Best Picture and Director 1994

1927/28 through 1997

What are your picks for Bst Picture and Director of 1994?

Forrest Gump
3
5%
Four Weddings and a Funeral
2
3%
Pulp Fiction
17
26%
Quiz Show
8
12%
The Shawshank Redemption
3
5%
Woody Allen - Bullets Over Broadway
5
8%
Krysztof Kieslowski - Three Colors: Red
12
18%
Robert Redford - Quiz Show
2
3%
Quentin Tarantino - Pulp Fiction
11
17%
Robert Zemeckis - Forrest Gump
3
5%
 
Total votes: 66

FilmFan720
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1994

Post by FilmFan720 »

I'm surprised that there hasn't been much talk about it here yet, but I think that the best film of the year is hands down Ed Wood. For a period in the 1990s, especially between Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood, it seemed like Tim Burton was becoming a really unique, exciting, personal and game-changing filmmaker. Looking back on this film, probably his best, makes me regret even more the direction he has taken in the past decade. I also endorse The Adventures of Priscilla... and Nobody's Fool.

The Shawshank Redemption is a film that I have never grasped. Perhaps it was because I came to it after its popularity had already started to set in, but I find it a manipulative, shallow and plodding drama. I will never understand the way people have gone apeshit enough over it to name it the Greatest Movie Ever Made.

Four Weddings and a Funeral is a solid romantic comedy, and as I keep saying, a fine representation of a genre that gets overlooked too much. There are a lot of other mainstream romcoms I would have rather seen nominated over the past 20 years, but I won't begrudge the one that did get in.

I'm probably the biggest Woody Allen supporter on this board (Anything Else made my Top 10 list in 2003), and it was nice for Woody to get a Best Director nod after a couple years of being overlooked for much better work, but this is my least favorite of his Directing nominations.

Forrest Gump is another one of those films that I get sucked into a lot on television, and that has a lot of really wonderful moments peppered throughout (especially thanks to such a great cast of actors). As summer fare and a TBS movie, it is wonderful, and I certainly don't begrudge putting it on this list even if I wouldn't...as a steamrolling winner, though, I'm not a supporter.

I almost voted for Kieslowski here, and Red is certainly a striking film, but to me what Tarantino did with Pulp Fiction has to be acknowledged here. Tarantino may not be the most inventive filmmaker out there, but he is so amazing at seeing disparate cinematic genres and homages and melding them into his own cohesive creation. Nowadays he may have gotten a little too self-important and repetitive (I had very little time for Django Unchained), but at the time he was so vital and explosive that I have to give him my vote for Best Director.

For Best Picture, though, Pulp Fiction is a little too much style with too little substance. And we have Quiz Show, perhaps the last great studio prestige period drama. Nothing that Redford does here is as revolutionary as some of the other films on this list, but it is a perfectly crafted drama, capturing a time and place perfectly and drawing a really fascinating view of the American Dream in the 1950s. The film works equally well as a period piece, a riveting drama and most importantly a heartbreaking character study. Quiz Show gets my Best Picture Vote.
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Reza
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1994

Post by Reza »

Voted for Pulp Fiction and Tarantino.

My picks for 1994:

Best Picture
Pulp Fiction
Four Weddings and a Funeral
La Reine Margot
Quiz Show
The Lion King

The 6th Spot: Wild Reeds

Best Director
Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction
Mike Newell, Four Weddings and a Funeral
Robert Redford, Quiz Show
André Téchiné, The Wild Reeds
Patrice Chereau, La Reine Margot


The 6th Spot: Peter Jackson, Heavenly Creatures
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1994

Post by Okri »

1994

From those that missed the line-up, I’d heartily endorse Hoop Dreams, Vanya on 42nd Street (which I saw for the first time last year and loved it) and Heavenly Creatures.

It’s interesting to hear Tee refer to the buzz The Shawshank Redemption had before it opened, simply because I didn’t know it had any. I think that feeling of discovery is the reason it’s on top of the imdb list, at any rate. I can understand all the flaws and acknowledge them. But when I’m in the grasp of Robbins + Freeman + Deakins + Newman, well..... I’m just enthralled and ultimately that’s why I voted for it.

As for the rest – I found that the concurrent Before the Rain and Exotica used chronology far more thoughtfully than Pulp Fiction, but beyond that, it’s basically engaging – no more. I don’t get Forrest Gump and don’t get much from Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Quiz Show intrigues me. It’s a film I respect more than love – indeed, I find the play Night and Her Stars to be a more layered, beautiful take on the subject matter. But it does a lot really right – the period and atmosphere, the performances and the script overall. I find it funny that it became the compromise choice this year for the critics, though.

Kieslowski easily gets my vote for director though – the trio of nominations Red scored this year are among my favourite nominations.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1994

Post by Mister Tee »

By early Fall 1994, the best picture battle lines were drawn: hipsters lining up behind Pulp Fiction, and the squares going all-out for Forrest Gump. Anyone with rudimentary knowledge of Academy history could have told you how that one was going to turn out…but I watched the whole thing as a sort of conscientious objector. I neither loved nor loathed either of the two films involved, and had several others that rated higher on my personal list.

My favorite film of the year was Nobody’s Fool, which, I’ve said here before, I see as one of the best movies about small town life ever made. (Paul Newman can’t stand Bruce Willis, but he plays cards with him every week – that’s small town life in a nutshell) The movie is very funny in a pleasingly gentle, insightful way, with Newman’s greatest latter-day performance.

My second favorite, and my first choice under directing, is Peter Jackson/Heavenly Creatures – a movie that is not only a gripping true crime story, and, visually, a marvel (Jackson’s later success with Tolkien came as no surprise, given the wonders he worked with the fantasy sequences here), but manages to fully capture the unreasonable tunnel vision that can be part of adolescence. I‘m fully with BJ, in that I’d love to see Jackson abandon his immersion in elves and dwarves and return to complex subject matter like this.

Other favorites did make the Academy list in one way or another, and I’ll deal with them a bit further on.

Several of the lesser nominees rank about equally with me -- in a range of “I’m not nuts about it, but it passed two hours pleasantly enough”. Don’t assume I’m favoring one over another by the order in which I discuss them.

The Shawshank Redemption had one of the oddest reputation-trajectories of any film I can remember. For months before the film’s premiere, there was significant “this might be a sleeper” buzz from industry insiders. When it finally opened, though, reviews were, while respectable, nothing outstanding – and, quite surprisingly (given the Stephen Kind pedigree), the film was largely a box-office fizzle. This made it an unlikely prospect for Oscar attention – voters still preferred hits, if they could find them, and several of the year’s later films (Nobody’s Fool and Little Women, for example) had been both better-reviewed and more successful. But Shawshank contended throughout the season – with the Globes, SAG and the DGA – and got a boatload of top nominations. It also, once it hit home video, became the big success initially expected, and soon attained that freak success that even today has it at the top spot on the IMDB list.

I can sort of understand all aspects of this scattered response. Shawshank is certainly not a great movie – the material is fairly trivial, with melodramatic turns, and, like most Darabont work, the film outstays its welcome by close to half an hour. But it also offers basic narrative satisfactions that few movies that year were providing: simple the story may have been, but it had real surprises, and worked on a primal level that made an audience feel it had really seen something. I’m not voting for the film, and I certainly don’t comprehend its IMDB status. But, simply as an audience member, I found it an enjoyable enough experience.

I’ve often declared myself a Woody Allen fan of the highest order, but, for the life of me, I don’t understand why people rate Bullets over Broadway so high. It’s got some laughs, and some solid performances (Chazz Palminteri’s for me the best -- the artifice in Dianne Wiest’s work never appealed to me as much as it did others). But I find John Cusack one of the weakest faux-Woody’s of the era, and the story for me pales next to not just the twin towers of Annie Hall and Manhattan, but the more recent Crimes and Misdemeanors and Husbands and Wives. When the film turned up such an unexpected favorite on Oscar morning, it seemed to me it was voters offering their apologies for not sticking by Woody during the scandal two years earlier. But two wrongs didn’t make a right: over-rewarding the trifling Bullets was just as much a mis-step as under-appreciating Husbands and Wives had been.

I was lucky enough to see Forrest Gump on opening day, which meant I didn’t to view it through the lens of its outsized commercial success. I found the movie modestly clever and enjoyable; a different approach to history I knew extremely well. I never bought into the notion that the film was some right-wing gloss on that history (a glib notion that came about chiefly because the GOP won the Congressional elections that year and Maureen Dowd and her ilk needed to make a facile connection). It’s true that the film harshly characterizes an anti-war leader…but it also shows Forrest helping integrate Southern schools, and giving all his money to a black woman – not generally seen as reactionary positions. In any event: as I say, I enjoyed the film well enough, something different during the summer stretch. I wouldn’t vote for it anywhere, but I didn’t consider its victory a signal of end times.

Elevating Four Weddings and a Funeral to best picture level was wildly inflationary, but, that said, I’d rank it well above most routine romantic comedies of the era. Maybe you had to have been there to see what an unheralded, wonderful surprise the film’s success was. Hugh Grant was, to that point, a fey supporting presence in British period films; to see him cut loose comedically was a wonderful thing. And the film as a whole was just so much more intelligently conceived and executed than its American counterparts, with an almost perfect cast (the exception: dreary Andie McDowell, who, for the second straight year, played the love interest in a terrific comedy and contributed next to nothing) that it felt like a triumph for taste as the film came from nowhere and ended up a major Springtime box-office hit. No, I’m not voting for it (though, were Pulp Fiction not contending, I’d probably choose it for original screenplay), and it wouldn’t make my top five. But I’m genuinely fond of the film.

I might have liked Pulp Fiction more had it not been preceded by such fantastical critical hype. Or if it had, in the end, been about anything more than its own spectacular cleverness. There was nothing wrong with that cleverness: for the two hours or so I was watching, I enjoyed myself thoroughly (though the Ving Rhames torture stuff wasn’t my favorite): the dialogue was consistently fresh and funny, the performances a general hoot (and, any time Samuel Jackson held forth, better than that). But I just felt a void at the center (something I also felt about Django Unchained, but didn’t feel about Inglorious Basterds) that made me wonder why so many critics seemed to find the Holy Grail in the film. I’d have voted for aspects of the film (the screenplay, as I said, and Jackson over Landau). But my picture/director votes go elsewhere.

For picture, Quiz Show is pretty much my only choice. I found the film a far livelier, more engaging effort than any of Redford’s earlier films. Part of this came from Paul Attanasio’s often-witty script (“You want to be worshipped? Go to India, and moo”), and from the across-the-board strong performances (with special points to John Turturro’s fearless Herb Stempel). But Redford’s direction – his sense of pacing -- also seemed a vast improvement on his earlier efforts. It’s true, as Damien used to point out, that the subject matter felt a little remote – a nation that had by then been through Vietnam and Watergate somehow didn’t find a rigged TV show all that shocking. But, in this five film grouping, for me Quiz Show ranks as the best.

Under directing, however, I’d go with a greater film, one that ranked with Nobody’s Fool and Heavenly Creatures as my favorite on the year, Kieslowski’s Red. I’d liked the first two parts of the Trois Couleurs trilogy well enough, but I thought Red represented a quantum leap above the others. Largely this is because the film deals with abstract matters: it’d be very hard to describe the plot and make it sound like something audiences would be anxious to see, but inchoate, subtextual feelings come across that make the film more satisfying than any plot-dependent one would. This is clearly the work of an artist, an auteur – and you have to give credit to the Academy branches that singled out the film more than most critics’ groups did. Kieslowski is my easy choice for best director of this group.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1994

Post by Heksagon »

Another good year. One excellent film which gets my votes (Pulp Fiction), one very good film (The Shawshank Redemption) and the three other nominees are good films also, although I have my complaints about each of them.

Four Weddings and a Funeral is a rom-com with a lot of funny scenes and decent characters, but still, it's just a rom-com that is limited by how shallow the genre is. Incredibly, it received a Best Picture nomination with only one other nomination to its name which has rarely happened after they reduced the number of Best Picture nominated in the 40s.

Quiz Show is overall an effective film, but it also has a lot of weak scenes, and for me at least, its portrayal of the TV studios of the time feels rather superficial.

Forrest Gump is an entertaining film for sure, but for my taste, it's also far too simplistic and conservative. The message of the film appears to be that as far as you do as you're told and don't ask any questions, you'll do fine. I just can't sympathize with that.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1994

Post by The Original BJ »

Not as good a lineup as last year, but a decent enough representation of the year. I don't think it has any of the clunkers that crashed the slates in the early '90's (to say nothing of the "mistakes were made" lineup next year).

I definitely would have bumped up Red to the main race, but I'm happy for the nominations it did get. (I imagine they weren't at all slam-dunks.) I also have a lot of admiration for Ed Wood, still Tim Burton's best film, and Heavenly Creatures, the kind of movie I'd like to see Peter Jackson make again some time soon. (Or ever.)

I think Four Weddings and a Funeral is probably the least of the nominees, though I don't have anything against it really. I think it's quite funny, with a very winning performance from Hugh Grant (Andie MacDowell, not so much). And the structure laid out by the title is inventive enough, providing a lot of celebratory uplift alongside a dash of heartbreaking poignancy. I don't find it to be an especially major movie though; for as much as some people gripe about comedies getting excluded from Best Picture, this movie actually begins a run of lightweight films that I think were over-rewarded for their enjoyability in place of more complex pieces of filmmaking.

The Shawshank Redemption has had a very strange popularity trajectory, and I think this may be the reason why I have a split opinion on the movie. On one hand, I don't at all think it should have been the box office flop it was upon its initial release. I find the story to be pretty engaging and the acting solid. And, of course, that ending is pretty hard to resist -- in terms of BOTH narrative surprise and emotional impact, the movie really sticks its landing. But over time, the film has developed a reputation in popular circles as a contemporary masterpiece, and that's a take with which I'd very much disagree. I think there's a bit too much uncomfortable prison nostalgia, some troubling stereotyping (I know Morgan Freeman says the prison rapists aren't gay, but...come on), and a warden character whose villainy reaches cartoonish levels. Overall, it strikes me as the kind of movie that guys who think they're really macho feel comfortable admitting they cried over (no offense meant to Okri), but as someone who doesn't mind more florid displays of emotion, I didn't have such an overwhelming experience at this one.

Quiz Show is quite a good movie, and the kind of big studio historical piece that was rather popular in the '90's but is mostly absent today, as the indie divisions have mostly picked up the pieces in that department. I think it's very well done, with a smart script that provides both a lot of exciting details about the Quiz Show scandal as well as historical context that uses this specific episode in television history to comment on burgeoning cultural tensions in America at the time. It's also wonderfully acted by Fiennes, Scofield, and above all, Turturro, who admirably plays up the unlikability of his character so that it's perfectly easy to understand why the producers of Quiz Show wouldn't want this guy anywhere near their program. Robert Redford does a very solid directing job -- I'd argue he improved quite a bit as a filmmaker since Ordinary People -- allowing many members of his decent-sized ensemble to make an impact, and capturing the flavor of the era in a fun but realistic manner. But I don't think his work reinvents the wheel, and neither he nor his film get my vote simply because I think some of the other nominees show quite a bit more reach.

I find Bullets Over Broadway to be a flat-out hoot of a movie. Definitely the film's 1920s-era New York theater scene is a milieu that appeals to me, but I think the characters are hugely memorable, the plot turns surprising, and the dialogue full of wonderful zingers. (My personal favorites: "Two martinis please, very dry." / "How'd you know what I drank?" / "Oh, you want one too?" and "Olive...you're a horrible actress.") I don't think the film is as great as Woody Allen's most mature works -- it isn't really even trying to be as profound as those. But I think the movie works in a lot of the same ways Shakespeare in Love does, as Woody Allen just seems to be finding so much delight in the cleverness of this whole escapade. Certainly it's not enough of a great new direction for him that I'd choose him as Best Director, but I don't think I've fully enjoyed any of his movies since Bullets as much.

I understand that this race pretty much divided people into Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction camps, and I can't say I'm terribly interested in taking a side in that war, simply because I genuinely like both movies. There are a lot of people whose tastes I generally jive with who insist I should just hate Forrest Gump...but I don't. I do agree that Forrest Gump has an obvious limitation, and that's its view of history. James Loewen in Lies My Teacher Told Me uses the phrase "Forrest Gump history" to criticize the way students are taught history -- as an apolitical series of events without context, one after the other, with little analysis for how certain historical moments caused others. And Forrest Gump is obviously guilty of that sort of narrative. The key scene in the movie that best reflects this is the one where Forrest is speaking at the anti-Vietnam rally in Washington. He gets up to the microphone, the sound goes out, he gives his speech (which we do not hear), and then the sound gets fixed. What could have been a moment for the film to say something -- ANYTHING -- about the war instead becomes a beat where the movie essentially refuses to make any kind of statement beyond "this happened, Forrest was there, okay." (It's no wonder both liberals and conservatives latched onto the film as a reflection of their own points of view, the movie just seems to be leaving all of its politics utterly vague.)

All of that being said, I must say that, as a historical epic, a film about one man's extraordinary yet ordinary life over the years, and through many changes in America, I think Forrest Gump is a deeply moving film. Forrest's relationships with all of the major characters are so poignantly drawn, small moments have such deep impact, like Lieutenant Dan's "Forrest...I never thanked you for saving my life," Forrest's grave-side "I miss you Jenny, if there's anything you need I won't be far away," and Mrs. Gump's much-parodied but completely beautiful "Life's a box of chocolates, Forrest. You never know what you're going to get." The movie is also very funny, with a lot of laughs that come not at Forrest's expense, but which celebrate a man who is very much deeply good even if he isn't all that bright. I think the performances across the board are pretty wonderful, and technically the movie is a marvel. The sequences in which Forrest is inserted into historical footage are dazzling even twenty years later, and the thing moves from one exciting set piece to another with wonderful skill. I think this is the peak of Robert Zemeckis's career. He has always been a director of exciting technical skill, but once he moved into "mature" filmmaking, a lot of his projects (Contact, Cast Away, Flight among them) had an uneven, overstuffed feel to them, like he was trying to cram in the great set pieces that excited him without focusing on how well his stories hung together overall. I don't feel that Forrest Gump suffers from this problem at all -- there's a lot in the movie, but it all feels of a piece, and I can't say I minded the movie winning Oscars because I think the narrative and emotional journey of Gump (from that opening feather accompanied by Silvestri's simple piano score to the feather's re-emergence at film's end) is so powerful.

Pulp Fiction is another movie that has a limitation. Quentin Tarantino has never been an especially profound filmmaker, and if you unjumble the chronology here, I don't think what we're left with is something all that deep. What it WAS, though, is hugely fresh and exciting. I can't imagine what it would have been like to see Pulp Fiction in real time -- even five years later, by the time I got to it, its innovations had been fully absorbed by mainstream cinema and other films I had seen. But even then, I knew I was on a tremendously innovative ride. The opening diner scene just crackled with energy, the "Royale with cheese" conversation instantly established a trend of movie characters talking in detail about the hilarious specifics of very random things, the dance scene in Jack Rabbit Slim's provided immediately iconic images, and the hypodermic to the heart pretty much symbolized what the movie itself felt like: a wild, frightening, very funny adventure that never stopped to catch its breath. And all of that came before the crazy time jump which, yes, was kind of just a riff on its own coolness, but which completely worked for me as a way to create narrative surprise and emotional impact. And that cast is such a joy, you can feel the enthusiasm the performers have with this material -- Travolta making a wildly exciting comeback, Jackson giving a glorious tour de force, Thurman establishing her gift for stylized performance, Willis showing off his sense of humor, Stoltz just letting it all loose, and so on. Obviously, the film has Quentin Tarantino's stamp all over it, and never have his skills for verbose dialogue, gallows humor, narrative wonkiness, outrageous violence, and flashy directorial flourishes been put to more cohesive use. I'm going to go with the edgier effort over the more traditional one in Best Picture and pick Pulp Fiction.

But I will be passing on Tarantino for Best Director because there is a more mature filmmaker on the ballot, who made a film I like even more. Red is a very mysterious movie -- on a fundamental plot level, I had NO idea where the movie was taking me, or how its parallel stories would eventually intersect. And it's the kind of movie that makes you feel that most films are fundamentally unoriginal in story, with their traditional structures and predictable narrative beats. On top of its innovation, the movie is also fascinating on a thematic level, and so humbling! Irene Jacob and Jean-Louis Trintignant come into each other's lives simply by chance, and yet they seem made for each other. If only she were older, or he were younger, they could have fallen in love. And yet...even if they were the same age, there's no way to know they would have ever met. The film asks us to think about the incredible ways coincidence, chance, time, and proximity shape fundamental aspects of our lives, and it does so with a deep sense of sadness, over what might have been but cannot be, and over what could be a joyous new relationship (at the film's end) brought on only by tragedy. And if those things weren't enough to want to cheer for Krzysztof Kieslowski, there's his extraordinarily graceful visual style, which incorporates the color of the film's title in eye-popping and haunting ways. I think this is the finest of the three films in the Three Colors Trilogy, and the best of the Kieslowski films I've seen. He gets my vote for Best Director.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1994

Post by Eric »

Fully gratified to see Shawshank has only one vote so far.

01. Satantango
02. Serial Mom
03. Wild Reeds
04. Bullets Over Broadway
05. Ed Wood
06. Exotica
07. Heavenly Creatures
08. The Glass Shield
09. Chungking Express
10. Pulp Fiction
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1994

Post by dws1982 »

Quiz Show/Kieslowski. For reasons to (hopefully) explain later.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1994

Post by Okri »

MovieFan wrote:I assume Tarantino and Pulp Fiction will walk away with this, but my vote goes to the highly underrated Quiz Show, I think its Redford's most accomplished film and direction.
You see, I assumed this race would be a lot more mixed - and right now there's a tie in both categories for the "win" and every single nominee has a vote.

I went for Shawshank/Kieslowski pretty easily, though I admit that lack of Red/Darabont in their categories definitely helped.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1994

Post by OscarGuy »

It's not often I get to say I've seen everything on the list, especially with a one-off foreign director slot.

While Pulp Fiction is easily the best of the nominated Best Pictures, Tarantino barely loses out to Kieslowski.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1994

Post by Big Magilla »

Corrected entry for second listing of Pulp Fiction. Whoever voted for the second selection may wish to change his/her vote, which is an option I enabled.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1994

Post by OscarGuy »

You may have to scrap and star over. You have Pulp Fiction listed twice.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1994

Post by mlrg »

a very strong line up indeed

Voted for Pulp Fiction and Tarantino.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1994

Post by MovieFan »

I assume Tarantino and Pulp Fiction will walk away with this, but my vote goes to the highly underrated Quiz Show, I think its Redford's most accomplished film and direction.
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Best Picture and Director 1994

Post by Big Magilla »

There were basically three films in the running for Best Picture - Forrest Gump; Pulp Fiction and Quiz Show, but the other two Oscar nominees, the box office hit Four Weddings a Funeral and The Shawshank Redemption which found greater success on home video were no slugs either. It was one of Oscar's Best Picture line-up ever with Bullets Over Broadway; Ed Wood; The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; Little Women; Nobody's Fool; Queen Margot and Three Colors: Red making it a very full year for awards recognition.

Tarantino's audacious breakthrough film Pulp Fiction probably still has more fans than Robert Zemeckis' Forrest Gump but the latter was my favorite film of the year then and remains so. Gump and Zemeckis get my vote.
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