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.

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: 

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: