Best Picture and Director 1990

[Heksagon]

This is an easy choice. One excellent film (GoodFellas), one good film (Dances with Wolves) and three films that really should be a lot better than what they are.

While it's no contest that my votes will go to GoodFellas, I must admit that I like Dances more than most people here and I don't feel it's an undeserving Oscar winner. Undoubtedly, the film's reputation has been hurt by the fact Kevin Costner's directing career since then has been underwhelming, and Dances has some of the same problems as his later films. And there's no way around the fact that Costner is a terrible actor.

But quite often, filmmaking is chemistry - looking for the right combinations - and Costner's style, which feels tedious in other movies, is the right match here.

[The Original BJ]

Not really a banner year at all. I would push for Avalon, which is a bit of a messy movie, but one with genuine emotional power. And I haven't seen a number of movies that could be up my alley -- Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, The Sheltering Sky, and The Cook, Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover come to mind. As for Miller's Crossing, I think it has moments of greatness (like the glorious "Oh, Danny Boy" sequence), but I found the narrative to be a little bit convoluted, and don't get as fully excited about it as many other Coen movies.

The true story behind Awakenings is genuinely astonishing. The movie? It's all right, a mostly inoffensive but thoroughly mediocre effort that undoubtedly warmed hearts in the way movies about disabled people overcoming obstacles usually do. There's very little that's inventive or exciting about the film, and I can't say I even found it that emotionally overwhelming either. De Niro and Williams were both solid, though, like the film that surrounds them, not especially bracing. I did think it was interesting to see Marge Simpson in a dramatic role, though.

My biggest gripe with Ghost really doesn't have that much to do with the movie, just the fact that it was nominated for Best Picture. I actually think the film is a fairly inventive blend of horror, comedy, and romance, and I think this deft combination of genuine thrills, laughs (most of them courtesy of Whoopi Goldberg's really funny line readings), and emotion (that last "ditto" is pretty hard to resist) is what made the movie such a surprising box office hit. Of course, one can enjoy a movie as a piece of popcorn entertainment and not find it particularly artful in the way that you'd want a Best Picture nominee to be. And that's how I'd evaluate Ghost -- I'm sure I'd enjoy myself if I watched it again right now, but in no way does it approach the levels of thematic depth and quality of craft that would qualify it as one of the year's best.

The experience of watching The Godfather III is a lot like that of watching your favorite cable tv show return to the air after a long hiatus -- that first episode brings you back into a world you love, and every time one of your favorite characters appears, you get a nice feeling of nostalgia as you remember that character's history, and feel excited to watch where their journeys will take them next. And so in that sense, the extent to which The Godfather III works -- and I think it does, somewhat -- has a lot to do with how great those first two movies are. But as its own piece, I think it's clearly a step down. And yes, the narrative is so structurally repetitive of what we had seen before that you really question why this installment needed to exist. (Compare that to Godfather II, which is so drastically different structurally from the first film that it expanded upon and deepened the earlier installment, rather than simply aping it.) Francis Ford Coppola's work is professional enough, but giving him a nomination for this would have been like nominating Peter Jackson for The Hobbit, another film that almost made me question my enthusiasm for the earlier installments.

I find The Grifters to be a very enjoyable, twisty noir, with a good number of laughs, and strong performances from Huston and Bening. It would have been a stronger Best Picture nominee than many of the movies actually nominated. I can't help but wonder, though, if I might have enjoyed the movie more with a more exciting director at the helm. This isn't to dismiss Stephen Frears, who I think is a generally intelligent director with a knack for both serious drama and humor, and who does strong work here in keeping the film moving through a somewhat tricky tone. But Frears really isn't a bold auteur either, and I think a director with more madcap recklessness might have energized the movie in a welcome way. Ultimately, I think he's a perfectly decent nominee, but not one I would elevate to winner.

I lament the exclusion of Reversal of Fortune even more from the Best Picture ballot. While watching the film, I remember thinking, this COULD have been a fairly standard, true-life mystery story, the kind that often pop up as (perfectly decent) cable movies and miniseries. But I found the way the story was presented -- in just a slightly more off-kilter manner -- made it far more special. Little touches, like Glenn Close's beyond-the-grave voiceover -- which immediately set the tone for the movie's overall black comic sensibilities -- made the film seem more playful, in a manner fully appropriate for the witty protagonist at its center. Barbet Schroeder's achievement isn't necessarily one of scope -- the story overall is too small for that -- but the film has such an unusual voice throughout, I have to give a tip of the hat to the director who managed to pull it off without it ever feeling silly.

I know I'm supposed to be snarky toward it, but I find that I rather like Dances With Wolves. (Though I do love that the film provoked one of my favorite Pauline Kael insults, that Costner should have been renamed "Plays With Camera.") For an epic, I think it moves along pretty briskly, and visually, Kevin Costner's images are among the more striking portraits of the American West in the past couple decades. I don't think the movie is revolutionary for taking the point of view of the Native Americans, but it's not as if sensitive dramas about American Indians during this period pop up all the time either, and I respect the movie for being one of a few that tackles this subject matter with intelligence and power. (That last sequence -- "You are Dances With Wolves, and you are my friend!" slays me every time.) I don't think the movie is perfect -- in the central role, Costner is a total blank, and even feels silly at times -- but I think his work as a director is grand and impressive, and I can pretty easily get swept away by his poignant portrait of kindness between races, in a world that so often encouraged otherwise.

And yet...it's a good thing I wasn't Oscar watching at the time, because I would have been FURIOUS with the movie for snatching all of those top trophies from Goodfellas. It's one of the great movies of the '90's, a gangster epic that takes the Godfather mythos and shatters it, showing how guys like Henry Hill dreamed of being the kinds of gangsters popularized by the movies, soared to success, and then plummeted down a tragic spiral. And this almost Shakespearean saga is put on screen with maximum excitement and energy, from the time-jumping script to the bracing performances by the cast, from the stellar soundtrack to absolutely dazzling visual sequences like that tracking shot into the club, which would go on to influence an enormous number of films over the next decade. And behind it all is Martin Scorsese, whose work here is a master class in innovation, tempo, emotional heft, and the sheer thrill of the cinematic form. Overall, I don't rate it quite as high as Raging Bull, but it's one of a handful of movies that I think cements Scorsese's place as one of the great directors of the medium, and I would choose it in Picture and Director without a second thought.

[ITALIANO]

You know nothing of my psychology, Marco. You have no more insights into my life, my responsibilities or my capabilities than anyone else here, except maybe Peter with whom I've worked extensively on the website. And people on my Facebook feed probably know more about the real me than you ever will. You have never once shown a genuine interest in getting to know me better, so I see little reason to believe you actually know anything at all about me or who I am.

Well, we all here know each other a bit by now - but I guess that you are basically right.

[ITALIANO]

Did you cast a vote in the 1985 poll Marco?

I did. It wasnt the best year ever, but not so bad that I couldnt vote - though I adnit that had to think for a while. In the end I picled Kiss of the Spider Woman (and Akira Kurosawa for Best Director).

[OscarGuy]

You know nothing of my psychology, Marco. You have no more insights into my life, my responsibilities or my capabilities than anyone else here, except maybe Peter with whom I've worked extensively on the website. And people on my Facebook feed probably know more about the real me than you ever will. You have never once shown a genuine interest in getting to know me better, so I see little reason to believe you actually know anything at all about me or who I am.

[mlrg]

Did you cast a vote in the 1985 poll Marco?

[Mister Tee]

The 90s were, by me, a significant improvement over the 80s – almost each year that decade gave me more movies I cared about than most years in the 80s. Unfortunately, 1990 was one of the exceptions. It felt more like the last year of the 80s than the first of the 90s.

The big miss for me was Miller’s Crossing, which I still see as one of the Coens’ finest achievements. (The Coens, like Woody Allen, had to grow on the Academy at first – though, once they were accepted, the voters started flipping for nearly everything) I also hold Mr. and Mrs. Bridge in very high regard, at least by the standards of 1990.

It’s hard to know where to start with this year’s nominees; it’s one of the most lackluster slates ever, and it’s easier to pick out the films that actually deserved nomination than to single which merited placement least.

Back in those largely pre-Internet days, I’d watch the nominations on TV, then head into work and pass the info on to my equally Oscar-obsessed co-worker. When I read off Ghost as a best picture contender, he shouted “God, no!” It wasn’t so much that Ghost was a particularly bad nominee; it was that it represented the “mediocrely reviewed but high-grossing popcorn movie” demographic we’d thought the Academy had dumped after Towering inferno. Ghost was likely rewarded for being a surprise summer hit -- movies like Dick Tracy and Total Recall had been expected to dominate the season; Ghost was a July sleeper that just kept hanging around. I thought it was a respectable summer time-waster, with 90% of the entertainment value coming from Whoopi. I wouldn’t have nominated it in a million years.

BY the time December rolled around, it was plain the Oscar landscape was bleak. To me that – and residual Coppola worship – is the only thing that could explain the very strong reviews Godfather III received. I thought the film was clearly not close in quality to the first two editions, but, more to the point, was so structurally imitative of those earlier efforts that it almost diminished them in memory. (When, in the final moments, Pacino said “Tonight, the Corelone family settles accounts”, I thought to myself, How many times do these accounts have to be settled? Andy Garcia brought a little fresh energy to the project, but Pacino looked exhausted in the lead role, and set the tone.

Awakenings is the kind of movie that brought the term Oscar bait into being – a completely toothless exploration of uplifting material, with actors allowed to play handicapped for two hours. DeNiro was acceptable enough, but, for once, I thought Robin Williams gave the superior performance (naturally, voters passed on him this time). It tells you how mediocre the year was as a whole that no one was excited about this film, yet no one doubted it was getting nominated.

There’s a scene in Dances with Wolves where Costner stamps his feet to the ground and is able to ascertain by feel where some rifles are buried. The scene stands out in my mind because it’s the only one in the whole three hours that I didn’t feel I recognized from some other movie. Audiences and even some critics seemed to think Costner had achieved some breakthrough – “a Western from the Native American viewpoint:, they shouted, as if Little Big Man, Soldier Blue, or even Broken Arrow hadn’t existed. I found it a completely humdrum experience, whose Oscar triumph was almost as numbing as Gandhi’s.

I’ve always wanted to give The Grifters another try. I liked some things about it, and am partial to both the genre and the actors. I didn’t care for the late turns in the narrative, but that may have been related to my particular experience seeing the film: at some point during that final reel, a derelict came and sat near my wife and me. His constant, vaguely menacing grumbling made us both very uncomfortable (and fearful), so my attention may have been fatally compromised during that part of the film I liked least. However, it’s not like I’ve been much fan of other Jim Thompson adaptations, so it’s possible m my reaction would hold. In any case, I’m not inclined to vote for the film – though I rate it higher than those four best picture nominees I discussed above.

My feeling about Good Fellas is, oh, so close – Scorsese came so close to making a truly great movie. For an hour and a half, I felt as completely carried away as is possible at the movies. The film hit the ground running and never took a breath; a virtuoso performance. And then I thought it suddenly started to sputter. Post- the Lufthansa heist, I thought the story lost its forward propulsion; the dread Scorsese narrative issues came to the fore. I did think the film rallied late, with Liotta’s verbally diarrhetic/paranoid day-in-the-life sequence (which captured a cocaine jag as well as anything I’ve ever seen on-screen). But that lapse at about the 90 minute mark made the film less than I hoped it could be. This is not to knock the film: it’s easily the best of the five 1990 nominees, and Scorsese is leagues ahead of anyone else that year for best director, so it gets my vote in both spots. I just wish I could vote for it with more full enthusiasm.

And, had Academy members given me the option, I’d be voting for Reversal of Fortune as best picture. Reversal of Fortune isn’t up to the greatest moments of Good Fellas; it’s a far smaller project. But I find it a more fully-realized one, largely thanks to the great Jeremy Irons performance, but also because of the witty script and Schroeder’s sardonic touches. I’m not voting for Schroeder for best director, because Scorsese’s work here is not to be denied. But I do wish I had the option of splitting my vote and acknowledging the movie that pleased me most that year.

[FilmFan720]

I voted for GoodFellas and Scorsese, a filmmaker I don't love, but which I think is one of Scorsese's most successful film (and easily the best of his most celebrated films).

Everything else on this list is pretty lackluster...Dances with Wolves and Ghost are fine Hollywood output, but neither of them are interesting enough to be called amongst the best of the year and I find Awakenings pretty trite stuff. I think The Godfather Part III is a better film than usually credited as being, but it comes after two masterpieces and pales in comparison.

I almost voted for Stephen Frears for Director, as I think The Grifters is a very interesting little crime film.

The astonishing thing about this dreary line-up is that this was a year that Hollywood put a lot of interesting films, although many of them were too dark or genre-y for the Academy...but I would have loved at least one of Edward Scissorhands, Longtime Companion, Dick Tracy, Gremlins 2 or White Hunter, Black Heart on this (not to mention Wild at Heart or Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!). Alas, we are left with Ghost and Dances with Wolves.

Top 5s
1. Longtime Companion
2. Edward Scissorhands
3. GoodFellas
4. The Grifters
5. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

1. Tim Burton, Edward Scissorhands
2. Martin Scorsese, GoodFellas
3. Norman Rene, Longtime Companion
4. David Lynch, Wild at Heart
5. Stephen Frears, The Grifters

[Eric]

Threw a vote at Ghost for special reasons.

[mojoe92]

Ghost and Barbet

[ITALIANO]

I'm glad. I think The Color Purple is a great film. You won't shame me over it.

Of course you can be proud, Oscar Guy, and this is after all YOUR board, so it's ok, I guess, if it mirrors your tastes. But, I mean, how can one take seriously a place where The Color Purple is considered a great film?! Plus, interestingly, of the many who voted for that movie only two or three had the courage of admitting it.

Perhaps they didn't feel like being berated by a miserable Italian who doesn't believe others can have an opinion unless he gives it to them. I'm glad I don't post on here much anymore, I don't think I could tolerate listening to your same condescending crap anymore.

I'm not the only one who doesnt post here often anymore, Oscar Guy - why dont you stop for a moment living in your private world and wonder why?

As for who is miserable between you and me, well, I'm sure not only I but even others here can have the answer. They will be afraid to tell you. But they know. And deep inside you know, too. But, I mean, I'm not going to give a psychological explanations of the person you are - not here and not now anyway. But I certainly could. But of course you are free to think that I'm the miserable one. I dont exactly care for your opinions, as you may know already.

And Oscar Guy, believe me, thinking that The Color Purple is a great movie, as you think it is, is objectively an insult to anyone's intelligence - including yours. Watch it again, cry less, and you'll probably be able to see it under a different light. Great movies are something else, really, and this isn't being "condescending" - it's just, well, knowing about cinema.

[Reza]

Voted for GoodFellas and Scorsese.

My picks for 1990:

Best Picture
1. GoodFellas
2. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
3. Reversal of Fortune
4. The Grifters
5. The Godfather Part III

The 6th Spot: The Sheltering Sky

Best Director
1. Martin Scorsese, GoodFellas
2. Peter Greenaway, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
3. Barbet Schroder, Reversal Of Fortune
4. Stephen Frears, The Grifters
5. Bernardo Bertolucci, The Sheltering Sky

The 6th Spot: Francis Coppola, The Godfather Part III

[mlrg]

1990 marks the first year I saw a best Picture winner in a movie theatre prior to winning the big prize. I was 12 at the time.

Awakenings is a pretty forgettable film that can only be remembered for its two leading performances

Dances with Wolves has great cinematography and a haunting score but it goes on forever. A good effort for a first time director.

If some people here were offended by Dead Poets Society being nominated for best picture, then I feel twice as offended by Ghost’s nomination. This is probably the most embarrassing nominee for best picture of the last 25 years (in years with 5 films nominated). I remember watching this at the cinema with a group of school friends. It was a great film for someone who was trying to get to second base though (which I was… at the age of 12)

The Godfather Part III was my favorite of the trilogy for quite some time and I remember how highly anticipated it was at the time. I saw it at a sold out 500 seats movie theatre in Lisbon that no longer exists almost a month after it had premiered. Although it has some flaws, mainly Sofia Coppola and Andy Garcia, whom I think was miscast, it’s pretty enjoyable.

Goodfellas is a great pop movie that set the standard for multiple films and tv series to come but in the end, as Damien once described it, it’s a great movie about nothing.

The Grifters and Reversal of Fortune should have replaced Awakenings and Ghost.

My vote goes to Godfather and Stephen Frears.

[OscarGuy]

I'm glad. I think The Color Purple is a great film. You won't shame me over it.

Of course you can be proud, Oscar Guy, and this is after all YOUR board, so it's ok, I guess, if it mirrors your tastes. But, I mean, how can one take seriously a place where The Color Purple is considered a great film?! Plus, interestingly, of the many who voted for that movie only two or three had the courage of admitting it.

Perhaps they didn't feel like being berated by a miserable Italian who doesn't believe others can have an opinion unless he gives it to them. I'm glad I don't post on here much anymore, I don't think I could tolerate listening to your same condescending crap anymore.

[ITALIANO]

I'm glad. I think The Color Purple is a great film. You won't shame me over it.

Of course you can be proud, Oscar Guy, and this is after all YOUR board, so it's ok, I guess, if it mirrors your tastes. But, I mean, how can one take seriously a place where The Color Purple is considered a great film?! Plus, interestingly, of the many who voted for that movie only two or three had the courage of admitting it.