because I’m writing this book in order, but I can say definitively that this is my favorite of his films. I have a limited tolerance for the narrative trickery of some of his later films, but this one hits me just the right way, setting a bar that he still has yet to surpass, in my opinion. This time around, the central conceit is dazzling, and a little dizzying, but never deadening.
6. As Leonard himself point out, this whole situation is karmic justice for him denying an insurance claim of a man with a similar condition.  At the heart of so much of American literature is the evils of our health-care system.  

Ah, 2001: I guess it’s never the wrong time to send the right message, but this was an odd choice, Kenneth Cole…

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2000

The Year: 2000
What the Nominees Were: Chocolat; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Erin Brockovich; Gladiator; Traffic
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: The Coen Brothers’ delightful O Brother Where Art Thou?

What Did Win: Gladiator
How It’s Aged: Your milage may vary, but I feel that this is a fundamentally silly movie that takes itself way too seriously. I actually preferred the critically derided Gladiator 2, because that movie knew just how cheesy it was.

What Should’ve Won: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
How Hard Was the Decision: Not very. I love this movie.

Director: Ang Lee
Writers: Wang Hui-ling, James Schamus and Tsai Kuo-jung, based on the novel by Wang Dulu
Stars: Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Chang Chen

The Story: Master swordsman Li Mu Bai entrusts his treasured green destiny sword to his never-quite-happened love interest Yu Shu Lien but the sword is then stolen by a young noblewoman-by-day, thief-by-night named Jen Yu. Jen Yu is tracked by down by her own conflicted lover, a mountain bandit named Lo. Will our heroes get the sword back, and who will end up dead in the process?

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Foreign Language Film, Art Direction, Cinematography and Original Score. It lost Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Costume Design, Editing and Original Song.
Why It Didn’t Win: Obviously it was under serious consideration, because it won four awards, but ultimately it couldn’t compete with Gladiator’s revival of the good old fashioned sword-and-sandal flick.  Maybe the Academy just prefers its epics in English (though there was a crude English dub of this one.)

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Neither Chow Yun Fat nor Zhang Ziyi were trained martial artists, but you’d never know it, because Lee and fight choreographer Yuen Wo Peing (who also did The Matrix) beautifully and balletically choreograph everything down to the smallest gesture. (Lee says in the commentary, “I learned the hard way making this martial arts film…the way this kind of film works, it’s more like music, more like dancing choreography…It’s cinema. It’s cinematic skills rather than the skill of beating someone up.”)
   
2. His co-writer, co-producer, and co-commentor James Schamus then cuts him down saying: “It’s not cinema, it’s a movie.” The commentary is great fun as Schamus keeps needling Lee about his previous flops (“Ride with the Devil, what a bomb”) and any other way he can. They’re a fun pair.
3. I was shocked to discover that the movie is exactly two hours. It feels more like three, in a good way, in that it’s got a lot of epic sweep crammed into its handsome runtime. The twenty minute flashback to Lo and Jen’s romance, shot on the scenic wastelands of far-Western China, is worthy of David Lean.
   
4. This is the first Lee movie I’ve gotten to (but not the last, of course.) It’s radically different from his previous movies in some ways, but Schamus points out that it’s sort of Sense and Sensibility with Martial Arts. “We’re talking about the relationship between individual freedom and the oppressive orders of a society that has yet to deal with the aspirations of its female members.” (He of course later sums this up more dismissively as “Ang Lee, repression, blah blah blah.”) It’s great to see Michelle Yeoh, who had made lots of good chop-socky movies, get a meaty part like this.
5. Peter Pau’s Oscar winning cinematography steals the show throughout, and he’s particularly good at one of the biggest challenges in film: Day for Night (scenes set at night but shot during the day.) Digital color-timing was new and this was the first movie to master the advances to make Day for Night work, really for the first time in cinematic history (Lean himself never mastered it and that’s the biggest flaw with Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia)
   
6. The Pitt-Jolie version of Mr. and Mrs. Smith would steal from this movie the whole “prove someone’s a super-assassin by dropping something at the dinner table and their super-reflexes keep it from hitting the ground” bit, but this gets points for doing it first and doing it better. The look Yeoh gives Ziyi when she gives herself away is devastating.
   

Ah, 2000: You keep using this word “punk.” I do not think it means what you think it means.

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1999

The Year: 1999
What the Nominees Were: American Beauty, The Cider House Rules, The Green Mile, The Insider, The Sixth Sense
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: This year is very frustrating for me. The internet (and even an actual print book entitled “Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen” by Brian Raftery) loves to claim that this was one of the all-time best years for American film. I just don’t see it. Most of the nominees are merely okay movies. As for non-nominees, it’s supposedly a shame that The Matrix wasn’t nominated? Really? When I saw it, I immediately tagged it as a recipe for creating psychopaths (nobody is real but you) and that’s proven to be very true. Fight Club has similar problems. Magnolia is a very good movie but it’s also a mess, where half the storylines don’t work as well as they ought. Eyes Wide Shut is a bit of a trainwreck. I enjoyed Being John Malcovich at the time but tried to rewatch it recently and couldn’t get through it because it’s just too self-consciously quirky. Election is brilliant, but its attitude toward child-abuse has aged very badly. Speaking of which…

What Did Win: American Beauty
How It’s Aged: Hoo boy. This very sympathetic portrait of a would-be child molester has aged even worse. Could you make an unproblematic movie about that subject matter? Maybe so, if you were very careful to get the tone right, but this movie doesn’t pull it off. And of course, given later allegations against star Kevin Spacey, it’s deeply ironic he got (and won an Oscar for) this role.

What Should’ve Won: The Talented Mr. Ripley
How Hard Was the Decision: Ultimately, there are only three unproblematic movies I love from this overrated year: Galaxy Quest, The Sixth Sense and The Talented Mr. Ripley. I rewatched the latter two to help make my decision and this one won (though I really enjoyed Sixth Sense and I do recommend it highly. Talk about a movie that rewards rewatches!)

Director: Anthony Minghella
Writer: Minghella, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith
Stars: Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Cate Blanchett, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jack Davenport

The Story: After borrowing a friend’s blazer for a piano recital, young con man Tom Ripley gets a chance to go to Italy and try to convince a rich man’s son, Dickie Greenleaf, to come home. Instead, Tom kills Dickie and takes over his life, then has to tell many lies to try to avoid being discovered.

Any Nominations or Wins: Astoundingly, it didn’t get a Picture or Actor nomination, but it did get nods for Supporting Actor for Law, Adapted Screenplay, Score, Production Design and Costume Design. It won nothing.

Why It Didn’t Win: American Beauty oozed Profundity with a capital P (Oh, the plastic bag!) so this neo-noir beauty couldn’t compete, I guess. Still, it’s baffling that it got beat out for a nomination by weak fare such as The Cider House Rules.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. It certainly seems that the Academy has never loved Matt Damon (though 2026 may finally be his overdue year). This is one of multiple years he should have won the award, perfectly capturing both the psychopathic hollow soul and the achingly sympathetic underdog that form the warring cores of the character. Those two aspects shouldn’t go together, but Damon makes it work beautifully.
   
2. I’ve always said that the special ingredient to a great performance is to always give your actor a secret that is not revealed in the scene. Even better is when they have conflicting lies that the audience knows about that are about to smash together, and then we watch them acrobatically get out of it. Damon’s linguistic gymnastics are delightful and riveting.
   
3. At this point I’ve read the novel, seen the original French adaptation with Alain Delon (Purple Noon), seen this, and seen the excellent black-and-white TV adaptation “Ripley” with Andrew Scott in the role. I enjoyed all four, but this one is the best of them, because Minghella complicates the story more, twisting the many knives that are out for Tom at all times. (Most of the second half of the movie, featuring the Blanchett and Davenport characters, was added by Minghella.)
   
4. One of Minghella’s many changes was switching Dickey’s amateur dabbling from painting to jazz, which is inherently more cinematic (though the TV show got great fun out of Dickie’s terrible paintings.) You can tell that Minghella loves luxuriating in the late-night jam sessions, just as much as he loves to recreate midcentury Europe at its most gorgeous.
   
5. Speaking of gorgeous, is there any better casting as “the beautiful people” than late-90s Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow? They’re both great actors, but they also needed ethereal good looks for these part to work, and they certainly make the movie easy on the eyes.
   
   
   

Ah, 1999: Their slogan was “Don’t Be Evil.” Then they changed it.

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1998

The Year: 1998
What the Nominees Were: Elizabeth, Life is Beautiful, Saving Private Ryan, Shakespeare in Love, The Thin Red Line
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Wes Anderson’s Rushmore and the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski. Over in Denmark, the Dogme film movement hit a high mark with Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration, which certainly deserved a nod.

What Did Win: Shakespeare in Love
How It’s Aged: Personally, I like it a lot. A delightful little pastry combining 90s Rom Com tropes with a highly fictionalized version of the life of Shakespeare. A good movie that suffered from being named Best Picture, a bar it shouldn’t have had to clear.

What Should’ve Won: Rushmore
How Hard Was the Decision: Hard. It’s universally considered to be one of the great Oscar injustices that Saving Private Ryan didn’t win, so I just rewatched that movie…and I really hate it. “Greatest Generation” macho fan fiction, in which the only one who follows the Geneva conventions of course turns out to be a sniveling coward in battle, uselessly quivering as the German soldier they spared comes back and kills several of them. Way too long (three hours!), terrible score, very dated acid-washed color timing, gloopy acting from Hanks…Compare this to a vastly superior movie, The Big Red One (which I reluctantly passed over back in 1980), which tells a similar story, but this time written and directed by an actual veteran, and there’s a world of difference. Fuller has the genuine humanity that Spielberg sorely lacks. So that left Rushmore and The Big Lebowski. Believe it or not, of the two, I prefer this one. Lebowski is great, but a bit too shaggy-dog to rank up there with the Coens’ best, in my eyes.

Director: Wes Anderson
Writers: Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson (!)
Stars: Jason Schwartzman, Olivia Williams, Bill Murray, Brian Cox

The Story: Max Fischer is a scholarship student at an elite private school, where he runs all the clubs but neglects his grades. He strikes up a friendship with a school funder, Mr. Blume, and develops a crush on a Kindergarten teacher, Ms. Cross. When the dean kicks him out, Max ends up in public school, but he continues his schemes to get Ms. Cross. Instead, she falls for Bloom. Max tries to get revenge, but ultimately helps get them together and finds a girl his own age.

Any Nominations or Wins: Nothing! Not even Murray! Not even screenplay! Truly shocking. It won Independent Spirit Awards for Director and Supporting Actor for Murray. Murray was also nominated for a Golden Globe.
Why It Didn’t Win: This year is infamous as the year that Harvey Weinstein’s influence peaked and the dubious win of Shakespeare in Love has his fingerprints all over it. (Weinstein remains one of the most thanked people in the history of the awards) If Miramax had distributed Rushmore, would they have given this one that push instead? That’s an interesting “what if.”

Why It Should Have Won:

1. I fell in love with Wes Anderson when this movie was released and he’s still my favorite working filmmaker today. (If you were to ask Reddit to create a Mount Rushmore of the greatest directors working today, it would surely be Nolan, Villeneuve, Fincher, and Tarantino. Each of those four men has made at least one good movie, but I find it so depressing that the style they share is the dominant one.) Anderson has a strong personality that has only asserted itself more and more in the years that have followed this one. Some find it twee, but I find it delightful, and, like Kubrick, the man is precise. Every prop is bespoke and intentionally placed. And they both know where to put a camera.
   
