The Man Who Made It: Director, 1991

These are the nominees for the Best Director of 1991:

Jonathan Demme, The Silence of the Lambs

Barry Levinson, Bugsy

Ridley Scott, Thelma & Louise

John Singleton, Boyz n the Hood

Oliver Stone, JFK

There are two big stories here, one about a nominee, one about a non-nominee. Let's take the second one first.

When Barbra Streisand screened her directorial debut Yentl in 1983, no less than Steven Spielberg proclaimed it "the greatest directorial debut since Citizen Kane." She even won the Golden Globe, one of only three women (also: Nomadland's Chloe Zhao, The Power of the Dog's Jane Campion) to do so. It took almost a decade for her follow-up, The Prince of Tides, a box office smash that appeared to finally earn Streisand a seat at the table. She was nominated again for the Golden Globe, and, most importantly to her, at the Directors Guild of America Awards, voted on by her fellow auteurs. Indeed, she was the only one of the DGA Awards nominees who didn't make the Oscar cut.

But it's hard to argue with who did.

At only 24 years old, John Singleton became not just the youngest Best Director nominee in history (still!), he became the first Black filmmaker so honored by the Academy. He had been honored with New Director honors by various critics' groups, but the Academy has no such category, and instead of ignoring him gave him the proper plaudits, making history. Since then, six more Black men have been nominated, all in the 21st Century: Lee Daniels (Precious), Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), Barry Jenkins (Moonlight), Jordan Peele (Get Out), Spike Lee (BlacKkKlansman), and Ryan Coogler (Sinners). None have won.

For Singleton, as it would have been for Streisand, the nomination was the award. No one was beating Jonathan Demme that year:

My rankings, from fifth to first:

The Last Double Act: Best Actress, 1991

The nominees for the Academy Award for Best Actress of 1991 are:

Geena Davis, Thelma & Louise

Laura Dern, Rambling Rose

Jodie Foster, The Silence of the Lambs

Bette Midler, For the Boys

Susan Sarandon, Thelma & Louise

The ceremony was held in March 1993, but everyone knew who'd win this category back in February 1991: Jodie Foster and her film were much of a phenomenon to ignore:

But the other nominees had their own interesting stories. Dern, daughter of actors Bruce Dern and (fellow nominee) Diane Ladd, received the script for Rambling Rose from director Martha Coolidge, who had trouble finding financing; Dern went to then-connected director Renny Harlin (whom she was living with) and he got the movie made. Midler produced For the Boys, campaigned hard despite it being a financial flop, put in the work to get her passion project the notice it needed. 

And then we have Davis and Sarandon of the much-discussed Thelma & Louise, both playing titular characters, neither of them pretending to be a supporting role to cheat the system. This was the last time two nominees from the same movie would show up in the Lead Acting categories, seven years after the Amadeus boys. It is said that, because neither of them won, studios began to push movies with two leads of the same gender as, surprise, a Lead/Supporting two-hander. Dishonest, sure, but it does remove the stress from one problem: in a film with two equally great leads, who do you rank above the other?

My rankings, from fifth to first, below:

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: