Oscars rehash: ’95, Year of Forrest, Forrest Gump

Despite all the accolades Forrest Gump received, it turns out that life isn't like a box of chocolates at all. First off, let's acknowledge that the Academy Awards are hardly a measure of what truly constitutes a great movie. (See: Crash). The ceremony is a production that allows self-important people (See: Crash) to pat themselves on the back for four-plus hours and honor movies that are usually (but not always) better than most made in a given year. The movies chosen as nominees, however, reflect not so much the best of the year, but what Hollywood values in any given year. When a movie like Forrest Gump wins Best Picture over Pulp Fiction and a film like Red is almost completely ignored, it usually means Hollywood voters valued the simplicity and familiarity (and revenue) of one movie over the complexity and freshness of another.

That year in question -- 1994 in movies and the '95 Oscar broadcast -- was the first time I really paid attention to movie awards. I had worked in a series of video stores going back to 1989, loved movies and had my favorites, usually starring Bill Murray or Chevy Chase, but it wasn't until the year of Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump and The Shawshank Redemption, that I felt strongly about one movie getting screwed. Since then, I've become a little more zen about it, but every now and then an Oscar choice is so ridiculously stupid (See: Crash), that I feel a little like I did back in 1995.

At the time, it seemed like a travesty -- not that Forrest Gump won over Pulp Fiction, but that either film was considered better than The Shawshank Redemption. Shortly before the awards, I was mollified some by an article in Premiere magazine by screenwriter William Goldman. In trying to determine what he considered the best picture (he eventually settled on Shawshank despite feeling that it needed to be shorter), he argued that the 1995 awards would be similar to 1977 when the mainstream hit (Forrest Gump in '95, Rocky in '77) won Best Picture over better pictures. Over time, however, he argued that what would be considered the best of the '95 group would, like the '77 group, change. I forget the precise order he predicted, but looking back it was something like this: Rocky WAS the best picture in 1977, because it was the movie that had captured the public consciousness. But, with a little time and a little more distance from Watergate, All the President's Men, began to look a little better, a little more important. As the '70s turned into the '80s, Network began to look somewhat prescient (even more so now), so maybe that really was the best film of the group. But over time, with more than 30 years distance, Taxi Driver is the real classic of the group. I forget what he argued about Bound For Glory, but it, like Four Weddings and a Funeral from 1995, has faded considerably in importance.

In 1995, Forrest Gump WAS the best picture. It wasn't, of course, by any true filmmaking standards, but it had so completely taken over the public consciousness that it was hard to deny its impact. With just a little distance, Quiz Show, like All the President's Men, looked like the better all-around movie, at least in a traditional sense. After a couple years and about 100 knockoffs, Pulp Fiction clearly stood out from bunch. Over time, Pulp Fiction has remained by far the most influential of the group, but The Shawshank Redemption probably has weathered the best.

So all this is a way of saying that when Avatar wins Best Picture in a couple months, it will be a travesty, it will be mistake, but the Academy will be both right and wrong. Given the enormous amount of money the movie has made and the impact a movie with such a strong pro-environment, anti-military message has made on popular culture cannot be denied. So it will win (unless Hollywood had enough of James Cameron at the Golden Globes). But it is not the best movie this year. What is, we won't really know for a few years, which is why I still like watching the Oscars even in those cases (See: Crash) when doing so pisses me off. It's the start of a discussion that will last for decades.

So, in that spirit a rehash, starting in 1995.

What should have won Best Picture: Not Forrest Gump. Definitely not Forrest Gump. I enjoyed the movie when I saw it, and even now I do not fumble for the mute button if I stumble across it on cable (as I do with, say, Dirty Dancing or a Subway commercial). Tom Hanks was charming playing a ridiculous character in a way few actors can be. Robin Wright Penn was and always will be impossible to not watch. But the movie has had so little resonance. What seemed at the time like en epic has faded to an interesting trifle, not as bad as its most vociferous detractors claim it to be and never as significant as its biggest fans thought it was. Robert Zemeckis has made better movies -- Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? -- with longer shelf lives and Tom Hanks has topped his performance several times over.

Pulp Fiction, meanwhile, changed filmmaking and film distrubution. It set off a chain reaction of uberviolent movies in homage/theft that seemed to misremember exactly how little violence there is in Pulp Fiction. It is a fun film, it helped make independent, creative films profitable, and some day, maybe, I will forgive it for spawning crap like Killing Zoe. It created a knockoff parade so pervasive in both content and marketing that it took me nearly 10 years to see Bottle Rocket, having been convinced by its cover art that the sweet little Wes Anderson movie was yet another Fiction copy.

Quiz Show has weathered reasonably well, especially the performances of both Ralph Fiennes and John Turturro. But it was never much more than a well-made movie by professional filmmakers, the sort of movie that should and does get nominated for Best Picture, but never wins.

Four Weddings and a Funeral was just happy to be nominated. But The Shawshank Redemption has survived the years well. It may still be a terrible name for a movie. That there are virtually no women in the movie, an obvious result of its plot, is still rather shocking. And yes, it is derivative of many other prison movies, some of them great movies in their own right. But Frank Darabont -- like Stephen King before him in the novella on which the movie is based -- focuses the story less on the wrongly jailed prisoner than on the man who actually committed his crime, Red Redding, whose voice-over narration explains how Andy Dufresne got his life back after being stuck somewhere he shouldn't be. That story is so compelling, that we are misdirected into believing the story is really about him. But the clue to the movie's real focus, and why it has endured, is the change in tense of the narration in its closing seconds. Red has told his story in past tense until he is on a bus heading south toward Mexico. The final scene bothered me the first time I saw it, because I didn't properly recognize it as coming from Red's imagination. It does not so much matter whether Red does find his friend on a beach working on a boat, but that he's even trying to find him at all.

Better movies that got screwed: Bullets Over Broadway. Dianne Wiest won for supporting actress, Woody Allen was nominated for director and Chazz Palmentieri for supporting actor. But in a career that often has been overappreciated (I admit this as a Woody fan), this movie was one Woody's few that didn't get the credit it deserved. Or how about The Lion King? In a run of movies that brought Disney animation back from the dead, this stands out as one of the most complex and visually stunning of them all. Yet it was nominated only for its music: three original songs and the score. You could throw Red in here, too, but it's really Blue from Krzysztof Kieslowski's series that still I still find haunting.

Worst award: Hoop Dreams not winning (or even being nominated for) Best Documentary. Screw job of all screw jobs. Or maybe Four Wedding and a Funeral even being nominated. It was a cute little movie, but any movie that has one of the worst-acted, worst-written scenes in history, should not be nominated for Best Picture. (Is it raining? I hadn't noticed. Ugh.)