2. We passed over Groundhog Day, but I’m glad to get to award another legendary Bill Murray performance here. The movies are only five years apart, but they marked different phases of his career, going from cocky leading man to world-weary supporting player. I adore his line reading when he tells Max he was in Vietnam and Max knows just enough to ask “Were you in the shit?” Murray considers laughing in the kid’s face, but instead quietly responds, “Yeah, I was in the shit.”
   
3. Out of every movie I’ve seen, I identify with this (frequently awful) hero the most. Like him, I was a precocious kid with bad grades and too much interest in extracurriculars. Like him, I always befriended adults, then felt easily betrayed by them. Like him, I became marginally less insufferable only due to some big humiliations. Schwatzman’s bluster is infectious, but it’s wonderful whenever it gets punctured a little, such as when he suddenly loses all confidence and meekly asks the dean, “Couldn’t we just let me drift by...for old time’s sake?”
   
4. In good movies, the hero must always choose between goods or between evils, rather than choose between good and evil. That choice is the theme. The theme of this movie is ambition vs. acceptance. As always, the hero must ultimately choose one over the other, but not be sure if he is right. Max chooses to scale back his ambitions in the end and accept some things about himself (“I’m a barber’s son.”) but he’s still mounting a ludicrously over-the-top play at his new, more modest public school. For my checklist, I identified various things he says that might qualify as a “false statement of philosophy” in the first half and a “corrected statement of philosophy” in the second half, but I realized there’s one statement he never abandons. He finds that Ms. Cross has transcribed a Jacques Cousteau quote: “When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.” That remains true of Max throughout.
   
5. Max tries to seduce Ms. Cross by reading David Halberstam’s “The Powers That Be” in front of her, which doesn’t work, but it does wonderfully establish his metaphor family: Midcentury public intellectual (“May I see some documentation?” “I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but…”, “I strongly agree with your views,” and my favorite, when he adds “and whatnot,” to the end of a sentence.)

Ah, 1998: Nope, don’t buy these! Much better flat-screen TVs for cheaper are coming very soon…

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1997

(Can I tell you how much I hate this poster? That’s not how people hug! Either her neck has snapped or he’s getting impaled by her shoulder.)
The Year: 1997
What the Nominees Were: As Good as it Gets, The Full Monty, Good Will Hunting, L.A. Confidential, Titanic
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: It’s crazy that Donnie Brasco wasn’t nominated (Give it the As Good as It Gets spot!) Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men was great (I had it at the top of my list at the time, but I was more edgelord-y then), Allen should have been in contention with Deconstructing Harry, Sayles delivered yet again with Men With Guns, and one of my personal favorites from that year was Jill Sprecher’s Clockwatchers.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: Titanic
How Hard Was the Decision: Hard. Donnie Brasco is great and L.A. Confidential is even better. It would easily win if I could move it to another year. But Titanic (a movie I didn’t appreciate at the time) just gets better and better every year. I showed it to my kids (10 and 13 at the time) and it instantly became the all-time favorite movie for both.

Writer and Director: James Cameron
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Gloria Stuart

The Story: An American heiress named Rose meets a rootless drifter named Jack on the doomed ship and they instantly fall head over heels for each other. Will either one survive the disaster?

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It won (deep breath) Picture, Director, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Editing, Score, Song, Sound, Sound Effects Editing, and Visual Effects. It lost Make-Up, Actress for Winslet, and Supporting Actress for Stuart, meaning that it got no acting awards.
How It Won: A pretty easy decision for the Academy: The most successful movie of all time, and it was a historical epic? Sign us up, please! America would have torched the Academy if this movie hadn’t won. Everybody was so enthusiastic to see it win that it ended up being the most watched Academy Awards show ever, as of this writing.

Why It Won:

1. Cameron may or may not be the best scenarist of all time, but there’s no doubt he’s the best scene-deleter. As with many of his movies, the deleted scenes would have made this movie awful, but Cameron thankfully realized what needed to go, including everybody confronting old-Rose at the deck of the ship to keep her from throwing the necklace in.
   
2. This movie has my favorite runtime for any movie ever, which is to say that, in the original press materials, it listed the runtime as “2 hours and 74 minutes,” which is technically true…but is not the way we typically reckon with time. I’m famous for my predilection for handsome (which is to say, shorter) movies, but this is one epic that earns every second. The movie is masterfully structured, and it’s no accident that the iceberg hits at the exact midpoint (and we’re enjoying ourselves before it hits as much as we do afterwards.)
   
3. The dialogue in this movie gets criticized a lot (specifically the fact that Jack and Rose call out each other’s names too often) but I’ve never gotten the objections. Yes, I wouldn’t call the prose literary, but the dialogue makes me fall in love with these characters just as much as they’re falling in love with each other, and that’s all I can ask.
4. The movie is also criticized for some small deviations from the true story, but that seems hopelessly nitpicky. Cameron (one of the first and most frequent people to visit the wreck) is clearly one of the all-time great experts on the topic, and the wealth of detail is luxuriously opulent. Most of the deviations (such as demonizing some people who weren’t that bad) are in the interest of telling a better story, and some of the flat-out mistakes (Jack remembers a lake that hadn’t been created yet) are charming.
5. Winslet getting a nomination as DiCaprio was passed over was perhaps unfair, but it speaks to Cameron’s frequent preference (in his best movies) for strong heroines over strong heroes. (Thankfully, Cameron hired silent-film-vet Stuart to play old-Rose instead of putting Winslet in old-age makeup, but you can’t help but notice that the only awards it lost were for Winslet, Stuart, and Make-Up. Combine those three into one and you would have surely had a winner.)
   

Ah, 1997: My dad growing up was always offended by ads that sexualized asexual products and would shout “It’ll get you laid” as he watched TV. This one would amuse him.

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1996

The Year: 1996
What the Nominees Were: The English Patient, Fargo, Jerry Maguire, Secrets and Lies, Shine
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Sayles’ greatest film Lone Star should’ve taken Jerry Maguire’s spot. Robert Altman turned in his last masterpiece with Kansas City, but that got ignored too.

What Did Win: The English Patient
How It’s Aged: Ever since “Seinfeld” took aim at it, it’s been a bit of a punching bag, the shorthand example of an art-film winner that leaves wider audiences cold. I think it’s fine, but not as good as…

What Should’ve Won: Fargo
How Hard Was the Decision: As much as I love Secrets and Lies, Lone Star and Kansas City, this was pretty easy. Fargo is one of the best movies ever made.

Director: Joel Coen
Writers: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Stars: Frances McDormand, William H. Macy, Steve Buscemi, Harve Presnell, Peter Stormare

The Story: Minneapolis car dealer Jerry Lundegaard hires two goons to kidnap his wife in order to get the ransom out of his father-in-law, but everything goes wrong. Very-pregnant small-town policewoman Marge Gunderson catches wind of the crime and settles everything.

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Actress and Original Screenplay. It lost Picture, Director, Supporting Actor for Macy, Cinematography and Editing.
Why It Didn’t Win: This is one of the odder wins, because The English Patient was not a juggernaut, critically or commercially …but it was a Miramax movie. For the first time, the dreaded name of Harvey Weinstein must be uttered in this series. He launched the first of many masterful campaigns, and squeaked out a win that should have belonged to Fargo.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Frances McDormand had starred in the Coen Brothers’ first film Blood Simple. She then married Joel. He then a wrote another part that would have been perfect for her, as the lead in Raising Arizona …but he cast Holly Hunter instead. (McDormand ended up with a small role in that movie.) Amazingly, she stayed with Joel, and finally, in 1996, he gave her the role that made her a star (and set her on a path to winning not one, not two, but three Best Actress trophies). Indeed, she is astounding here, handling a thick accent and body-suit, as the keen-eyed, even-keeled, mildly-philosophical heroine. She’s unlike any cop we’ve ever seen onscreen before, and we love her for that.
   
2. Someone asked once on Reddit about Chekov’s guns that never go off, and one of the best answers was Marge’s pregnancy in this movie. We keep expecting her to suddenly go into labor (talk about a complication!) but no, her pregnancy simply proceeds apace from beginning to end, neither affecting nor affected by the plot. Given our sense that all potential plot events must be triggered, it creates a wonderful feeling that this is true, not a made-up story.
3. In fact, the film begins with a title card falsely claiming that it is based on a true story, and I certainly believe it when I first saw it in the theater…After all, who could make this up? Well, the Coens could. Do I feel tricked? Yes, but these are also the pranksters who pretended to be a pretentious critic on Blood Simple’s hilarious DVD commentary. Ultimately, it helps the movie to be fooled because you suspend your sense of story logic. (The story about an insane Japanese woman flying to Minnesota and freezing to death trying to dig up the abandoned ransom money is just an urban legend, thankfully, though it was spun out of a real, tragic suicide.)
4. When you hear that Steve Buscemi has never gotten an Oscar nomination, you search around for one he should have gotten, and you inevitably land on this one, but he couldn’t have competed with the actual nominee Macy (who is even better, and didn’t win either) so unfortunately, Buscemi ends up without a nod, but he is spellbinding in this movie, as the uncircumcised sleazebag who screws everything up.
   
5. The Coen Brothers (born and raised in St. Louis Park, Minnesota) were justly famous for the sense of place in their movies, whether it be Texas, Arizona, or Hollywood, but had not explored their own home state. It frequently results in something special when directors who have told every story except their own suddenly return and tell a hometown story. This one has a sense of genuine affection and humanity that was maybe lacking in their more distanced (but nearly perfect) early works.

Ah, 1996: Unfortunately, this has pretty much come true, just in the last year or so.

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1995

The Year: 1995
What the Nominees Were: Braveheart, Apollo 13, Babe, Il Postino, Sense and Sensibility
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Bizarre nominations this year. I like Babe and Il Postino fine, but how did they beat out more obvious Oscar-fare such as Nixon and Dead Man Walking? I’m less surprised that Toy Story and Safe did not get nominations, but they certainly deserved them.

What Did Win: Braveheart
How It’s Aged: It’s pretty repugnant. It makes an absolute hash of the true story, in ways that we now know conform to Gibson’s political views and personal problems. The movie oozes homophobia. It’s also just way too long and self-important. It has opposite politics from Dances With Wolves, but in many ways they’re similar movies. Both vanity projects that temporarily bamboozled the Academy but didn’t age well.

What Should’ve Won: Safe
How Hard Was the Decision: I seriously considered Apollo 13, Dead Man Walking, and Sense and Sensibility, but none were as good or retro-actively important as Safe.  There was no obvious candidate this year, so I decided to once again go with my heart and choose another creepy indie.

Director: Todd Haynes
Writer: Haynes
Stars: Julianne Moore, Peter Friedman, Xander Berkeley

The Story: Fragile housewife Carol White lives a fairly idyllic life in the San Fernando Valley in 1987 with her husband and stepson, but everything goes wrong when she develops Environmental Illness, basically becoming deathly allergic to all chemicals. No one can help her, so she winds up living in a commune in the desert that may or may not be a cult. It ends with her moving into a plastic igloo, hanging a mirror, looking into it and saying “I love you, I love you.” Will that work? We have no idea.

Any Nominations or Wins: None whatsoever, not even for Moore! It received Independent Spirit Awards for Director, Feature, Female Lead and Screenplay, but won none.
Why It Didn’t Win: They still give away Independent Spirit Awards today, but it’s a little redundant, because the winner is always the same as the Oscars. The Academy Awards have embraced independent cinema in the 2020s, but back in the 1990s, there was still a gulf separating them, thus the need for the two award-shows. Still, especially given the weak nominees, it’s crazy that this movie didn’t get a Picture nomination, and especially a nomination for Moore. (In 1999, it was belatedly voted the “Best Film of the Decade” by the Village Voice Film Poll.)

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Perhaps Moore didn’t get a nomination because Haynes intentionally chose not to give her many close-ups. We are never supposed to fully identify with Carol, and are in fact encouraged to judge her …and then feel bad about it …and then judge her again …and then hit our heads in frustration that we can’t figure her out. The film’s number one question, does this illness have a psychosomatic element or not, remains totally unanswered and it drives the viewer crazy. We feel awful to be in the same position as her doctors, husband, and ultimately even the commune she joins, blaming her for her own illness, and knowing we could be totally wrong. She’s clearly a victim, but of whom and what?? The film just masterfully twists that knife, never pulling it out or ramming it home.
   
2. But that brings us to the film’s other unanswered question: Is the commune she joins a cult or not? Haynes felt that it was, and wanted to be clear that it was, but his instincts for fairness as a filmmaker conflicted with that. When Carol’s husband visits her, he points to a lit-up mansion looming over the commune’s cabins and asks who lives there. She says it’s the commune’s leader, without realizing that this might be a problem. But here’s the thing, Haynes decided to take out that exchange and that shot of the mansion when the film debuted at Sundance. Then, when he heard audiences assume that commune was an absolute good, he decided to restore the shot for the final release. Haynes’ inspiration to make the film was seeing his friends with AIDS be encouraged to blame themselves and turn to self-help gurus who claimed to be able to cure them without medicine. He clearly wanted to preserve the film’s main mystery (whether the illness was at all psychosomatic) and semi-resolve the other (whether it was a cult or not). I’m not sure whether he should have left the shot in or not, but if that’s what he wanted to say, I’m glad he trusted himself to say it.
   
3. As you may have guessed, this is a film that has only grown in meaning and importance over the subsequent 31 years, as the line between self-help and medicine has continued to blur and blur. I was certainly conflicted watching the film: I diagnosed myself with cancer, couldn’t convince any doctor I was right, and was stage 4b before I finally got megadoses of chemotherapy (which I never fully recovered from) so I’ve never been able to dismiss cases like Carol’s which have only become more common in the years since this movie was made. Haynes was listening when no one else was, and neither judging nor endorsing. The result is one of the most powerful films I’ve ever seen.
   
4. I will continue to spotlight female contributors to the male-directed films I give Awards to so this time I will spotlight this film’s legendary producer, Christine Vachon, who, in addition to all of Haynes’ films, also produced Swoon, Kids, Go Fish, I Shot Andy Warhol, Happiness, Boys Don’t Cry, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and One Hour Photo. A great champion of queer filmmakers (like herself and Haynes), but ultimately just a master of story regardless of who you or the filmmakers are. (In terms of female-directed films, we skipped right over Jane Campion’s masterpiece The Piano, because it got crowded out by my discussion of Schindler’s List and Groundhog Day, but I should have paused to point out that that also would have been a very strong contender)
5. Fans of feminist storytelling will appreciate a shoutout: Whenever, in the film, anyone asks Carol to speak, and she finally responds hesitantly, she then gets interrupted before she can finish. At one point, in the commune, she’s asked to describe a room she remembers having as a child and finally thinks of one, but can only say “I guess this one I had, had yellow wallpaper and…” before being interrupted. No doubt a reference to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story? A fun blink-and-you’ll-miss-it allusion.
   
6. Carol’s relationship with her stepson is another one that does nothing for her (or, as with everything else in the movie, is this another reason to condemn her?) In their only real interaction in the movie, he reads his gruesome report for school about gangs in L.A. and she cautiously asks if it has to be so gory, but is shut down again. It’s a good example of the movie’s very dry satire of life in the Valley in the 80s.
7. If I remember correctly 1995 was the first year I published a best of the year list (in my college paper) and I picked this as number one. Can you trust your opinions of 31 years ago, when you were 20? Rewatching this, I decided I could.

Ah, 1995: Introducing the internet, aka the 24-hour workday