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:

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:

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: