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!

New Podcast Appearance on (of all places) "Secretly Sporty"!

Hi, everyone, I hope you’ve been enjoying “What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won”! It’s been a lot of fun to rewatch and write up all these movies.

 
Meanwhile, I’ve got another podcast appearance! I never thought I would end up being a Fitness Influencer, but here we are! You may recall that we had Austen Rachlis as a guest on our most recent episode of “A Good Story Well Told,” and so now I’m appearing as a guest on “Secretly Sporty,” the excellent podcast she produces with Sebastian Langdell. We have fun talking about my fitness routine, our favorite sports movies and my recovery from chemo by walking Central Park (not the last time my cancer will come up this week, as you’ll see from my 1995 WSWTCW pick on Thursday.)

Check it out!

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1993

The Year: 1993
What the Nominees Were: The Fugitive, In the Name of the Father, The Piano, The Remains of the Day, Schindler’s List
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Groundhog Day, which belongs on any shortlist for the greatest movies of all time (and certainly one of the most profound) was not even nominated!

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: Schindler’s List
How Hard Was the Decision: This is the hardest decision I had to make for this book. Groundhog Day is a perfect movie, and Schindler’s List is an imperfect movie, so the decision should be easy, but what kind of monster takes away the Oscar from Schindler’s List?? I just couldn’t do it. I rewatched the movie and found it stunningly well-made and less problematic than I found it in the theater, so I decided to stick with it.

 
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writer: Steven Zaillian, based on the book Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally
Stars: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Embeth Davidtz

The Story: German Industrialist Oskar Schindler employs Jewish work camp laborers to make a cheap buck, but becomes bound to them and eventually spends his fortune to protect them from the Holocaust.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It won Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Score, Editing, Cinematography, and Art Direction. It lost Actor, Supporting Actor for Fiennes, Makeup, Sound and Costume Design.
How It Won: A movie about the Holocaust was overdue and one this artistic and serious was a shoe-in for the Award, as well it should have been. Even better, the movie was actually a success at the worldwide box office, and Spielberg also made Jurassic Park the same year, earning enormous Hollywood goodwill.

Why It Won:

1. As I say in my books, irony is the heart of all meaning, and what could be more ironic than to have the hero of your Holocaust movie be a German Nazi Party member? That’s actually a tricky question to answer, and it certainly came under criticism at the time (Spielberg didn’t help his case by later making a terrible slavery movie whose hero was Matthew McConaughey.) Is it obscene to celebrate a German, or is this the only way to tell the story? The Jews in the story, of course, have no agency, and doesn’t a hero need agency? Ultimately, this choice of hero for Hollywood’s only in-depth exploration of this tragedy is deeply problematic, but it does make for a powerful and, yes, ironic movie, so I can see why he did it.
   
2. I’m usually not a fan of Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography, which is often too sun-dappled and pretty, but Spielberg gets amazing work out of him here. Spielberg rejected his usual commitment to storyboarding and made Kaminski work hand-held with source lighting to mimic a documentary feel. Kaminski paints astounding black and white images with what light he was allowed. The result isn’t quite documentary, it’s almost more neo-noir, but it’s exactly what his project needed.
   
3. Ben Kingsley is half (Muslim) Indian and half (Quaker) English, so what parts should he be allowed to play? Just biracial roles? Fully Indian roles, such as Gandhi? All-white Shakespearean roles? What about Jewish, which he does quite convincingly here? (He has said, “I’m not Jewish, and though there might be some Russian-Jewish heritage way back on my mother’s side, the thread is so fine there's no real evidence.”) The rules on what we allow are always shifting, but it’s hard to complain that he got this part, which he delivers powerfully. Here he plays the accountant who gently coaxes Schindler into his act of heroism, and does great work with eye-contact, assiduously avoiding it except for a few powerful assertions.
   
4. It seems insane that Ralph Fiennes didn’t get an Oscar for this movie, but Tommy Lee Jones was so delightful in The Fugitive, and he was overdue, whereas it seemed like Fiennes (making his stunning feature debut) would get another chance soon enough. But, as of this writing, it’s never happened. It’s always been someone else’s turn. He steals this movie as an actually-evil Nazi, Amon Goeth. Spielberg said of Fiennes’ audition that “I saw sexual evil. It is all about subtlety: there were moments of kindness that would move across his eyes and then instantly run cold.” Admitting the sexual nature of evil, which movies are often loath to do, elevates the performance and the movie.
   
5. Spielberg optioned the novel and then spent ten years trying to get other directors to make it, including Roman Polanski, who survived Krakow and Auschwitz, and, of all people, Billy Wilder, whose entire family died in the camps. Ultimately, he chose to make it himself (Polanski said “I certainly wouldn't have done as good a job as Spielberg because I couldn't have been as objective as he was.”) Spielberg would indeed seem a poor choice, because of his lack of personal connection, yes, but more so because of his innate desire to entertain. (He is quoted as saying to himself, “That’s not what the public will accept from you. What they will accept from you is thrills, chills, spills, and awe and wonder and that sort of thing.”) Ultimately, this may be an “only Nixon could go to China” moment. Only a master entertainer could find it in him to make something this darkly powerful. (Polanski would eventually make an excellent Holocaust-adjacent movie, The Pianist, but that movie was too small-scale to be the defining document of the horror, in the way this movie is.)
6. Interestingly, I usually bawl during movies that are even slightly tragic, but I didn’t cry watching this one until we meet the real families at the very end. Is that because the movie is not emotionally manipulative or because I am immune to Spielberg’s efforts (as I frequently am)? I think it’s the former. I think the movie takes a somewhat antagonistic relationship to the viewer, preferring to beat us up rather than tug our heartstrings, and that was the right instinct. The most horrifying moment in the movie is when the women on Schindler’s list are accidentally shipped to Auschwitz. They have heard rumors that when you arrive there the Nazis will tell you they are giving you a shower but then gas you instead. Sure enough they get stripped and sent to the “showers.” They wait in absolute terror, then from out of the nozzles above them comes …water! They really are being showered. It’s one of the biggest moments (sighs? moans? yelps?) of relief in any movie, but it feels like more of an FU to the audience than an attempt to get us to cry. It’s a necessary reminder that, despite all the efforts of these two men, survival in the face of all-consuming evil was still mostly about sheer luck.
   

Ah, 1993: Let’s skip it this time.

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

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1989

The Year: 1989
What the Nominees Were: Born on the Fourth of July, Dead Poets Society, Driving Miss Daisy, Field of Dreams, My Left Foot
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Do the Right Thing; Sex, Lies and Videotape

What Did Win: Driving Miss Daisy
How It’s Aged: It’s artless and treacly. Compared to our winner, it feels like a very benighted portrayal of what it means to be beneficent to black employees.

What Should’ve Won: Do the Right Thing
How Hard Was the Decision: Not at all. This is widely acknowledged as one of the great Oscar injustices. (Born on the Fourth of July and Sex, Lies and Videotape are both excellent movies, but not as great as Do the Right Thing.)

Writer and Director: Spike Lee
Stars: Spike Lee, Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Richard Edson, Giancarlo Esposito

The Story: A conflicted black pizza delivery man working for the only white business on his block must decide what to do when a race riot breaks out

Any Nominations or Wins: Just Supporting Actor for Aiello and Original Screenplay, losing both
Why It Didn’t Win: Hollywood was terrified of this movie. Before it came out, there were articles about how it would cause rioting in the streets, and then, when the riots failed to materialize, articles saying that we’d dodged a bullet. Driving Miss Daisy was a far more comforting movie to give the award to.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Cinematographer Ernest Dickerson has said his number one influence was Jack Cardiff, who shot Michael Powell’s movies, such as Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, and he successfully recreates the eye-popping use of impressionistic and vibrant color. He painted the wall behind the cornermen bright red just to be more vivid. At film school, would-be cinematographers were still being told that black skin was too hard to light, so it was best to just not try. Dickerson didn’t listen.
   
2. Lee’s first two films are great, but with this third one (released just a year after his second) he exploded in importance and has remained one of the top directors ever since. Eventually, he would stop acting in his movies, but he’s fantastic here as Mookie. It’s hard for screenwriters to create sympathy for characters who try to avoid conflict, but Lee makes Mookie’s simmering, sublimated tensions utterly compelling.
   
3. The dialogue in this movie is packed with character (“If Mike Tyson dreams about whupping my ass, he’d better wake up and apologize.”) and it has monologues of blistering racism, but it’s even better when it captures the tiny dog whistles that even the nicest characters let slip into their speech, such as when Sal asks a black customer, “You paying now or on layway?”
4. After you see the movie (a few times) you must read the book of the same name where Spike captures in real time every step of the process of creating it, from snatches of idea to its chaotic release (you can’t help but wonder if the movie would have been strengthened or weakened if DeNiro had agreed to star as Sal).
5. In the book, you’ll discover all the ways in which the cast rewrote the movie while they were shooting. The ultimate example of this is Roger Guenveur Smith’s character Smiley, who isn’t in the script at all, but Lee allowed Smith to create himself a nearly-silent part who became a bigger and bigger element of the story as they went on.
   
