Lots of complaints about my picks for 1995 so I started from scratch and went with a purely consensus set of nominees. A pretty grim list. My fellow Oscar nuts don't have much of a sense of humor is all I can say.
If I didn't nominate your favorite movie or performer, don't blame me.
In case you were wondering, my personal favorites are, in alphabetical order, Apollo 13, Babe, Before Sunrise, Clueless, Congo, Devil in a Blue Dress, Die Hard with a Vengeance, Get Shorty, A Little Princess, Persuasion, The Quick and the Dead, Richard III and Toy Story. A baker's dozen. All top ten lists should be a baker's dozen.
The worst movie of the year, for those playing at home, was Demi Moore's version of The Scarlet Letter, with Showgirls giving it a real run for its money. I'd say one day we should hand out Alternate Razzie Awards for history's worst movies and performances, but life is too short to self-inflict one's own misery.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
Another actress poll I shut down early — "shenanigans."
By the way, before I forget (as I often do), these were 1993's alternate winners in the categories I am not revisiting:
Picture: Schindler's List
Actor: Bill Murray (Groundhog Day)
Director: Steven Spielberg (Schindler's List and Jurassic Park)
Supporting Actor: Ralph Fiennes (Schindler's List)
Supporting Actress: Gong Li (Farewell My Concubine)
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
Anthony Hopkins's performance in The Silence of the Lambs is iconic, deservedly so, one of the greatest villains in movie history. In fact, his Hannibal Lecter is so memorable, you forget how little time he's actually on the screen. Thus, I've dropped him into the supporting category where I think he belongs.
Which leaves a bit of a mess in the lead category. I've nominated the five guys who ran closest to Hopkins in the various alternate Oscar lists I follow. Of them, I opted for Kevin Costner in JFK as my winner, as much a career win as for the individual performance, although I still think he's better than his competition.
By the way, do I buy into the conspiracy theories touted in JFK? Not for a second. I think in 1963 we couldn't wrap our heads around the notion that a pissant like Lee Harvey Oswald could kill the most powerful man in the world, the beloved John F. Kennedy, and came up with all sorts of elaborate explanations for such a heinous crime. But if there's anything that we've learned over the six decades since, it's that one man with a gun can murder multitudes. In retrospect, the only surprise is that Oswald didn't take out half the street.
Nevertheless, I enjoy a paranoid thriller about JFK's assassination — e.g., James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand, Stephen King's 11/22/63 — as much as the next guy, and Costner is at the heart of this one. That the film falls flat during its earnest third act isn't his fault.
But as always, you decide.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
When I ran the poll for best actress of 1990 the first time around, I shut it down very early — a clear-cut case of voting vandalism. Not sure why my actress polls inspire more shenanigans than the actor ones, but they do. Feel free to speculate in the comments section below.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
I seem to remember some chirping from the peanut gallery back in the day for my failure to nominate Batman — first dark comic book movie, influential, etc. — thus, the nominations for best picture and director. But I still say it hasn't aged well, and Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson now look as campy to me as Adam West and Cesar Romero. Feel free to disagree in the comments section below.
And still no nomination for Driving Miss Daisy, the Academy's choice for the year's best picture. It's not the worst movie to win for best picture — but it's close. I'm going with the anti-Miss Daisy, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, but you have many other movies to choose from. I hope you find something to your liking.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
I'm not exactly a hobgoblin for foolish consistency, but if I nominated La Dolce Vita for best picture of 1961, then I really should put Cinema Paradiso, 1989's best foreign picture winner, in, you know, 1989. Thus, this slight reshuffling.
By the way, in the categories we are not revisiting, Tom Hanks (Big) won best actor, Susan Sarandon (Bull Durham) won best actress, and Joan Cusack (Working Girl and Married to the Mob) edged Michelle Pfeiffer and Geena Davis for best supporting actress.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
This is one of those years I exercised the "dingoes ate mah baby!" card and skipped over very actor-ly, Oscar-nominated performances by Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep in Ironweed, a mediocre and largely-forgotten drama about a couple of skid row drunks. I opted instead for a pair of iconic performances that the Academy ignored, John Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing.
If you don't like it, you've come to the wrong place.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
My drive-by ballot box stuffer showed up again this last weekend so I finally decided to do something about it, paying for a professional polling service. I'm busy converting my recent polls to the new setup. I'll probably be finished by this weekend.
As an added benefit, I've been able to clean up my old alternate Oscar polls, deleting the votes of the two or three people who abused the system. And I'm not talking four or five votes — that's enthusiasm. I'm talking forty or fifty votes, and even more. That's obsessive-compulsive disorder. Seek treatment. Or write your own Oscar blog. And then let me know about it — I'll be happy to read it.
By the way, as I cleaned up the voting, some pleasant surprises popped out — wins for Ginger Rogers, Irene Dunne, Margaret Dumont, Tony Curtis, Tom Hanks. And Saving Private Ryan did not lose to The Truman Show. Good stuff.
Okay, let's skip ahead six years to 1981. The polls from the intervening years probably aren't perfect, but they're good enough — or at least nobody complained about them at the time which is pretty much the same thing as far as I'm concerned.
In retrospect, I can see I was doing then out of necessity what I am doing now by design — relying on a consensus of other people's opinions to arrive at my list of alternate Oscar nominees. The truth is, while a post appeared every Sunday morning in 2019 like clockwork, I went weeks at a time without writing a word. I was, instead, heading to the hospital every morning before dawn, gobbling Compazine and Zofran like tic-tac's, and otherwise napping all day just so I could brush my teeth and go to bed at 7. That's something they never tell you about cancer: it's exhausting.
But I digress.
Anyway, in my heated rush to knock out ten or twelve weeks worth of blog entries during a lull in treatments, I was forced, like Blanche DuBois, to rely on the kindness of strangers. And overall, I like the results.
The danger, though, of a purely consensus methodology is you can fall into the same simple-minded habits the Academy does and wind up with the same nominees, year-in and year-out, whether they've really done anything special or not. Meryl Streep has, like, eleventy-thrillion Oscar nominations — she could puke up a roll of film after a night of heavy drinking and the Academy would give her an award for it — while some of Hollywood's greatest actresses never got nominated at all (paging Myrna Loy). So I have to be on guard for that, separating out the good stuff from the "dingoes ate mah baby!" kind of autopilot noms.
There's not much point in doing this if you don't occasionally think outside the box ...
That said, 1981 actually went pretty well as far as the voting goes, but 1981 was also the first time I paid attention to the Oscars and I wanted to tweak it a bit.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
The first time around, Erik Beck and Mister Muleboy — who I like to think of as the loyal opposition — took me to task over my selections for 1975's best supporting actor. Muleboy plumped for Robert Shaw's turn in Jaws and the math supports him; but Erik's argument for Jack Warden in Shampoo fell, by my count, on twenty-eight deaf ears, including two of my own.
The rest of the year stands as is. Jaws took the top prize with less than twenty percent of the vote. Other top contenders were Nashville, Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, all of which finished within five votes of the winner. If ever a situation called for ranked choice voting, this would be it (that is, as long as the New York City Board of Elections doesn't do the actual counting).
By a slightly more comfortable margin, Steven Spielberg (Jaws) claimed the award for directing.
Top honors for acting went to Jack Nicholson (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and Isabelle Adjani (The Story of Adele H.). Lily Tomlin (Nashville) romped to the award for best supporting actress.
Okay, let's get best supporting actor squared away.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
I wasted most of Sunday afternoon writing a long essay explaining why I'm not nominating Marlon Brando this time around for his performance in Last Tango in Paris, and then I realized I didn't care — and if I don't, why should you?
Suffice it to say, it's a lousy performance in a terrible movie, and what the likes of Pauline Kael once saw in it eludes me. (You can read her infamous review here.) As Andre Soares put it in his review for Alt Film Guide (here), "the film will feel erotic only to those who can't spell the word 'sex.'" The disturbing revelations about Tango's production history (recounted here) only underscore my distaste for this repellent product.
Brando's work in Tango still has its champions (here), and if you're a fan, I say good for you, but twelve of the fifteen alternate Oscar sites I follow fail to mention him at all, and as great as Brando often was, this performance rightly belongs in the dustbin of cinema history.
By the way, if you're wondering how the votes I am not revisiting turned out, The Sting won the alternate Oscar for best picture in a squeaker; Liv Ullmann won best actress for Cries and Whispers and Scenes from a Marriage; Ingmar Bergman won best director for the same two movies; and Harriet Andersson edged out Valentina Cortese for best supporting actress.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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