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 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 our 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

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!