6. Then, finally, explore the Criterion DVD. There’s a great moment where Lee is rehearsing the first boycott scene with actors Aiello and Esposito. Lee notices that, instead of saying “Only Italian-Americans on the wall”, Aiello has changed it to “Only American-Italians on the wall.” Spike instantly sees that this is better, and points out to Esposito that his mocking response should also change to mirror Aiello: “Well, I don’t see any ‘American-Italians’ eating here!” As Esposito is making the change in his script, Aiello explains that that’s the way he says it, because he visited Italy and decided that he was more proud of being American than Italian. At this point, Esposito gingerly points out that he himself is in fact, unlike Aiello, Italian-born. Aiello is of course totally embarrassed, but Esposito chuckles and says it’s no big deal. This exemplifies a piece of advice from my writing books: Always let your characters re-label themselves.
   
   
   

Ah, 1989: Found in “Weekly World News.” I was basically straight-edge, so I didn’t need it, but most of my friends would have been very interested if only they read that publication.

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1988

The Year: 1988
What the Nominees Were: The Accidental Tourist, Dangerous Liaisons, Mississippi Burning, Rain Man, Working Girl
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Martin Donavan’s Apartment Zero is a brilliant film. Die Hard is fantastic, of course.

What Did Win: Rain Man
How It’s Aged: A film the autism community is not a big fan of, certainly. Tom Cruise is an underrated actor and Dustin Hoffman is always great, but ultimately this movie’s version of “idiot savants” has not aged well.

What Should’ve Won: Die Hard

How Hard Was the Decision: Look, do you think I wanted to do Die Hard?? I didn’t want to do Die Hard. But what else is there? I rewatched Dangerous Liaisons thinking that was going to be my pick but it has not aged well. What is supposed to seem delightfully wicked now just seems disgustingly lousy. Mississippi Burning is well made but I couldn’t endorse its portrayal of Hoover’s FBI as being heroes in the civil rights movement. That left Apartment Zero, which is one of my favorite movies, but was so obscure at the time that it seemed far less likely to win an Oscar than Die Hard. So Die Hard it is.

Director: John McTiernan
Writers: Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza, based on the novel “Nothing Lasts Forever” by Roderick Thorp
Stars: Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Bonnie Bedelia

The Story: New York cop John McClane flies to L.A. to win his wife and kids back, but ends up in a high-rise office tower that’s been taken over by thieves pretending to be terrorists.

Any Nominations or Wins: Nominations for Best Film Editing, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Effects Editing and Best Sound, but no wins
Why It Didn’t Win: The Academy did recognize its technical prowess with some nominations, but it wasn’t a contender for the big prize, as action movies weren’t considered serious awards fodder. It’s only as time has gone by that this titan has come to loom over the other movies of 1988. Many of those have not aged well, whereas this Christmas classic has aged like fine wine.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. The script was famously first offered to Schwarzenegger, then Stallone, and I love them both, but they would have ruined this. Willis is wonderfully vulnerable as the hapless barefoot cop who spends most of the movie just trying to call the police. This is one of those “Bryan Cranston in ‘Breaking Bad’” situations where absolutely no one thought this comedic actor had this part in him except one maverick casting director with a dream.
   
2. This movie has a great collection of ‘80s assholes, including William Atherton, Paul Gleeson and an actor who should have become a huge star in 1988 due to his masterful performance in Apartment Zero: Hart Bochner. That part showed he had leading man qualities, but no one saw it, so Bochner would spend his whole career killing it as minor sleazebags.
   
3. John McTiernan directed a holy trinity of action blockbusters, Predator, this, and Hunt for Red October, but never got material that good again and actually ended up going to jail for a few years for lying to the FBI about wiretapping! No matter how much trouble he’s had, they can never take those three movies away from us.
4. It’s funny how many filmmakers on this list have cited the French New Wave as inspiration. The brilliant cinematographer Jan de Bont and the editors Frank J. Urioste and John F. Link drew from Godard the idea of cutting between moving shots, instead of waiting until the camera had stopped moving. Later movies would emulate this and be terrible, but this movie proved that results could be wonderfully propulsive.
5. Alan Rickman won rave reviews on Broadway in “Dangerous Liaisons” only to be replaced in the movie by John Malkovich. Rickman triumphed in the end, however, because only his movie was chosen for Matt Bird’s What Should’ve Won the Could’ve Won. Rickman does so many things beautifully here, but the one I love is when his character suddenly has to fake an American accent and he gets it almost perfect …but not quite. It’s good enough that we believe John has fallen for it, then we also believe when it turns out he saw right through it. (And he had probably seen Hans’s face from atop the elevator.)
   
6. In the novel, the hero is older and fails to save his drug-addicted grown daughter from falling to death with the lead terrorist at the end. McTiernan was having none of that. He said he wanted to bring joy back to action thrillers, which had gotten too grisly, and indeed he plays Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” diagetically and non-diagetically, and even has Rickman humming it. The results are thrilling. John isn’t having a lot of fun, but Hans is, and so are we.

Ah, 1988: Got ten hours and want to hate your friends?