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1991
The winner is listed first, in CAPITAL letters.
Filmsite's Greatest Films
of 1991
Actor:
ANTHONY HOPKINS in "The Silence of the
Lambs", Warren Beatty in "Bugsy", Robert De
Niro in "Cape Fear", Nick Nolte in "The Prince
of Tides", Robin Williams in "The Fisher King"
Actress:
JODIE FOSTER in "The Silence of the
Lambs", Geena Davis in "Thelma & Louise",
Laura Dern in "Rambling Rose", Bette Midler in "For
the Boys", Susan Sarandon in "Thelma & Louise"
Supporting Actor:
JACK PALANCE in "City Slickers", Tommy Lee Jones in "JFK",
Harvey Keitel in
"Bugsy", Ben Kingsley in "Bugsy", Michael
Lerner in "Barton Fink"
Supporting Actress:
MERCEDES RUEHL in "The Fisher King", Diane Ladd in "Rambling
Rose", Juliette Lewis in "Cape Fear", Kate Nelligan
in "The Prince of Tides", Jessica Tandy in "Fried
Green Tomatoes"
Director:
JONATHAN DEMME for "The Silence of the
Lambs", Barry Levinson for "Bugsy", Ridley
Scott for "Thelma & Louise", John Singleton for "Boyz
N the Hood", Oliver Stone for "JFK"
 The
five films nominated for Best Picture for 1991 were a very
distinctive mix of different types of films: a musical animation,
a horror/thriller, a gangster bio, a political conspiracy thriller,
and a romantic melodrama.
The big winner was director Jonathan Demme's The
Silence of the Lambs (with seven nominations
and five wins). Its surprise win came for many reasons:
- it was a 'horror' film - the first of its
genre to be named Best Picture
- it was the first Best Picture nominee
to have been commercially-available on videotape before its
win
- it was released in late January of 1991, many
months before most Best Picture nominees were released
(to keep them fresh in Academy voters' minds)
- and most importantly, it was the third film
to win the top five awards (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best
Actress, Best Director, and Best Writer/Screenplay - Ted
Tally) since two other films had accomplished the same feat: One
Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and It
Happened One Night (1934) - it was the last Best
Picture winner, to date, to win both Best Actor and Best
Actress
The top-notch film, a shocking psychological
horror picture about a cannibalistic killer and his strange
relationship with a newbie FBI agent, was based on Thomas Harris's
1988 best-selling novel of the same name. It was a sequel to
an earlier film Manhunter
(1986) (aka Red Dragon: The Pursuit of Hannibal
Lecter), also based on a Thomas Harris novel titled Red
Dragon published in 1981. The two nominations without
wins were for Best Sound and Best Film Editing. Jonathan Demme
(with his first directorial nomination) won the Best Director
award for The Silence of the Lambs,
a film with uncharacteristic subject matter that was not usually
the recipient of so many Oscar awards.
The other four Best Picture nominees that spread
the nominations fairly evenly were:
- Walt Disney's feature-length animated musical
cartoon Beauty and the Beast (with six nominations
and two wins - Best Song "Beauty and the Beast" and
Best Original Score) - it was the first hand-drawn
animated feature to be nominated for Best Picture. [It would
be another ten years before a special Oscar category for
animated films would be created - Best Animated Feature Film.]
Three of the film's nominations were for Best Song - its
other two nominated songs were "Be Our Guest" and "Belle." It
was the first film to have three nominated songs in
one year, a feat duplicated by The Lion King (1994)
- director Barry Levinson's Vegas gangster movie Bugsy (with
ten nominations and two wins - Best Art/Set Direction and
Best Costume Design)
- director Oliver Stone's controversial three-hour
long examination of President Kennedy's assassination and
conspiracy theory in JFK (with eight nominations and
two wins - Best Cinematography and Best Film Editing); Stone
was nominated for three Oscars - producing, directing, and
writing
- star/co-producer/director Barbra Streisand's
second directorial effort The Prince of Tides (with
seven nominations and no wins), a melodramatic adaptation
of Pat Conroy's novel about a psychiatrist's curing of the
traumas of a patient's family
Two of the directors of Best Picture nominees
were not nominated for Best Director: Gary Trousdale and Kirk
Wise for Beauty and the Beast, and Barbra Streisand
for The Prince of Tides. [Streisand was the third female
director who failed to receive a nomination for a Best Picture-nominated
film. The other two were Randa Haines for Children of a
Lesser God (1986), and Penny Marshall for Awakenings
(1990). Part of the controversy over the nominations for
director was because Streisand had been overlooked one other
time as director - for Yentl (1983).]
