Oscar Flashback – 1991

The debate raging in the comments section of another post declares that this year mirrors 1989, when Driving Miss Daisy won Best Picture. They compare that to the Blind Side and I guess I would say that, what crack pipe are you all smoking? They also are wrongly comparing Precious to Do the Right thing which was snubbed that year. I guess the only thing those films have in common is that they were both directed by a black man. Do the Right Thing was an activist film, not a story of abuse and recovery. So that makes it a racist comment for starters. The point being made is that the more white washed version of the story, Driving Miss Daisy, was more palatable for the Academy voters than the more harsh Do the Right Thing (also, Spike Lee would be personally insulted by this comparison because that is what he’s like). So they’re thinking that The Blind Side would be that palatable version. It’s just not a good comparison in any way, shape or form. But I don’t want to talk about that year. Instead I’m going to focus on 1991.

1991 was such a great year for films. The selected five were so good, if released today any one of them would slaughter the competition. This is an uncommonly weak year for movies and a very bad year to choose ten nominees.

The Silence of the Lambs
Beauty and the Beast
Bugsy
JFK
The Prince of Tides

The other films that weren’t even nominated would also come close to slaughtering the competition this year:

Boyz in the Hood
The Fisher King
Thelma and Louise
Fried Green Tomatoes
Barton Fink
L.A. Story

Funnily enough, several of the directors and actors up this year were at play in 1991 – Terminator 2 was the highest grossing film. Kathryn Bigelow had release Point Break. Fisher King starred Jeff Bridges (who wasn’t even nominated). And Alec Baldwin was in The Marrying Man (Baldwin probably headed for a nod with It’s Complicated). And an animated film was up for Best Pic, like Up might be this year.

No one else is every going to argue that The Silence of the Lambs didn’t deserve to win that year. But what’s really difficult to wrap one’s mind around is how The Fisher King was shut out. One could easily have dumped The Prince of Tides. Barbra was famously left off the Best director lineup – Ridley Scott and John Singleton were there instead. I would say that JFK could go – all of that Kevin Costner dialogue (“Back and to the left”) and the horrible scenes with Sissy Spacek — but I know it was one of the biggest films that year and Oliver Stone was such a big deal back then. Beauty and the Beast was a big deal and a big deal, no doubt – the antithesis of Silence of the Lambs. Bugsy seemed to have Oscar written all over it, except that it didn’t. Something was off.

This was the year I found myself hooked to Oscar. That The Silence of the Lambs could swoop in and win all of the top awards like that, beating the so-called Oscar bait, Bugsy, showed me that the Oscar race could be shifted, and that it wasn’t fixed where the most obvious choice would win. Where Oscar is concerned, the fix isn’t always in.

The only real problem with the Oscar race, as I see it, and as it always has been, is that everyone gets caught up in the temporary and doesn’t consider the permanent. For instance, the temporary was the popularity of Barbra Streisand and the strength she was exhibiting as a director. The temporary was the celebration of Robin Williams but the dismissal of Jeff Bridges in The Fisher King.¬† The question remains whether it is possible or not to rid the Oscar race of this element.