Scheming of the Lambs: Best Actor, 1991

The nominees for 1991’s Best Actor:

Warren Beatty, Bugsy

Robert De Niro, Cape Fear

Anthony Hopkins, The Silence of the Lambs

Nick Nolte, The Prince of Tides

Robin Williams, The Fisher King

How does one define Best Actor, supposedly meant for leading players? Usually it’s pretty easy, you know who the lead is. Warren Beatty plays Bugsy Siegel in Bugsy; it’s right there in the title! Nick Nolte is in every scene of The Prince of Tides, the movie follows his arc, easy. Robin Williams is more of a co-lead in The Fisher King: the first 20 minutes are all Jeff Bridges and we don’t witness Williams outside of Bridges’ POV until past the halfway point, but he and Bridges are unquestionably the two arcs we follow, of equal importance. Ditto Robert De Niro in Cape Fear, which appears to be Nick Nolte’s movie (what a year he had!), but it doesn’t take long for De Niro’s psychopathic Max Cady to take center stage - unquestionably the co-lead.

The one that people still debate, however, is Anthony Hopkins in his first go as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. The film follows Clarice Starling’s pursuit of serial killer Buffalo Bill, she comes to Lecter for consultation purposes. There was no doubt he was going to get nominated - when the movie premiered and Hopkins and Jodie Foster hit the red carpet for the 1990 Oscars, reporters even asked him if he felt like this was his dress rehearsal for the following Oscars - but until campaigning began in earnest in late Autumn, he was the favorite to win Best Supporting Actor - even the National Board of Review named him so!

But apparently Hopkins disagreed, convincing the studio publicists to push him for Lead. He went from odds-on favorite to presumed second banana: how could he possibly hope to win against the raw emotional nakedness of Nolte, who’d taken the Golden Globe and various critics’ prizes? Of course, we know now, Hopkins was unstoppable:

But was it category fraud? I say no. Starling is how we get to Lecter, and once we do, he has an arc of his own to follow, separate from hers: the slow manipulation of resources that will allow for his escape. And interactions with Lecter have their impact on Starling, too, both in her approach to the case and in how she sees herself. Hopkins is a Lead.

But should he have won? My rankings, from fifth to first:

King’s Queen: Best Supporting Actress, 1991

The nominees for the Best Supporting Actress of 1991:

Diane Ladd, Rambling Rose

Juliette Lewis, Cape Fear

Kate Nelligan, The Prince of Tides

Mercedes Ruehl, The Fisher King

Jessica Tandy, Fried Green Tomatoes

What a lineup! The only one from a Best Picture nominee is The Prince of Tides' Kate Nelligan as Nick Nolte's mother, but even though she had won some critics' awards - and would win the BAFTA Award in this category for the next year (again, those pesky release dates!) - her presence here is somewhat a surprise: all her other honors were for her performance in Frankie and Johnny. Jessica Tandy was enjoying a career renaissance following her Best Actress win for 1989's Driving Miss Daisy; fried Green Tomatoes gave her another Southern eccentric to play, the story's narrator. Then-17-year-old Juliette Lewis broke out in a big way as Nick Nolte and Jessica Lange's rebellious daughter in Martin Scorsese's Southern Grande Guignol Cape Fear. And of course, the great Diane Ladd, here for a third time for her matriarch in Rambling Rose.

But there was no beating The Fisher King's Mercedes Ruehl, she was having a moment. By 1991, she had already won acclaim for her performance in Married to the Mob and won the Tony Award for the original Broadway run of Neil Simon's Lost in Yonkers, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. With The Fisher King, she got a showcase role in a movie that topped the box office for two consecutive weeks, earning critical praise and critics' awards - hell, even though the Los Angeles Film Critics honored Life is Sweet's Jane Horrocks as the Best Supporting Actress of the year, they fudged placement and named Ruehl their Best Lead Actress - people were eager to award her! Eventually, the Academy got in on it:

My own rankings, from fifth to first:

Curly's Gold: Best Supporting Actor, 1991

So now that we've briefly gone over the 75 films screened from 1991, we can get into the Academy Awards. Just going by the non-specialty feature-length narrative categories, 25 films were nominated across 18 categories. We're only going to discuss a few of them this week, the nominees for Acting, Directing, and Best Picture, and, just like the 64th Academy Awards ceremony, we're starting with Best Supporting Actor:

Tommy Lee Jones, JFK

Harvey Keitel, Bugsy

Ben Kingsley, Bugsy

Michael Lerner, Barton Fink

Jack Palance, City Slickers

Three first-time nominees (Jones, Keitel, Lerner), three from (two) Best Picture nominees (Jones, Keitel, Kingsley), and one previous winner (Kingsley). Lot of overlap there, except for Hollywood veteran Jack Palance, up for his scene-stealing turn as cattle driver Curly in the smash hit City Slickers, his third nomination in a career that dated back to 1950’s Panic in the Streets. Veteran actor in a popular film giving the performance everyone's talking about - it's a familiar formula, you might even call it a winning one:

He wasn't the only winner of the lot, though. Keitel, up for playing the Los Angeles mobster Mickey Cohen, who teams up with Bugsy Siegel in Bugsy, was named Best Supporting Actor by the National Society of Film Critics for three roles: Bugsy, Thelma & Louise, and Mortal Thoughts (didn't see it). Lerner, as an Old Hollywood studio magnate in Barton Fink - a bit of Selznick, a bit of Mayer - hired a publicist and financed his own Oscar campaign after the Los Angeles Film Critics anointed him Best Supporting Actor at their annual awards; the absence of his co-star John Goodman, Golden Globe nominee and second runner-up at the New York Critics Circle Awards, was considered a surprise. As for the others, Kingsley, as New York mobster/Siegel's oldest friend Meyer Lansky, had been nominated at the Golden Globes, while Jones, as politician Clay Shaw, the only person ever put on trial for conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy, had only been honored by the Dallas-Fort Worth Critics Association, and Lord knows they're a prime target for Dealey Plaza stories. 