Their two directors' places were taken by Ridley
Scott (with his first directorial nomination) for his stridently
feminist buddy/road film Thelma & Louise (with six
nominations and one win - Callie Khouri's Best Original Screenplay),
and 24 year-old black director/writer John Singleton (with
his directorial debut) for his tragic film about South Central
Los Angeles gang violence in the ghetto drama Boyz N the
Hood (with two nominations and no wins).
[Singleton became the youngest nominee
for Best Director in Academy history, and the first African-American to
be nominated as Best Director. He was also the third non-white
director ever nominated - the first was Hiroshi Teshigahara
for Woman in the Dunes (1965), and the second was
Akira Kurosawa for Ran (1985). Singleton was also
cited with a nomination for Best Original Screenplay - but
surprisingly, no Best Picture nod for Boyz N the Hood.
Interestingly, Laurence Fishburne and Angela Bassett played
a divorced couple in this film, and would become Oscar nominees
for What's Love Got to Do With It (1993) two years
later as the real-life battling couple Ike and Tina Turner.]
The Best Actor winner was Anthony Hopkins (with
his first nomination and first Oscar) for his chilling portrayal
as cannibalistic, menacing, psychopathic serial psychiatrist/killer
Dr. Hannibal "Cannibal"
Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs.
Hopkins' performance - supposedly comprised of about 16 minutes
of screen time, was purported to be one of the shortest Best
Actor performance ever, up to this time. David Niven also had
an extremely short role in Separate Tables (1958). (Hopkins
was on-screen less than the Best Supporting Actor winner, Jack
Palance, for City Slickers.)
The competing Best Actor nominees were:
- Warren Beatty (with his fourth unsuccessful
acting nomination) as womanizing, glamorous East Coast Jewish
gangster and 40s Las Vegas dreamer/developer Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel
in Bugsy
- Robert De Niro (with his sixth nomination,
and his second consecutive nomination in the 90s) as vengeful,
demented ex-convict Max Cady in director Martin Scorsese's
remake of the earlier 1962 thriller Cape Fear (with
two nominations and no wins)
- Nick Nolte (with his first nomination) as
Streisand's emotionally crippled patient Tom Wingo in The
Prince of Tides
- Robin Williams (with his third nomination)
as Parry - a New York City street person in search of the
mystical Holy Grail in director Terry Gilliam's fantasy/comedy The
Fisher King (with five nominations and one win - Best
Supporting Actress)
The Best Actress Oscar was presented to Jodie
Foster (with her third nomination and second Oscar)
for her performance as strong-willed, brainy, yet vulnerable
FBI agent trainee Clarice Starling searching for a brutal serial
killer in The Silence of the Lambs.
[She had previously won a Best Actress Oscar for The Accused
(1988), three years earlier.]
Two other Best Actress nominees were the co-stars
in Thelma
& Louise, two gutsy, pistol-wielding female outlaws who
raise hell and joyride until they have nowhere left to escape
from surrounding FBI agents:
- Geena Davis (with her second nomination) as
bored housewife Thelma
- Susan Sarandon (with her second nomination)
as Louise Sawyer
The remaining two Best Actress nominees were:
- Bette Midler (with her second nomination)
as USO entertainer Dixie Leonard, wife of showbiz partner
James Caan in director Mark Rydell's musical For the Boys
- Laura Dern (with her first nomination) as
oversexed, uninhibited 19 year-old Rose in director Martha
Coolidge's tale of sexual repression and coming-of-age in
a film adaptation of Calder Willingham's semi-autobiographic
book Rambling Rose (with two nominations and no wins).
[Laura Dern's nomination was in the same year as her own
mother's (Diane Ladd's) supporting nomination for the same
film. They were the first and only real-life mother-daughter
pair to receive Oscar nominations in the same year and for
the same film.]
The Best Supporting Actor Oscar was a surprise
win for seventy-two year-old Jack Palance (with his third nomination
and first Oscar - it was thirty-nine years since his
last nomination for Sudden Fear (1952)), for his role
as trail boss Curly in director Ron Underwood's adventure/comedy City
Slickers (the film's sole nomination and win). This was
the award for which Palance performed one-arm pushups.
[Palance tied the existing record of
thirty-nine years between nominations and victory with Helen
Hayes - her span of films existed between The Sin of Madelon
Claudet (1931-2) and Airport (1970). The record
holder of the longest span between acting nominations was
Henry Fonda, with forty-one years between The
Grapes of Wrath (1940) and On Golden Pond (1981).]
Two competing Best Supporting Actor nominees
were co-stars in Bugsy:
- Ben Kingsley (with his second nomination)
as Bugsy's long-time mobster mentor Meyer Lansky
- Harvey Keitel (with his first nomination)
as Bugsy's foul-mouthed gangster associate Mickey Cohen
[Note: Keitel has repeatedly been overlooked
by the Academy, although he has consistently given original
and strong Oscar-worthy performances, including these roles:
Charlie Cappa in Mean Streets
(1973), "Sport"
Matthew in Taxi Driver (1976),
Judas Iscariot in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988),
Jake Berman in The Two Jakes (1990), Hal Slocumb in Thelma & Louise
(1991), Mr. Larry White in Reservoir Dogs (1992),
George Baines in The Piano (1993), Winston Wolf in Pulp
Fiction (1994), and more!]
The remaining two Best Supporting Actor nominees
were:
- Tommy Lee Jones (with his first nomination)
as New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw, accused of complicity
in Kennedy's murder in JFK
- Michael Lerner (with his first nomination)
as Louis B. Mayer-like studio boss Jack Lipnick in the quirky Barton
Fink (with three nominations and no wins) from the writer/director
team of Joel and Ethan Coen
Mercedes Ruehl (with her first nomination) won
the Best Supporting Actress award for her performance as video
store owner Anne Napolitano and girlfriend of burned-out radio
talk-show host (Jeff Bridges) in The Fisher King - it
was the film's sole Oscar win.
The remaining Best Supporting Actress nominees
were:
- Diane Ladd (Laura Dern's co-star and real-life
mother) (with her third unsuccessful nomination) as genteel
Southern matron 'Mother' Hillyer in Rambling Rose
- 17 year old Juliette Lewis (with her first
nomination) as young rebellious teenager Danielle Bowden
who nearly succumbs to Robert DeNiro's psychotic assaults
in Cape Fear
- Kate Nelligan (with her first nomination)
as co-star Nick Nolte's mother Lila Wingo Newbury in The
Prince of Tides
- Jessica Tandy (with her second and last nomination)
as eccentric 80 year-old nursing home resident and storyteller
Ninny Threadgoode in director Jon Avnet's adaptation of Fannie
Flagg's novel Fried Green Tomatoes (at the Whistle Stop
Cafe) (with two nominations and no wins)
It should be noted that Terminator
2: Judgment Day with Arnold Schwarzenegger won four technical
Oscars (out of its six nominations): Best Makeup, Best
Sound, Best Sound Effects Editing, and Best Visual Effects.
Oscar Snubs and Omissions:
Ray Harryhausen, the special-effects genius of
notable films during the 50s-80s, including It Came From
Beneath The Sea (1955), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), One
Million Years, BC (1966), The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958),
and Clash of the Titans (1981) -- but who never received
even a single Oscar nomination -- was awarded the Gordon E.
Sawyer honorary Academy Award this year.
