Before I go on to list the biggest mistake the Academy has made over the last 20 years I figured I could give the lazy kids who don’t want to read the previous couple thousand words a brief summary.
5) The 2009 ceremony got not one or two, but all five nominees for Best Picture wrong, leaving the rightful movies in the dark.
4) Leonardo DiCaprio was blindsided by Jaime Foxx for Best Actor in 2005
3) Shakespeare in Love shoots past Saving Private Ryan to take home Best Picture in 1999
2) Last year’s abomination of letting The King’s Speech stutter past The Social Network for top prize.
As for the biggest error in the past 20 years we go have to go back to one of the strongest years of modern day cinema: 1994. All five movies were absolutely great. Masterpieces even. There was a romantic comedy thrown in the mix, which is almost unheard of. Specifically though, let’s talk about the movies currently ranked as #27, #4, and #1 of all time on IMDb. Keep in mind, only 10 of the top 30 films on this list are from the 90’s at all. That leaves seven spots for nine years of films. At twenty-seventh is the winner Forrest Gump. A fantastic film about.. I don’t even need to talk about it. You’ve seen it and have quoted it for most of your life. I am absolutely not claiming it as an undeserving winner of the award. It was just undeserving THAT year against the following competition. Now, when people ask me what should have won that year I can’t tell them. I honestly have no idea because the two movies that deserve it were both two of the best films of all time and I proudly place them in my personal top 10. Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption. I don’t even know what else to say. Quintin Tarantino’s time jumping, foul mouthed masterpiece or the Stephen King adaptation that will put you through the ringer of emotions. Pulp Fiction (#4) has some of the best lines of dialogue cinema will ever see and flips the entire genre of gangster movies on its head. Not to mention it contains performances of a lifetime from Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Christopher Walken (in one scene, no less), and the role that is credited with saving John Travolta’s career. There had been movies that played with their timeline before, but never to this extent. To have a character die and be in the movie a few scenes later was unheard of. The craziest thing is that it works flawlessly. Most of the world hadn’t known Tarantino yet, but after seeing this film, we got a pretty good idea. Whether it’s learning what they call a quarter-pounder in Amsterdam or the amount of pain a man is willing to go through for a watch, the film is perfection if there ever could be such a thing. Swinging over to The Shawshank Redemption (#1) you get Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman telling the prison story of all prison stories. The film didn’t do well at the box office, which clearly hurt it’s Academy performance but those who did see it could not deny what they had seen. As I said previously this movie will put you through the ringer of emotions be it fear, anger, sadness, loneliness, pride, or happiness, you will feel it. This movie resonates so much with the world that earlier today I was in a meeting where they referred to Shawshank for at least five minutes and it made sense to everyone. The message of the film is get busy living or get busy dying and it’s more and more true every day. It is such an important film that is perfectly directed by Frank Darabont without being too showy or stylized. It is almost the anti-thesis of Pulp Fiction and that is what makes it so hard to compare the two. Either way you slice it though, one of them deserved to call itself Best Picture and sadly neither ever will.
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