1991
Winner:
The Silence of the Lambs certainly stood the test of time, though many similar genre films do not. It still maintains a presence in memes and our collective culture and memory. The Silence of the Lambs was a game changer. Classified as a psychological horror story it upped the ante. Similar genre films beforehand had none of the quality and this film started the craze of behavioral science or abnormal psychology stories on film and television. It was highly intelligent for a creepy film, while also remaining extremely accessible to an audience, though that is standard today. The film was truly influential in that it changed what we expect from such stories. If there is a reason the film stood the test of time and is still highly rewatchable today, it’s the writing. The book is a modern crime classic and it rightfully won for the adapted screenplay. The pace is perfect. Nothing was unnecessary and no scenes could have been sped up. It’s grotesquely fascinating then incredibly tense. It’s full of classic lines, but many of the crispest dialogue is not the most famous. “I graduated from UVA, Captain; it’s not a charm school,” Jodie Foster says when faced with sexism. Indeed, it takes feminist concerns seriously long before it became popular to do so, and that’s straight from the novel. “It matters, Mr. Crawford,” Jodie Foster replies when her boss says he hopes she understands why he treated her with sexism in front of other police officers. “Cops look at you to see how to act. It matters.” The writing is also brilliant because the characters are so thoroughly nuanced and iconic. Jodie Foster is a delicate balance of strong and smart, yet still unsure and clumsy. Anthony Hopkins is the most likable creep ever. According to AFI, Hannibal Lecter is the number one villain of all time. If it’s a likable villain you seek, yes, but it’s hard to see him as truly evil like he is. I would say it was the role of a lifetime for Anthony Hopkins but he’s had many roles of a lifetime. Some of the minor characters literally did have the role of a lifetime. Anthony Heald as the prison creepo, Ted Levine as Buffalo Bill, and Brooke Smith a Catherine Martin, for example, will always be remembered for those few moments and scenes. Also, Darla the Bichon Frise that played Precious will be remembered, if for nothing else the name. The film also works on the story level because of the great chemistry between Foster and Hopkins, which makes the film go from standard deviant crime drama to classic. The directing is solid also, with a grim, eerie feel, and a perfect ambiance. The cinematography was solid and this was easily the height of Jonathan Demme’s career as a director. Yes, he did other solid films, but nothing else like this. I don’t have a single criticism, though the difference between perfect and flawless is a thing. While the film is without flaws, it’s not one of the very best films ever made, only the best of its genre. The Silence of the Lambs is one of three films to win for picture, director, actor, actress, and screenplay (It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest were the other two). Out of all the awards it won, there was literally no better option. It’s a solid Best Picture winner, and would likely deserve to win in most years, but would likely just miss the cut if I made a list of my favorite 100 films.
Nominees:
Beauty and the Beast was the first animated film to be nominated for Best Picture. It makes you wonder why, and why more aren’t at least nominated still today. Disney had a Golden Age when they first came out and produced several classics. But then World War II hit and their efforts were required elsewhere. The films they did produce for themselves were compilations of shorter films and were only sporadically worth watching. But then they had a comeback in the 1950s until they settled into producing films that stayed in the collective memory even if they weren’t critically superb. By the 1980s their quality had dropped off noticeably. But then came the Disney Renaissance, or Golden Age Revival, in the late 1980s and they once again produced some of their best films for five years or so before then becoming hit or miss once again. If you look at the common thread of what works for Disney, it’s fairy tales, or at least a magical, fairy tale feel. And Beauty and the Beast is one of the most quintessential fairy tale Disney films, as well as one of the most fairy tale feeling Disney films from a production standpoint. It’s easily one of the most magical Disney films. It was directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, and though it was the first directed film for both, they had worked on other Disney films. The only technical nominations were for sound and score, and it won for the latter. It features some of the best classically Disney animation. I miss those brilliantly colorful drawings like I miss Technicolor. It just feels like a classic. Some of the scenes are sweeping, even for animation. The film is perfect mix of sweet, funny, and adventurous. It’s extremely well written on every level from turning a small fairy tale into an hour and a half to the individual dialogue and smallest extras that make it perfect. It has the perfect pacing and length. There are no weak or dispensable moments, none. The characters are extremely likable characters. Even Gaston is bearable in some ways, for being such a cad. He’s not the stock ugly villain of Disney films. The characters are much more nuanced than you’d find in a traditional fairy tale. Belle is not strictly a princess needing rescue, which is refreshing. Even the minor characters bring joy and life to the film. As for the cast, it has a minimum of stars, but solid acting. Angela Lansbury is the only recognizable name. But most of the relative unknowns gave the performance of their careers, quite literally. It’s something of a musical, but outside of the theme song, the music is not particularly great, though nevertheless the songs are almost all catchy and memorable. The title song by Celine Dion won the Oscar, and two other songs were nominated that category. Is Beauty and the Beast the most enchanting Disney film ever? You could make the case. You could also easily make the case Disney should get back to enchanting. It works, and the other things don’t quite work. Why don’t they stick with the best formula instead of continually trying to reinvent something that doesn’t need an update? Still, in the many rises and falls of Disney, there were many films deserving of being nominated for Best Picture, and perhaps this was the most obvious.
Bugsy is an interesting true story about the mobster Bugsy Siegel who was instrumental in the development of Las Vegas, but the film wastes a tremendous opportunity to be truly great. It is slow to develop and has many unnecessary parts, yet somehow it was nominated for the screenplay. It takes a while to even figure out what’s going on. It could have been clearer about getting into the story, and there were many ways they could have done this. It’s slow to start and then it never quite gains any lasting momentum. The film ends up feeling anti-climactic, but not because the end isn’t interesting or powerful, but because it meandered and never really built tension or much of anything at all. Furthermore, there are no particularly memorable scenes or lines. Trimming the run time and making it a little more fast paced would have helped. It did not have the right script or feel to unfold slowly. The storytelling is overall poor. The plot is incoherent and unfocused. It’s hard to figure out precisely what they’re trying to say. It also doesn’t feel grounded and they needed to give it a stronger voice or sense of place and time. It’s not particularly grand or glamorous for a period piece about the high life. It’s not particularly bold for a crime story. It’s too lightweight. It’s also the slowest, most lifeless gangster film ever. It’s neither shocking nor brash, two ways in which a gangster film can stand out. It also completely lacks the sense of voice they can have. As a love and betrayal story between two volatile characters, which is essential to the plot, it’s pretty pedestrian and there’s not much chemistry between the leads. Essentially they took a fascinating true story and made it just barely better than boring. Some of the acting is very good, though I did not like Warren Beatty in the lead role. His acting capabilities seem to exist of trying to look cute, and something more was needed here. He tries to get by on his grin alone and it’s not enough. When the scene calls for him to be angry or violent, he seems more like a brat than a threat. He did not deserve to be nominated for his performance and likely only was because of name recognition. Harvey Keitel is solid though and deserved his supporting nomination. Ben Kingsley turns in another stellar performance, but didn’t do enough to warrant his nomination. Annette Benning is superb, though she was snubbed for an acting award. The film was directed by Barry Levinson, and though it’s not nearly his best, he was nominated for Best Director. The production is nothing special, though the set and costume design is splendid and deserved the Oscar wins. It was also nominated for cinematography and score. Ennio Morricone does a decent soundtrack, but nothing spectacular compared to his best. It’s one of the most overrated nominees of the decade, and there’s a reason it’s largely forgotten. Still, it is almost worth watching, even if it is not quite Oscar material.
JFK is one of Oliver Stone’s best films and helped bring the conspiracy theories behind the Kennedy assassination into the mainstream. Do I believe Oliver Stone’s theory of what happened with the Kennedy assassination? I think it has some holes in it, though I am admittedly not an expert on this conspiracy theory. Do I believe the Warren Commission report? Not in the least. The movie ends by pointing out many documents will be declassified in 2029. Even then I doubt we will know the truth, which is a shame (update in 2026: the since released documents have given some glimpses into things but not enough, not surprisingly). One of the points made by the film is that the government owes its citizens transparency, though when has that ever happened? Certainly not recently when swathes of our history are still classified in the name of national security. While I was watching the film, I wondered whether it was responsible to make such speculations in a movie. If you get your history from Hollywood, you are in trouble, but people do precisely this. Getting trapped in such questions loses the point of the movie, which is to challenge what is blindly and absurdly accepted. The movie is successful in this because you cannot watch it without being stirred to think more deeply. It’s a stellar detective story of epic proportions. It packs in so much information it’s almost dizzying at times. It’s not a film you can glide through or casually watch. It demands your attention and most of the time it earns it too by most of the time being fascinating and gripping. In the opening scenes it takes aim at the military industrial complex, and what today is known as the deep state. Donald Sutherland eventually ties the whole film together as Mr. X. After the scene the film loses a little momentum. The theory is established, all the questions that were going to be answered were answered, and yet the film goes on. The dismantling of the single-bullet theory in the courtroom is a fantastic scene though. The courtroom scene as a whole sometimes feels like theoretical grandstanding, even if it’s interesting grandstanding. The movie is a technical masterpiece as well, intricately melting together actual footage with an array of created scenes with vastly different feels. The film makes perfect use of archival footage and the scenes are perfectly stitched. It won Academy Awards for cinematography and editing, and was nominated for score and sound, as well as Best Director for Stone. The length is daunting but worth the investment and highly rewarding. Still, it could have shed some minutes here and there. The scenes depicting the strain on marriage, for example, seem superfluous in the vastness of the film. Despite its length, the movie never drags and does not waste moments, and certainly deserved the screenplay nomination. In a story so compelling, you hardly notice the acting, but it was outstanding. I think Kevin Costner should have been nominated for Best Actor, though he was nowhere near as good as Anthony Hopkins this year. Kevin Costner does not have the strongest Southern accent though and I’m not sure it was necessary for him to pretend. It features a stellar cast, pretty much everyone who was anyone in those days. Tommy Lee Jones manages to stand out in a crowded group and was rightfully nominated for his supporting role. In fact, JFK is very deserving of all its nominations, and might have actually been good enough to win in some years. This year, though, there is no point in comparing it to the actual winner because there is no contest. As for the story it presents as an alternative to the official narrative by the Warren Commission, all you can really conclude is that something is fishy.
The Prince of Tides is a romantic drama involving a man trying to overcome psychological trauma from his dysfunctional childhood. It was based on a novel and nominated for the adapted screenplay. The film is too much like a soap opera, in that the scenes often seem too much for a mind to fully believe and also solely designed to stir your emotions ten different ways. Then again, if the plot was not so fantastical, it would be boring. Other than the parts that require suspended belief, however, the script is occasionally good and sometimes powerful, even if it meanders to no place in particular. I know people consider this to be Nick Nolte’s finest role, and this is very true, but that still is not saying much. He was nominated for his role and the only other cast member to be nominated was Kate Nelligan for her supporting role. I was disappointed with Barbara Streisand. Normally I love watching her act but her buoyant personality seems stifled in this one. As for the production, it has an appropriate sleepy feel to match the Southern parts of the story. It was nominated for cinematography, art direction, and score. It was directed by Barbara Streisand, who directed two other films in her career. This was the only one nominated for Best Picture, and she was not nominated for her direction. There was no reason for her to be. All things considered, it is not a bad film, just nowhere near a Best Picture.
Other Notable Films - Boyz n the Hood seems to be the biggest omission this year. While it might not be good enough to be the best film in any given year, it certainly belongs on this year’s shortlist and, looking back, it’s much more culturally relevant than half the nominees. / If suspense films like this year’s winner are to be included, then Cape Fear might have deserved some consideration. It’s not quite good enough to be a nominee, but it is better than some of this year’s choices. / L.A. Story was a cute and quirky film, that is now largely forgotten even with a 94% ranking on Rotten Tomatoes. It was one of my favorites back then and had the misfortune of being made a few years before quirky tales found their way into the list of nominees. / Not that I would remotely nominate it for Best Picture, but Rambling Rose saw the first and only mother and daughter nominated for the same film with Diane Ladd and Laura Dern for Best Supporting Actress and Best Actress, respectively. / Tous les Matins du Monde was oddly not even nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, although it won Best Film at the Cesar Awards. It easily ranks in the best five movies of 1991.
Top Five: The Silence of the Lambs, Beauty and the Beast, Tous les Matins du Monde, JFK, Boyz n the Hood