He was also nominated at the BAFTAs, but due to British release dates, that wouldn’t happen until the following year. In fact, none of the nominees here were up for the 1991 BAFTAs, whose four-wide category consisted of Alan Bates for the 1990 Hamlet, Derek Jacobi for Dead Again, singer Andrew Strong for The Commitments, and Alan Rickman, who won for Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. I think our category’s stronger, frankly!

My own rankings, from fifth to first: 

An Affair to Remember: 1991, Part Seven

Christmas Day audiences had a full menu in 1991: the Wim Wenders epic, the latest Lawrence Kasdan navel-gazer, a French film adaptation of a French literary classic, and the adaptation of a best-selling novel about a married man who falls in love with his sister's married therapist. Decisions, decisions! Audiences chose Hook; the Academy chose The Prince of Tides.

Based upon the 1986 best-selling novel of the same name by Pat Conroy,  The Prince of Tides was the second directorial effort for Barbra Streisand, who cast herself and Nick Nolte as the leads. The film wound up in the Top 20 highest-grossing films of 1991 and received seven Academy Award nominations - but not for Best Director, the only Best Picture nominee not to get a nomination in that category. As Billy Crystal sang, "Did this film direct myself?" Streisand would only direct one more film, 1996's The Mirror Has Two Faces.

Here are six of the films Vhristmas audiences could enjoy:

A Holiday for Murder: 1991, Part Six

It’s been a longtime tradition that studios save their Oscar hopefuls for the end of the year - closer to voting, fresh in the memory. It's no surprise, then, that three of the five Best Picture nominees were all released in December, two of them in the timeline we present today: December before Christmas. One of those is Bugsy:

Bugsy is a biopic of Benjamin Siegel (Warren Beatty), a Jewish gangster whose titular nickname was then-contemporaneous slang for crazy, due to his tendency to violently fly off the handle. Siegel invented Las Vegas as we know it today; the film gets into the risks he took, the tension between East Coast mobster Meyer Lansky (Ben Kingsley) and West Coast mobster Mickey Cohen (Harvey Keitel), his romance with Virginia Hill (Annette Bening), whose legs inspired the name of the casino-hotel The Flamingo, and more. It was not a total success at the box office, but director Barry Levinson blamed that on the fact that their distributor was more focused on the release of Hook, which came out just nine days before. Well, Bugsy got a Best Picture nomination and two Oscars; Hook was the #6 Box Office Hit of 1991 and won zero of its five Oscar nominations and had the larger cultural impact (my generation certainly seemed to hail it as a masterpiece), so who really won here?

The other nominee is JFK. 

Oliver Stone had already made a name for himself as the button-pushing, Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, as well as the screenplay for Midnight Express - this three-hour-and-change epic focuses on one New Orleans-based lawyer fixating on the much-discussed conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy and the subsequent cover-up. Not your typical holiday blockbuster fare, but it made over $200M worldwide, won two Oscars, and permeated the culture (even Seinfeld has an episode referencing a “magic loogie”).

It makes you feel for the no-doubt hopefuls that played at the same time. Such as:

True As It Can Be: 1991, Part Five

Since the Academy Awards began, only three animated films have won Best Picture. Two of them, Toy Story 3 and Up, are seen by many as beneficiaries of the Academy's 2009 expansion of the nominees to ten. The first animated Best Picture nominee didn't need an expanded ballot, it had the juice to take one of only five slots reserved for the very best in cinema, as decided by the people who make it. That was Beauty and the Beast:

After two decades of output that offered more curiosities than classics, the studio returned to making musical adaptations of fairy tales, as it had in the early days with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella. The Little Mermaid was a hit in 1989, and now came Beauty and the Beast, the "tale as old as time" about a beautiful young woman who, to save her father, offers herself as a prisoner to the owner of an enchanted castle: a prince cursed to live as a beast. Released the Friday before Thanksgiving, it proved to be no turkey. The songs, the canny casting (Angela Lansbury! Jerry Orbach!), the animation, the writing, all of it struck a chord with audiences and critics. It wrapped up the year as #3 at the box office and won two of its six Academy Award nominations. The success inspired a live-action Disney Channel pre-school series, a Broadway musical, a straight-to-video spinoff (with Tim Curry and Bernadette Peters!), and, eventually, a not-as-good live-action remake.

We'll get more into it when we discuss the Best Picture nominees. Meanwhile, that entire Autumn is full of instant classics and off-the-beaten-track masterpieces:

A Drag: 1991, Part Four

Summer slips into Autumn at the 1991 multiplexes, with a legendary documentary, a hit for Terry Gilliam, and a backloaded September: