The nominees were ...
- Bullets Over Broadway
- Four Weddings and a Funeral
- The Lion King
- Pulp Fiction
- The Shawshank Redemption
Forrest Gump. One of the criteria I use for this blog is, if someone were to ask me to go see a certain movie right this minute, whether I would say, "Sure!" or "No, I don't think so." Films that get the first response generally wind up in my "should have been" nominees list, if there's room. Those that get the second response ... well, get the shaft. So, while I admit that I kind of enjoyed seeing Forrest Gump the first time around, admiring Tom Hanks's skill at creating a character and the movie's technical wizardry, I don't think I could ever sit through it again.
... when it should have gone to ...
 |
| Pulp Fiction |
Of course, there are people who feel about Pulp Fiction the way I feel about Forrest Gump. When Quentin Tarantino's audacious, bloody, hilarious reworking of film noir material won the top prize at Cannes, there were boos mixed with the cheers. And I suspect it was just too out-of-the-mainstream for the Academy, though they had to give it the one Oscar it won: for Tarantino's screenplay. It's often said that Tarantino is too much in love with movies, though that's a criticism that applies to almost all of our major filmmakers today -- certainly to Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, and maybe to the Coen brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, and others as well. But Tarantino, whether he knows it or not, has a strong kinship to literature as well, particularly to Dickens. His quirky characters and narrative surprises are certainly Dickensian, if one remembers the Dickens who was fascinated with the criminal underworld of his day, and whose moments of horror often spill over into grotesque comedy.
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