Ridley Scott's Thelma & Louise should
have been nominated for Best Picture. Coming before Jane Campion's The
Piano (1993) was the New Zealand director's second feature
film in this year - the un-nominated, autobiographical An
Angel at My Table with Kerry Fox as novelist/poet Janet
Frame. Director/writer/actor Albert Brooks' existential fantasy
comedy about heaven, Defending Your Life lacked nominations,
and recognition for Brooks as recently-deceased Daniel Miller
on trial in the afterlife, for Meryl Streep as his love interest
Julia, for Rip Torn as Daniel's reassuring defense attorney
Bob Diamond, and for Lee Grant as prosecutor Lena Foster.
As mentioned earlier, there was no Best Picture
nod for John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood, and Laurence
Fishburne was denied a nomination for his role as strict, tough-love
South LA father Jason "Furious" Styles. And director
Terry Gilliam's fantasy/comedy The Fisher King with
five nominations came away with only one Oscar win - Best Supporting
Actress (Mercedes Ruehl). Losing nominees included Robin Williams
(Best Actor), Best Original Screenplay (Richard LaGravenese),
Best Original Music Score, and Best Art Direction-Set Decoration.
There were also many acting performances that
deserved some sort of recognition by the Academy:
- Wesley Snipes as the targeted, wealthy Harlem
ganglord Nino Brown in director Mario Van Peebles' violent New
Jack City
- also Wesley Snipes as married, slick black
architect Flipper Purify, engaged in an inter-racial love
affair with Italian-American secretary Angela (Annabella
Sciorra) in writer/director Spike Lee's Jungle Fever
- Samuel L. Jackson as Flipper's violent, crack-addicted
brother Gator Purify in the inner-city melodrama Jungle
Fever
- Lili Taylor as aspiring but plain San Francisco
folk-singer and poet named Rose (opposite River Phoenix as
a young GI) in the heartbreaking Dogfight
- River Phoenix as Seattle narcoleptic hustler
Mike Waters in Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho
- Reese Witherspoon (in her film debut) as a
14-year old with a crush on an older boy in The Man in
the Moon
- Steve Martin (the film's screenwriter) as
wacky TV weatherman Harris K. Telemacher and Sarah Jessica
Parker as liberated Valley Girl SanDeE* in Mick Jackson's L.A.
Story (with no nominations)
- Annette Bening as sassy, slinky, and leggy
B-movie starlet Virginia "Flamingo" Hill, Bugsy's
hard-boiled gangster moll and namesake for his visionary
casino/resort in the Nevada desert in Bugsy
- Anjelica Huston as Morticia Addams in Barry
Sonnenfeld's The Addams Family
- Harvey Keitel as sympathetic police officer
Hal Slocumb in Thelma & Louise
- Gary Oldman as presumed assassin Lee Harvey
Oswald, Donald Sutherland as Mr. X, and Joe Pesci as conspirator
David Ferrie in Oliver Stone's JFK (only Tommy Lee
Jones was recognized for his acting performance, among the
film's eight nominations)
- Macaulay Culkin as friendly neighbor Thomas
J. Sennett to Vada Sultenfuss (Anna Chlumsky) in Howard Zieff's My
Girl
- Mary Stuart Masterson as Alabama cafe operator
Idgie Threadgoode - one character in the life stories of
Jessica Tandy's Ninny in Fried Green Tomatoes
- Mimi Rogers as a spiritually-converted Los
Angeles telephone operator in writer/director Michael Tolkin's The
Rapture (with no nominations)
- Lili Taylor as shy waitress and aspiring folk
singer Rose - chosen as River Phoenix's 'ugly date' in Nancy
Savoca's Dogfight
- Alison Steadman as Wendy - the nurturing mother
of a lower middle-class London family in British filmmaker
Mike Leigh's second film Life is Sweet
- Timothy Dalton as screen star and Nazi spy
Neville Sinclair in the comic-book spy film The Rocketeer
- Val Kilmer as Doors' lead singer Jim Morrison
in Oliver Stone's biopic of the 60's rock group The Doors (with
no nominations)
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