The 1991 Retro Hollmann Awards

After much delay and (internal) debate, my personal picks for the Best in Film, 1991. You've seen the Top Ten - now, the Retro Hollmann Awards! Beginning with:

My Top Ten of 1991

Presenting, in alphabetical order, my Top Ten Films of 1991, with apologies to: At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Beauty and the Beast, Boyz n the Hood, My Girl, Soapdish (#11), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (#12), Until the End of the World (#13), and Vegas in Space.

The Big Winner Is….: Best Picture, 1991

The nominees for the Best Picture of 1991:

Beauty and the Beast

Bugsy

JFK

The Prince of Tides

The Silence of the Lambs

As we've seen, The Silence of the Lambs was unbeatable:

I've posted the little trivia and histories of the nominees already, their paths to this moment. So let's get right to it - my rankings from fifth to first:

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:

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:

Blockbuster Summer: 1991, Part Three

Summertime is the season for blockbusters, has been since 1975. The biggest hit of 1991 came out Fourth of July weekend, a movie that didn't just spend four weeks at #1, but wound up the #1 movie of the year, the first of three times director James Cameron could claim the top spot of the year. Obviously, I'm talking about Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

After the success of 1984's The Terminator, a sequel may have seemed inevitable, but it was a process getting started. James Cameron didn't want to do one, and besides, he had had a falling-out with the production company that held half the rights (Cameron's ex Gale Ann Hurd held the other half). Arnold Schwarzenegger did want a sequel, and he convinced Carolco Pictures, which had produced Total Recall, to purchase the rights and move forward - they even set a release date for Memorial Day weekend, before a storyline was even set. So, Cameron came back, and soon, it was the typical stories for a James Cameron film: behind schedule, over-budget, with reports that it cost too much to ever see profit. They were finishing post-production all the way up until the star-studded premiere on July 1; two days later, it hit screens.

A juggernaut. Not only did it take the top spot at the box office for the weekend, it broke the record for Fourth of July weekend releases. And everyone saw it, men, women, and children. It held onto the top spot for the entirety of July, sticking around long enough to end the year as 1991's highest grossing film. Right below it? Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which had come out three weeks before...and which we'll also discuss below, alongside eleven others:

Guns Blazin': 1991, Part Two

The Silence of the Lambs continued its dominance for five weeks until Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze debuted. Eventually, the #1 spot was taken by City Slickers, which ended the year as the #5 hit of 1991, and which we get into below. But one movie that never topped the box office still became not just an Oscar winner, not just one of the year's top earners, but a cultural moment, debated by critics, audiences, and scholars: Thelma & Louise.

The brainchild of writer Callie Khouri, Thelma & Louise was born of her frustration with women's parts in cinema, and was originally set to be an indie film with Khouri directing. When the script got into Ridley Scott's hands, however, things changed: he came on as producer, and, after several others passed, eventually took on the directing reins, enticing actresses like Jodie Foster, Meryl Streep, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Goldie Hawn before the final duo of Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon were cast. And when it finally did come out, oh my goodness, what a furor. Was it feminist? Was it anti-male? Khouri and critic Janet Maslin said people who were offended were mis-aligning their sympathies (a nice way of saying, "a hit dog will holler"). It's a conversation that's still being had as subsequent generations discover the film; that, and what happens after the fade to white in the final frame, a sequence parodied over and over again in films (Wayne's World 2), television (Family Guy), commercials, and beyond. It's also the movie that changed the fortunes of the ab-solutely hunky drifter Louise takes up with, one Brad Pitt. And, did you know, just 19 days ago, a musical version of the film premiered in London, written by Callie Khouri with original songs by Neko Case? The legacy continues...

And it all happened here, in 1991, just one among these twelve releases:

The Early Bird: 1991, Part One

We start 1991 not in January, but in February. Partly because it just happened to work out that way. And partly because 1991's movie year - full of legends, beauty and the Beast and Thelma & Louise and JFK and Paris is Burning and Soapdish - can be said to center around the February box office smash that became a home video sensation, with enough heat to win Best Picture a year and a month after its initial release. Yes, yes: The Silence of the Lambs.

The film has an interesting pedigree for a blockbuster and Oscar winner. Based on a pulp paperback thriller, The Silence of the Lambs follows FBI trainee Clarice Starling as she hunts down a serial killer who skins his female victims; in her mission, she consults with the imprisoned murderer-psychiatrist-cannibal-genius Hannibal Lecter, who plays his own mind games with her. The director is Jonathan Demme, who by this time had become more known for his critically-acclaimed comedies like Melvin and Howard and Married to the Mob, though he initially broke through with exploitation pictures for Roger Corman, such as Caged Heat and Crazy Mama. The stars are Jodie Foster, a former child star who, with her Oscar-winning turn in 1988's The Accused, graduated into Serious Adult Actor, and Anthony Hopkins, a Welsh actor more known to the US for serious prestige work like The Lion in Winter or 87 Charing Cross Road. Together with writer Ted Tally, they made what could have been a lurid thriller and turned it into a hit with critics and audiences - and an enduring cinema classic.

Oh, yes, classic. We don't like to think of anything made after the 1960s as a classic, but it's been 35 years, I think we can say it, and The Silence of the Lambs more than qualifies, if just for how ubiquitous the film's iconography has become. Yes, the book series by Thomas Harris was already popular, and Michael Mann adapted Red Dragon into Manhunter in 1986, but it's the success of The Silence of the Lambs that gives us a four-film franchise, two television series (Hannibal and the short-lived Clarice), a musical parody (Silence! The Musical), decades of references (Zootopia 2 just last year paid homage), and even an "unconventional biography" (Brian Raftery's Hannibal Lecter: A Life, published just this February). Even during the film's first month of release, you could feel it: Foster and Hopkins presented the writing awards at the Academy Awards for 1990, just one month after The Silence of the Lambs came our, and were introduced with great fanfare and greeted by loud applause. When the VHS came out in October, it became the most rented video in the country. When the Academy Awards for 1991 were held the next year, the film became the third (and, so far, final) to win The Big Five: Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Screenplay (adapted, in this case). That's a lot of momentum to carry for a year, but it had the goods.

And to think, in some places it played alongside these films:

1991: Well, Why Not?

I got so far behind on 1960 I almost forgot I spent April, May, and half of June watching 75 films from 1991. These 75, in fact:

The 1960 Retro Hollmann Awards

1960 took me a long time to sit back and consider. I started with this year because it was the last of Alfred Hitchcock's Best Director nominations; I wrap it up with an abundance of outstanding films of every genre, the beginning of a new decade heralding the coming of a new sensibility. The variety is evident in the number of nominees I wound up with: 38 different films are named within the 18 categories, 

The 1960 Retro Hollmann Awards:

The Top Ten of 1960

Here are my Top Ten films of 1960, with apologies to The Facts of Life (my #11), Hiroshima mon amour, Jazz on a Summer's Day, Lola Montès, Our Man in Havana, and Spartacus. Beginning with #10…

Hitch's Last Chance: Best Director, 1960

Here we come to the final Oscar category we're covering for 1960, the nominees for Best Director:

Jack Cardiff, Sons and Lovers

Jules Dassin, Never On Sunday

Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho

Billy Wilder, The Apartment

Fred Zinnemann, The Sundowners

Now, this would not be Hitchcock's year at the Oscars, though he didn't leave 1960 without some honors: when the Walk of Fame officially opened in early 1960, Hitchcock was among the first honorees, with two stars, one honoring his film work, the other honoring his television work. And as we discussed before, Psycho itself was a major hit, breaking box office records all around the world, with Hitch himself raking in over $15 million. It was a great year for the director, the year that, I would argue, made him the legend he is today. The Oscar nomination was the capper. Unfortunately, it wasn't a win, and it was his final nomination; he would finally get an Oscar seven years later ... an honorary award.

The night's big winner was Billy Wilder. Hitchcock had five Best Director nominations, Wilder had seven Best Director nominations, and four times - 1944, 1945, 1954, and 1960 - those nominations were against each other. This was the second time Wilder triumphed. It was also his last nomination, in this category, at least. Worth noting, too: this was also the third match-up between Wilder and Fred Zinnemann.

And how do I rate them? From fifth to first, here we go:

An All-Timer: Best Picture, 1960

Tomorrow we close out the 1960 Oscars with Best Director, since this 1944/45/60 run began with the nominations for Alfred Hitchcock. That’s the marquee category this time around. Which means today, we get into the Big Prize. The nominees for Best Picture are:

The Alamo

The Apartment

Elmer Gantry

Sons and Lovers

The Sundowners

My rankings, from fifth to first: