Best Picture and Director 1993

[FilmFan720]

Wow, I somehow got pretty far behind in these polls...

Since Damien is not here to push it, I will put a word in here for Six Degrees of Separation. I think it is one of the best stage-to-screen adaptations we have ever had, finding a very cinematic way of telling a story so perfectly told theatrically, while also giving an extraordinary ensemble of actors some of their best film opportunities. I would strongly encourage its inclusion here, along with A Perfect World.

The Fugitive is a great summer film, and whenever it is on television I get sucked in. I'm not too upset that it made it here, because I think it is a solid example of a genre that doesn't get acknowledged by the Academy enough, but it won't get my vote.

In the Name of the Father is probably a film I should revisit, as I haven't seen it in a while and only have fleeting memories of the film. I remember liking it, but not loving it. The Remains of the Day I have a much stronger memory of, and technically there is a lot of very interesting stuff that Merchant and Ivory are doing. The film remains too distant, however, for me to really embrace it.

The Piano is another film that I admire more than love, and also one that I keep wanting to go back and give another chance. I almost voted for Jane Campion here, but she is overshadowed a little bit.

Schindler's List is certainly the most important film on this list, but it is also a film that matches its hype in most every way. It is just as devastating and powerful as most claim it is, and Spielberg is doing a lot of really mature work. I gladly endorse its Best Picture win.

For Best Director, though, I have to lean towards Robert Altman. I caught the last piece of Short Cuts on IFC last week, and it is a remarkable achievement that Altman keeps complete control of at every moment. That ensemble is pitch perfect, including a lot of actors giving performances that seem beyond what we think they should be capable of. So often when talking about directors we overlook their ability to draw performances out of actors and ensembles, and this is one of the greatest pieces of ensemble directing ever. I give Altman my award (again).

[The Original BJ]

This is the first year I have any vague memory of the Oscars. I remember being in the room while my parents were watching the show, and this movie called Schindler's List kept winning things. At the time, I was more curious about another movie that kept being mentioned, named after the musical instrument I played, and which featured a very entrancing poster with a piano on the beach. (At the time, the only nominees I'd seen were Addams Family Values, Beethoven's 2nd, and The Nightmare Before Christmas. I was too young even for Jurassic Park!)

As others have said, this was an outstanding year, and the best overall Picture/Director lineup of the 90's. There were two big misses for me. The first is the inability of Short Cuts to score more than its one nomination -- it certainly would have made my Best Picture list, I can't fathom that the writers didn't go for it, and at least one actor could have made it as well (although it seems like there was no consensus on who was the standout, which can sometimes doom strong casts). The second is The Age of Innocence and Martin Scorsese -- although not an obvious choice for the material, the director really did a bang-up job, making the film's Gilded Age battle of manners as emotionally lacerating as any of his more overtly violent efforts.

The weakest nominee is The Fugitive, but mainly because it's just miscast as a Best Picture nominee. I thought it was a perfectly good summer movie though, with suspenseful set pieces, an intelligent narrative grounded in genuine human drama, and a sly performance by Tommy Lee Jones that added some welcome humor. Certainly it doesn't have enough on its mind to get my vote, but I'd rather praise it for what it does well than knock it just because it doesn't belong in this conversation. (In fact, looking at 1993 makes me lament at how far the summer movie has fallen. That year, the blockbusters included The Fugitive, Jurassic Park, In the Line of Fire, Sleepless in Seattle, and The Firm. Just ONE of those would have seemed like a breath of fresh air this summer.)

On the whole, I find Jim Sheridan to be an intelligent director with an ability to present emotionally affecting material in a way that doesn't feel manipulative. I don't think he's so singular a visionary, but In the Name of the Father is probably the closest he came to presenting something that felt urgent. The film's narrative is mostly gripping, tackling subject matter and themes that still resonate very strongly today, and the cast is pretty superb, with Day-Lewis providing one of his many tour de forces in the central role, and Postlethwaite providing sensitive support as always. And it's hard not to get energized by Emma Thompson's late-film court room monologue. I can't say this movie reaches me in a terribly personal way that I'd want to vote for it, but its nominations weren't unworthy.

Given the stars, director, and screenwriter, it's impressive that The Remains of the Day didn't end up feeling like Howards End 2. Obviously, the difference between E.M. Forster and Kazuo Ishiguro aids immensely in making the two films feel distinct, but on the whole, the cast and filmmakers bring quite a bit of fresh energy to the project that it never feels like they're coasting on the familiar. As always with James Ivory's films, The Remains of the Day is beautifully mounted, and by its conclusion, very powerful, as we watch Hopkins and Thompson come so close to falling for one another before they're separated, never to have this chance come again. But I still don't think it's quite as good a movie as Howards End -- visually, for instance, I don't think James Ivory is nearly as inventive this time around -- and seeing that I didn't vote for Howards End under weaker competition, I will not be choosing The Remains of the Day this year.

I think that the remaining three nominees would have been among the greatest winners in Best Picture/Director ever, and choosing between them is very difficult.

Short Cuts is Robert Altman's greatest post-Nashville work, and maybe his second best film overall. This is a tremendous tapestry, and the way Altman weaves together Carver's disparate stories so that they all feel practically written solely for this piece is breathtaking. I also think that Short Cuts is one of the most successful films to capture what it's actually like to live in Los Angeles -- the different environments all easily within reach, the strange hybrid of city and suburbs, the significance of car culture and how it both separates and brings people together, and of course, the earthquakes. L.A. isn't just the setting here, nor is it used simplistically for the sake of metaphor (as in, ahem, an upcoming Best Picture winner). Instead, Altman digs deep into the environment to create a very lived-in portrait of a specific city just as he did for the country music capital. And narratively, his film, like so many of his movies, is full of wry human observation, sharp social satire, and immense sadness. It's a splendid movie...but the competition forces me to pass on him this time.

I find The Piano to be a simply hypnotic film. At its heart, it is about the struggle for human beings to communicate with one another in a world where people say and do things that benefit themselves first, and others second (if at all). Yes, some of those themes are articulated clearly (i.e. the language difference between the British and the Maoris, the fact that Ada literally can't speak), but I find the movie's "message" (if there is one) to be fascinatingly oblique, and so these elements (and the fact that the piano is an obvious symbol) don't bother me much, because I think the complexity of the characters and their actions is so absorbing. For instance, Ada's quest to win back her piano is both a heartfelt depiction of a woman struggling to hold on to her main form of communication, and an examination of a woman's self-destructive behavior amidst a reality she fails to accept. Baines may ultimately fall in love with Ada, but that genuine affection stems from a manipulative, abusive relationship where he prizes his needs first and foremost above hers. And Flora's betrayal of her mother is a devastating portrait of a young girl who selfishly seeks to torment, yet soon becomes wracked with guilt when her mother receives a punishment the little girl never could have imagined. Jane Campion never judges her characters, and never tells us how we should feel about them -- they are allowed, simply, to engage with each other and the world in very painful, but very human ways. And her visuals, as others have said, are glorious, and reach their zenith with that overwhelmingly powerful sequence of Ada and the piano in the ocean near the film's climax. Add to that the exceptional performances by Hunter and Paquin, and Nyman's dazzling score, and you have a movie I'd enthusiastically vote for in many other years.

But not in 1993. Schindler's List is, in pretty much every respect, a very obvious Oscar choice. The subject matter alone has yielded awards attention for far less impressive movies, and this one was pretty much built from the ground up to be the vehicle that would FINALLY yield Hollywood's box office giant the one career triumph that had long eluded him, for a deeply personal film (on which he didn't even take a salary). But sometimes the obvious choice is also the best. Both times I saw the film I felt like I was hardly even watching a movie at all -- it seemed more like I was transported into the middle of a nightmare, albeit one that just seemed too real to even exist. There are so many sequences in the film -- the rounding up of the Jews from the ghettos, Fiennes's terrifying yet human Nazi shooting prisoners at random, the children jumping into the toilets, the women being sent to the showers, most of the Fiennes/Davidtz relationship, the second appearance of the girl with the red coat -- in which I had difficulty believing that I was actually watching what I was watching. And then there is that finale, which is just beyond powerful -- I know Spielberg got some flack for making a film primarily about the Jews that escaped the Holocaust, but I found watching one actual survivor after another appear on screen to be tremendously moving, a beautiful illustration of the film's theme that even during the most horrific tragedies, one human being's willingness to do good can still change lives for the better. That Oskar Schindler begins his journey as a war profiteer and only slowly grows into a hero is yet another feather in the movie's cap, as actor and filmmakers realized the value in presenting Schindler as a complex man with conflicting motivations, not a simplistic saint. And Steven Spielberg -- by that point a supremely gifted visual filmmaker -- crafted perhaps his most stunning images yet, with a style that somehow feels both like documentary realism and an out-of-this-world nightmare at the same time. (Of course, he's aided tremendously by Janusz Kaminski's unimpeachable photography, and John Williams's haunting score.) For me, this is the peak of Spielberg's career, and although I hope he has many more wonderful films ahead, I highly doubt he will ever come close to matching his formal abilities to a subject this emotionally overwhelming again. The Academy made the right choice in Picture and Director this year.

[Reza]

Voted for Schindler's List and Spielberg.

My picks for 1993:

Best Picture
1. Schindler's List
2. The Age of Innocence
3. The Remains of the Day
4. Farewell, My Concubine
5. The Piano

The 6th Spot: Shadowlands

Best Director
1. Steven Spielberg, Schindler's List
2. Martin Scorsese, The Age of Innocence
3. Chen Kaige, Farewell, My Concubine
4. James Ivory, The Remains of the Day
5. Jane Campion, The Piano

The 6th Spot: Peter Weir, Fearless

[Heksagon]

A considerable improvement over the previous year. In fact, I think that this year starts a string of four or five good years when the Academy made better nominations than usual. Or perhaps more accurately, I feel they avoided the really sub-par films during this time.

The Fugitive is a popcorn film for sure, but it's a good popcorn film, and it relies more on suspense than on violence, so it's also a bit more intelligent than what action films usually are. Oddly, it's the first action film since Raiders of the Lost Ark to get a Best Picture nomination. 80s saw a huge amount of classic action films, but the Academy during this time was aesthetically so conservative that none of them was even a contender for Best Picture or Director nominations.

In the Name of the Father is the weakest of these films, in my opinion. It's a good film in a technical sense, but its treatment of the Irish Troubles and police abuse is rather heavy-handed.

Remains of the Day must have looked like an unlikely film subject, but James Ivory's subtle direction and Anthony Hopkins' excellent lead performance make it work.

The choice between the best film here is between Schindler's List and The Piano, both excellent films.

However, I can't get over the idea that Schindler's List is a visual adaptation of obviously good material. The brilliant cinematography and good acting somewhat mask the fact that the events are presented in a very linear fashion and the characters - even Schindler - are rather superficial. So, I partly agree and partly with Tee's impression that the film expands the material in the novel. Those scenes that focus on the visuals, yes. But the characters, no.

Therefore - after a lot of thinking - my votes go to The Piano, which I feel has more developed characters, and which gets a lot out of a weaker premise by focusing on its strongest elements. Unfortunately, Jane Campion hasn't matched this quality since (actually, she hasn't even been close). And yes, I'm a big admirer of the score also.

[Precious Doll]

Michael Nyman has also provided some marvellous scores for over more then a decade for some of Michael Winterbottom's films, with his Wonderland score being the standout and every bit a great as The Piano score.

I voted for The Piano and Jane Campion easily the best English language film of the year. Of the nominated films only Remains of the Day comes anywhere near it.

[Eric]

His collaborative score with Damon Albarn for Ravenous is one of the great underheralded scores of, well, ever.

[ksrymy]

No one mentioned Michael Nyman's haunting score for The Piano yet. For me it's the central piece of the film and, as much as I think John William's score for Schindler's List is also very good, Nyman deserved the win here.

I couldn't agree more. Nyman's work is gorgeous. It's a shame his star never really took off.

[mlrg]

No one mentioned Michael Nyman's haunting score for The Piano yet. For me it's the central piece of the film and, as much as I think John William's score for Schindler's List is also very good, Nyman deserved the win here.

[Mister Tee]

The best way to illustrate what a spectacular year 1993 was: imagine a best picture slate of The Age of Innocence, In the Line of Fire, Much Ado About Nothing, Philadelphia and Short Cuts. How many years in any decade have yielded frontline slates that strong, let alone a second string? And that’s not even to cite Fearless, The Secret Garden, A Perfect World, Six Degrees of Separation or Groundhog Day. Or, going a bit further down to the “at least worth seeing”: Like Water for Chocolate, A Bronx Tale, Searching for Bobby Fischer, King of the Hill, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Carlito’s Way, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, Shadowlands, What’s Love Got to Do With It? (at least two movies akin to the latter – Coal Miner’s Daughter and Ray – got best picture nods, something never even considered here). Magilla, if you found the Academy list the only movies worth seeing, I’d say you’re in the deep minority. 1993 was the best movie year since the 70s.

As usual, though, in such a bountiful year, I experienced a good many personal disappointments in the nominations. If a period piece dealing with repressed love was going to be nominated, by me it should have been The Age of Innocence, one of Scorsese’s most passionate (and stunning-looking) movies, and my number two choice on the year. Also, if there was going to be a mano-a-mano thriller on the list, I’d have quickly chosen In the Line of Fire over the very entertaining but more trivial The Fugitive (I’ve said this before: in Hitchcock terms, it’s as if they nominated To Catch a Thief when Strangers on a Train was also available). I also greatly embraced Fearless; despite its flaws, it’s the Peter Weir film to which I most respond.

However…none of the actual Academy choices fall below the acceptable line. The Fugitive was, as I said, minor, but it was well-paced and fun throughout. (At the time it seemed Andrew Davis might become a solid action director, but that sure fell through) In a field that was otherwise pretty solemn, it obviously got the votes of those who want the Oscar winner to be “fun”.

So far, at least, our vote here is mimicking critical consensus: those who didn’t choose Schindler’s List pretty much coalesced around The Piano. I’ve said around here before that I thought The Piano was a triumph for director Jane Campion – her images are striking throughout (and beautifully shot: I’d have chosen the film over Schindler for cinematography). But her triumph was over writer Campion, whose work I didn’t admire nearly as much. I heard people at the time calling the film “completely original”… to which my thought was, only if you’ve never seen The Most Happy Fella or Wild is the Wind (or even Desire Under the Elms) – the mail-order bride getting it off with the hired hand is a wheeze of a plot. Combine that with the age-old “repressed Brits in suits vis a vis close-to-nature natives”, all of it wrapped up with the sort of thuddingly blatant symbolism that has bored me from high school on, and you have a script virtually designed to annoy me. So, despite what I see as its visual accomplishments, and strong performances by Hunter and Paquin (the men not so much), I’m not even faintly tempted to throw a vote this film’s way.

I wouldn't dispute that Remains of the Day is well made and well acted -- Ivory might have reached his peak of directorial smoothness with the project. At the same time, I found the piece too small, too narratively limited for my taste. About a half an hour in, I came to the conclusion Anthony Hopkins, no matter how provoked, was never going to respond to anything -- and that, metaphorically, that's why England almost lost to the Nazis. Nothing happened over the remainder of the film to change that perspective, which made for less than scintillating viewing. I did find the Brighton ending rather sweet, and the whole thing was, as I say, immaculately done -- though I'd point out there are both positive and negative connotations to "immaculate".

I agree with Magilla that it was disconcerting to find that In the Name of the Father had been factually altered (and not just in the areas Magilla cited; apparently Emma Thompson's miraculous discovery of the exculpatory evidence was complete fiction as well). Unlike in the odious A Beautiful Mind, however, the created elements in this film were not (in the main) created for sentimental uplift, but for deeper exploration. The idea of a man who can’t get along with his father being forced to share a prison cell with him is wonderfully bracing (and a subtle metaphor, besides). I almost wonder if the filmmakers would have done better to have fictionalized the story from the start. (It used to be common practice for writers to take an actual event/anecdote and fictionally create their own version. Sometimes I think Truman Capote unleashed hell on literature by making In Cold Blood determinedly journalistic, ushering in an era where reportage has superseded invention) In any case, I find the film compelling in its drama -- more raw than any other film Sheridan has ever made -- and, among the best picture candidates, my second favorite on the year.

Sometime in the Spring, Altman started screening Short Cuts for friends in LA, and Time Magazine ran an "early preview" -- the details of which had me salivating for the film's Fall release. Ironically, because so many other good films opened in the interim (many of the titles I mentioned in my opening), by the time Short Cuts opened it didn't stand out quite as boldly as it would have when I'd first read about it (or in many other years). This is a shame, because I think this is, apart from Gosford Park, the most impressive/substantial of Altman's later films. Not to say there aren't problem with the film -- not all the vignettes work as well as the best (the furniture destruction scene seems pointless), and Jack Lemmon's fussbudget acting feels really out of sync with the rest of the performers. But on this whole this is a major, ambitious work that ranks easily among Altman's top films.

But I haven't voted for him as best director this time, because Schindler's List is close to as great a film as its supporters at the time contended, and the clear choice for best picture and director. The overriding reaction at the time was to note what a great advance this was for Spielberg in terms of content and maturity. But I think something should also be said about how much Spielberg expanded upon his source material. I'd read Keneally's Schindler's List (or Schindler's Ark, as it was initially known) some ten years before the film, and always thought it would make a strong project for Spielberg to undertake. But I had no expectation what he would mount would have such breadth and scope. The basic premise (more or less ne'er-do-well industrialist cunningly saves a huge number of Jews from the gas chambers) and even some details (the girl in the red dress) come from the novel. But Spielberg expanded the material to the point this was the most vivid, horrifying fiction about the Holocaust to that date. There were scenes (like the prisoners being run around the camp yard) so startling they felt like they were taking place on another planet. Add in the extraordinary character of Goeth (in Fiennes' exceptional performance) and you have a film that bears ranking with the greatest historical epics ever made. It's probably true that a far lesser film on the same material might have appealed enough to the older Academy demographic that it, too, would have won the best picture. But Spielberg didn’t make that film; he made an extraordinary one, and he deserved every prize he won that year.

[Eric]

01. Short Cuts
02. Carlito's Way
03. The Last Bolshevik
04. From The East
05. Clean, Shaven
06. Naked
07. Totally F***ed Up
08. Dazed and Confused
09. Matinee
10. It's All True

[ksrymy]

My picks

Best Picture
1. The Piano
2. Schindler's List
3. Farewell, My Concubine
4. Jurassic Park
5. In the Name of the Father

Best Director
1. Jane Campion, The Piano
2. Steven Spielberg, Schindler's List
3. Chen Kaige, Farewell, My Concubine
4. Robert Altman, Short Cuts
5. Jim Sheridan, In the Name of the Father

[Cinemanolis]

Replace The Fugitive with The Age of Innocence of this would be one of the best lineups ever.

Totally agree. Voted for Spielberg and Schindler's List too.

[Big Magilla]

The only other strong nominee was Jane Campion's The Piano, which was well made with four sterling performances, but it laid on the feminism with such a heavy hand that I found it just a wee bit uncomfortable to watch at times. Was the broken finger (fingers?) really necessary?

Ada communicated through her piano. It was the one love she always truly had. Having her finger cut off is devastating for her, her piano-playing and us to watch.

Kind of my point.

[mlrg]

Replace The Fugitive with The Age of Innocence of this would be one of the best lineups ever.

Voted for Spielberg and Schindler's List

[ksrymy]

The only other strong nominee was Jane Campion's The Piano, which was well made with four sterling performances, but it laid on the feminism with such a heavy hand that I found it just a wee bit uncomfortable to watch at times. Was the broken finger (fingers?) really necessary?

Ada communicated through her piano. It was the one love she always truly had. Having her finger cut off is devastating for her, her piano-playing and us to watch.