Oscars 1997: Best Picture

There was no beating the Titanic juggernaut for Best Picture, not in 1997:

But here's how I'd rank 'em:

1997 Oscars: Best Supporting Actress

Best Supporting Actress was a tight race between two very different performers and performances. In one corner, the beauty demonstrating her thesping abilities in the throwback noir L.A. Confidential, Kim Basinger (some still may consider her role a leading lady part); in the other, the veteran whose career was older than 20th Century Fox, emotionally anchoring the narrative of the epic box office titan (!) Titanic, Gloria Stuart! Indeed, at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, they both won, a rare awards season tie.

Oscar did not go the same way.

It’s an interesting lineup overall, with three Best Picture nominees, a dramedy, and a studio comedy all in the mix. Here's how I'd rank 'em:

1997 Oscars: Best Actress

Best Actress '97 was one of those where everyone won something. Julie Christie and Helena Bonham-Carter won critics' prizes, Helen Hunt and Judi Dench won Golden Globes, and Kate Winslet won the box office. If you were around in the late 90s, though, you may recall how unstoppable Helen Hunt was. She was the star of the TV hit Mad About You, for which she won four consecutive Emmys, 1996-99, and of the 1996 film, Twister. TV and movie stardom - isn't an Oscar the logical next step?

The nominees, ranked by me:

1997 Oscars: Best Actor

Hard to oversell what a slam-bang lineup 1997's Lead Actor was, is. One of those years where any one of them could win and it wouldn't be the wrong choice. The one that did win? A great choice!:

The nominees, as ranked by me:

1997 Oscars: Best Supporting Actor

Was it inevitable that Robin Williams would triumph at the Academy Awards?:

In addition to three previous nominations in Best Actor and being a beloved industry titan at the time, he was also only one of two Supporting Actors from Best Picture nominees, the other being As Good As It Gets' Greg Kinnear, at the time best known as the host for E!'s Talk Soup, for which he won two Daytime Emmys. L.A. Confidential and Titanic were better represented in the actress categories. And while The Full Monty won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast (or Best Ensemble, as some call it), none of its individual performers were ever able to gain a foothold in the awards race; only the BAFTAs, as one might expect, nominated Mark Addy and Tom Wilkinson, with the latter winning in a category that also included Rupert Everett for My Best Friend's Wedding (also a Golden Globe nominee) and Burt Reynolds for Boogie Nights (the only one of the nominees below so honored by the Brits). Reynolds found himself in the unfamiliar position of being the critics' pick all season, but while Boogie Nights was called his big comeback, Reynolds hated the movie: he fired his agent and publicly dismissed writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson and his experience working on it. The category's other big comeback story, Robert Forster, had a better time with Jackie Brown, praising his experience and crediting it with revitalizing his career (even on Wikipedia, his bio has a section called "Career Slump" before one labeled "Jackie Brown").

The performances, as I rank 'em: 

1997 Oscars: Best Director

We now start our journey through the 50th Academy Awards, celebrating the films of 1997. Next week we'll do Best Picture, this week we'll do the Acting categories, but today: Best Director.

Now, if you recall, it was a director who set me on this path of 1990, 1997, and 2003: Kevin Costner. Readers voted the years in which he directed a film as the project to follow my The Winner Is John Ford series. Sadly, as we noted yesterday, The Postman was little appreciated in its time, though Costner did "win" Worst Director at the Razzies and its overseas equivalent, Spain's Yoga Awards. Unfair and unjust.

Two directors who missed the Oscar lineup: James L. Brooks for Best Picture nominee As Good As It Gets and Steven Spielberg for Amistad, both nominated at the Directors Guild of America Awards and at the Golden Globes. The Boxer's Jim Sheridan was also nominated at the Golden Globes while missing out at the Academy Awards. And then there's Baz Luhrmann, whose 1996 Romeo + Juliet was no awards favorite in the States but qualified for the next year's BAFTAs, where he was nominated for Best Director against Curtis Hanson, Peter Cattaneo, and James Cameron...and won. 

But there can be only one King of the World at the Oscars: 

Here's how I'd rank 'em:

1997: The Big One

Today we cover the last month of films in 1997, including two Best Picture nominees and Kevin Costner's second directorial effort.

December 19, 1997, is one of the most important dates in cinema history, as it is the release date of James Cameron's Titanic. People forget this, but at the time, disaster was expected. The film went over $100M over budget, shooting went two months over schedule, and the release date was pushed back multiple times before being given an inauspicious pre-Christmas date. "Cameron's ego's done him in this time!" people thought. It soon became the world's highest-grossing film in history, a title it would hold until...James Cameron's Avatar in 2009, another film that people thought would bomb its release (people online said with Avatar: The Way of Water, this time the long-foretold end of Cameron's career would finally take place, it's bound to be a flop, no one cares about these movies! both Avatar films rank above Titanic in all-time box office). The movie was the #1 film at the box office for 15 weekends in a row, 3.75 straight months of Titanic dominance.

But just because something wasn't #1 doesn't mean it didn't make a lot of money. As Good As It Gets came out Christmas Day. The fourth film by James L. Brooks, it follows the unlikely relationship between an obsessive-compulsive ornery romance writer, his big-hearted but sharp-tongued waitress, and his gay artist neighbor. A heartfelt rom-com with very little in the way of special effects, it wound up a sensation, grossing over $300M and winning Oscars for lead actors Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt.

That was just one of several Christmas Day releases, including The Postman. It had been seven years since Kevin Costner had made his directorial debut with (and won the Oscar for) Dances with Wolves. In the years between, though he didn't direct, he produced many of the films he starred in, some of which (Wyatt Earp, Waterworld) people bring up when talking about Costner as a filmmaker. No one made that error with his films immediately following Dances with Wolves: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, JFK, and The Bodyguard. I think the reason is obvious: they were hits, and people want to associate Costner the Director with less-than-successful, big-budgeted epics. Something about the success of Dances with Wolves seemed to stick in people's craw.

The Postman, at least, would finally prove them right. He got the job directing because the source novel's original author, David Brin, felt Costner channeled his titular hero throughout his filmography. The hero being a drifter in a post-apocalyptic United States who is mistaken for a postal service worker, and in a world without mail or phones, he represents healing, communication, hope. Sentimental and sincere, critics hated it and audiences didn't see it. It grossed less than half its budget...worldwide. It would be another six years before he directed again.

But there were more than just three December releases. There were also these:

1997: Good Will, Great Success

Ten movies we get into today, all released between November 7 and December 10, 1997.  December 5th, though, saw the release of our next Best Picture nominee: Good Will Hunting.

Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures does a good job of placing us in Matt Damon’s and Ben Affleck’s shoes, two good-looking young actors who haven’t quite hit yet and are waiting for that One Great Part that will showcase their talents. Together, they collaborate on an expansion of a short script Damon wrote in college, a thriller about a Southie math genius recruited by the government. Castle Rock Entertainment buys the script, Rob Reiner and William Goldman make some suggestions about what to take out (the thriller aspect) and what to build up (these therapist scenes…), but the movie doesn’t get made. There’s interest from studios, but no one wants to buy the script due to the writers’ requirement: that they be cast in the roles they wrote for themselves. Fortunately, by this time, they’re friendly with indie success Kevin Smith, who convinces Miramax to make the film and cast the guys…and you know the rest. Movie’s made, released, and is a huge hit, ending up on Top Ten lists, grossing $225.9M on a $10M budget, winning Oscars for Damon & Affleck’s screenplay and for Robin Williams’ against-type performance as the therapist, and cementing the young men’s status as Stars.

And this is what was out in theaters as it started it’s run:

1997: Just Before the Fall

Thirteen films here, all released between September 26 and November 7, 1997, as late Summer turns to early Autumn. 

1997: Exposed

This batch of 15 films covers the period July 16 - September 19, 1997. Two Best Picture nominees came out in this period: The Full Monty on August 13 and L.A. Confidential on September 19.

The Full Monty, in which out-of-work steel workers in desperate need of money form a pseudo-Chippendales act promising full frontal nudity, was one of many British indie/arthouse films that took the US and Oscar by storm in the 1990s; indeed, between 1992 and 1998, nine such films were up for Best Picture. It was an insanely successful film, financially, grossing over $250M on a $3.5M budget. Of course, money isn't everything, but cultural impact is, and The Full Monty can boast that, too: two stage productions, one a musical (2000, book by Love! Valour! Compassion! playwright Terrence McNally), one a non-musical (2013); a television series spin-off that debuted on Hulu last summer; and, I would argue, is the reason other similarly-toned and -themed films from 2003's Calendar Girls to 2014's Pride were greenlit and made.

L.A. Confidential is the movie people today claim came closest to threatening Titanic's Best Picture win (I assume that's quite relative). Adapted from the James Ellroy novel of the same name, it depicts the corruption of the LAPD, its relationship with Hollywood and organized crime, and a trio of cops who decide, yeah, maybe it's time to do the right thing. Titanic may have been the people's choice, but L.A. Confidential was the critics' pick: the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Society of Film Critics, and the Critics' Choice Awards all named it the Best Film of 1997. It was also a hit - $126M gross, $35M budget, hoo yeah.

Interesting to see two Best Picture nominees among these releases, especially as, nowadays, August and September aren't really considered "awards season" periods. Times change. Anyway, the rest of the summer:

1997: The Best Batman

I'm late on this, so let's charge through 2.5 months' worth of 1997 releases, shall we?:

1997: The Two J. Los

1997 begins with two Jennifer Lopez movies, the debut of a modern American master, and Corky St. Clair:

1997: Beginning

Now that 1990 is wrapped, we can get to 1997.

The 1990 Retro Hollmann Awards: Part Three

OK, so we've got my Top Ten, part one of the awards, and part two of the awards. Now, the grand finale: part three of the 1990 Retro Hollmann Awards!

The 1990 Retro Hollmann Awards: Part Two

Continuing to wrap up 1990 after the Top Ten and Day One of 1990 Retro Hollmann Awards. Three acting categories lie ahead, let's go:

The 1990 Retro Hollmann Awards: Part One

This is the first of three posts this week, each dedicated to the 1990 Retro Hollmann Awards. No, I did not make a separate nominations announcement, all will be revealed as we go category by category. Get familiar with my Top Ten of this year, come back, and enjoy.

The first six categories:

Top Ten of 1990

Here's to the Honorable Mentions: Alice, Cinema Paradiso, King of New York, Miller's Crossing, Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, Postcards from the Edge, Reversal of Fortune, and to my #11, Mermaids. They almost made it to this Top Ten and, in the years to come, some may wind up becoming more dear to me than the films below. As of today, though, after 75 films and much consideration, these are my Top Ten Films of 1990 - in alphabetical order:

Oscars 1990: Best Director

History has a way of repeating itself. In 1980, Martin Scorsese was the critical favorite for Raging Bull, expected to win until leading man Robert Redford made his directorial debut. In 1990, Scorsese was the critical favorite for GoodFellas, with everyone making jokes at the expense of Kevin Cosnter, a leading man making his directorial debut...until they actually saw Dances with Wolves. Once people saw the film, they knew the inevitable was to occur:

 

My ranking of the nominees:

Oscars 1990: Best Actress

How many times has a horror performance won at the Academy Awards?

Fredric March did it at the 1931-32 Oscars for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, though that was a tie with Wallace Beery's The Champ. Ruth Gordon famously won for her chilling neighbor in Rosemary's Baby in 1968. And partly because they have the prestige of Oscar, people still debate whether Natalie Portman in 2010's Black Swan and Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins in 1991's The Silence of the Lambs were in horror movies at all.

But I don't think there's any mistaking that 1990's Misery is a horror film, with its psycho leading lady, terrifying premise, and Stephen King source material. And that makes it all the more miraculous that against the critical (and pundits'!) favorite Anjelica Huston, the year's biggest box office queen Julia Roberts, and previous winners Meryl Streep and Joanne Woodward, it was Kathy Bates who reigned supreme:

Here's how I'd rank 'em:

Oscars 1990: Best Actor

The five nominees for Best Actor were all winners. Kevin Costner wasn’t expected to get the Oscar for Dances with Wolves in acting, but he was the favorite to win Picture and Director (especially after Golden Globe and Guild wins). Richard Harris was up for a movie no one had seen but which he had done ample publicity for: the nomination was the win. Awakenings’ Robert De Niro had already been named Best Actor by the New York Film Critics Circle (also citing his supporting performance in GoodFellas) and by the National Board of Review, where he had tied with co-star Robin Williams. Gerard Depardieu won the Cannes Best Actor prize for Cyrano de Bergerac and the Golden Globe for Best Actor - Musical/Comedy for Green Card.

And Jeremy Irons won the actual Oscar:

The nominees, ranked in order of my preference:

Oscars 1990: Best Supporting Actor

1990's Best Supporting Actor race is full of surprises. The first is Al Pacino's nomination for the comic strip adaptation Dick Tracy, where he goes big as gangster Big Boy Caprice. Pacino being nominated wasn't the surprise - the Golden Globes so honored him earlier - it was the fact that he got in for Dick Tracy and not in Best Actor for The Godfather: Part III that shocked.

The bigger surprise was the winner. Before there were 105 "precursors," common wisdom still held that the New York Film Critics held a lot of sway with Academy voters; this year's winner was Bruce Davison in Longtime Companion. He also won the Golden Glove and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Male. The only thing he didn't win was the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award, though he was named runner-up to Joe Pesci in GoodFellas (Pesci was reportedly runner-up to Davison's NYFCC win). If you wanted to win your Oscar pool, you were predicting Davison.

And you would have lost:

Well, here's how I'd rank 'em:

Oscars 1990: Best Supporting Actress

Of all the nominees for Best Supporting Actress, only one got cheers and whoops when her name was called before the winner was announced:

Whoopi Goldberg's win was not quite a surprise - those cheers alone are proof of the momentum. She had received the best notices for her performance in the biggest hit of the year, even critics who panned the movie praised her portrayal. The only threat to her win, it would appear, was Lorraine Bracco, who had been awarded by the LA critics and hat-tipped by the New York critics and the Golden Globes. Mary McDonnell, Golden Globe-nominated and the leading lady in the Best Picture frontrunner, would probably be next. And after that, your guess is as good as mine: Diane Ladd was a Golden Globe nominee and had been here before but had an atypical part in an atypical film, while Annette Bening had managed to push out early favorite Shirley MacLaine (Postcards from the Edge) for a spot in the final five. 

In the past, I have given ratings from one star (*) to five (*****). I'm ending that today because, honestly, sometimes I just don't know how to rate something. I do know how to rank my affection for a set of performances, however. So, as with Best Picture, here are the Supporting Actress nominees from my #5 to my #1:

Oscars 1990: Best Picture of the Year

And now we come to our Oscars week, beginning with Best Picture of the Year - after all, I've reviewed every other movie I watched this year, why not review the Big Five?

These were the Big Five of 1990:

And these are my takes, counting down from my fifth choice to my top choice:

1990: All I Want for Christmas

Francis Ford Coppola was done with The Godfather. He felt he had told the Michael Corleone saga from beginning to end with both The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II. Paramount Pictures was not done with The Godfather. They felt there was more money to squeeze out and went about trying to develop a third chapter as early as 1978. Many writers and directors and even producers later, they were still nowhere. Fortunately for them, neither was Francis Ford Coppola, in need of a profitable hit as a director and writer after the one-two punch of One from the Heart and The Cotton Club. His sister Talia Shire talked him into hearing Paramount out (hey, can't blame a broad for trying: after all, she was nominated for The Godfather: Part II). Reuniting with most of the original cast and Mario Puzo, Coppola began work on the film in 1988.

The movie finally hit theaters Christmas Day 1990. Like Awakenings and Dances with Wolves, it was never #1 at the box office, but it wasn't a flop, either. In its first day, it made $6 million, the highest-ever for a Christmas Day release until 1997's Titanic. And because they were relatively frugal in their budget, they were able to actually make a profit by the end of its run, grossing over $136 million. Critics were mixed-to-positive in their reviews, while the usual awards season gong-throwers - the Hollywood Foreign Press, the Directors Guild, the Academy - welcomed back their old friends with open arms. The Godfather: Part III wound up tying with Dick Tracy for the second-most nominations: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Andy Garcia), Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography (the only time Gordon Willis received such a nomination for his work on the series, if you can believe it), Best Editing, and, surprise surprise!, Best Original Song ("Promise Me You'll Remember"). The film was a hit and it was getting awards: everyone's Christmas wishes were coming true.

There is only one more Christmas Day release to discuss but, too, I've an oversight to correct: a movie that came out earlier in the year that I forgot to place in its proper month. Fortunately, it has Santa right in the title:

1990: Snobs

Let's talk about Penny Marshall.

Penny Marshall is best known as one-half of Laverne & Shirley (she was Laverne) alondside Cindy Williams, characters they originated on the television sitcom Happy Days. Her brother Garry Marshall (who would eventually direct Pretty Woman) created Happy Days, having been a veteran of the TV side of show business; it was he who pushed her into acting, but it was her own independent work with writing partner Williams that inspired the Laverne and Shirley characters. A popular show, Laverne & Shirley ran eight seasons, during which time Marshall received three Golden Globe nominations and started directing: first a pilot of a different, then four episodes of Laverne & Shirley. Set to make her cinematic directorial debut with Peggy Sue Got Married, she left due to creative differences, but the same year got another directing job: the comedy-thriller Jumpin' Jack Flash with Whoopi Goldberg - a modest hit! She followed it up with the fantasy Big with Tom Hanks - an insane hit, and an Academy Award nominee for Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay. Her next film: Awakenings.

Awakenings tells the incredible true story of catatonic patients who miraculously, albeit temporarily, became active and aware after decades of no progress, possibly due to a treatment administered by their new physician. Robin Williams is the doctor, Robert De Niro is the first test subject - both were named Best Actor by the National Board of Review. A hit film based on a best-seller, it grossed over $100 million, was named among the best films of the year by a number of critical bodies, and was a no-brainer for a Best Picture nomination.

Marshall, however, never received any accolades for the film. Not an Oscar nod, not a DGA nomination, not a Golden Globe. And this is part of two problems the Academy had throughout this decade. The first, obviously, was their lack of nominations for female directors - you can’t say they just weren’t good enough, their films kept making money and getting into Best Picture (Randa Haines, anyone?). The second was, as far as I can see it, snobbery. Awakenings is not a comedy. Marshall, however, was a comedienne, a sitcom star. It didn’t matter that her films kept making money or received critical acclaim, just as it didn’t matter that Jerry Zucker - of Airplane!, Police Squad, and Top Secret! fame - brought in the biggest moneymaker of the year. Just as it didn’t matter in 1995, when Ron Howard won the DGA Award for Apollo 13 but blipped with Oscar! They weren’t in the club…yet.

Awakenings came out December 19th, amidst these eleven other eventual nominees and awards season hopefuls:

1990: The Winning Road

Today, we focus on films released October 19-December 5, which means we're focusing on Dances with Wolves.

This is why we're here, after all. You voted for me to watch Kevin Costner's directorial works and the films they were released alongside, so here we are. And Costner's first go in the director's chair was also his most successful: it won Best Picture, entered the lexicon, and secured his place in Hollywood, making his subsequent projects possible.

The film started as a spec script by writer Michael Blake, who had only one successful screen credit to his name: Stacy's Knights, a 1983 film about card-counting and revenge featuring, guess who, Kevin Costner. In interviews, Costner paints Blake as talented and temperamental, a man who had trouble selling his work because he entered every interaction with execs and developers with a "fight me" mentality, bemoaning the stupidity of Hollywood suits, refusing to compromise his vision, and overall, just being difficult. But talented! When Costner read Blake's still-unsold screenplay for Dances with Wolves in the 1980s - not because Blake offered it, but because he left it around the house while living with Costner - he immediately saw the appeal...and why studios were nervous about it. It was he who suggested Blake turn in it into a novel and sell that first, which might make it easier to sell the "adaptation" to studios.

Published in 1988 by Fawcett's Gold Medal imprint (meaning straight to paperback), the film rights were immediately snatched up by Costner, by then a star thanks to Silverado, The Untouchables, No Way Out, and Bull Durham, hoping to make it his directorial debut. You had an uncooperative writer, an untested director, and a genre - epic Western - that had dried out, especially since the notorious flop of Heaven's Gate in 1980. Not to mention half of it wouldn't be in English at all, but in the Lakota dialect! Just as they balked at the script, studios balked at the package. Eventually, Costner and his producing partner Jim Wilson secured foreign investment and a deal with Orion Pictures. Costner also paid out of his own pocket when production started going over budget, one of those things that immediately made people raise their eyebrows, smirk, and call the movie, Kevin's Gate. Filming in private ranches and national parks, Costner and crew wrapped up in late 1989. A year later, the film was released, limited on November 9th, wide on November 23rd.

And it was a smash hit. While never, not once, claiming the #1 spot at the box office, it had staying power. By the end of its run, it was the third-highest-grossing 1990 film in the United States, the fourth highest in the entire world. Accolades came from all over the world: the Berlin International Film Festival gave Costner the Silver Bear for Outstanding Single Achievement, the Japanese Film Academy named it the Best Foreign Language Film of the Year, France's César Awards nominated it for Best Foreign Film, and the Golden Globes gave it three awards, including Best Motion Picture - Drama. It cleaned up stateside too, named among the best of the year by guilds for the Cinematographers, Editors, Casting Directors, Directors, and Producers. 

All on the way to its big night at the Academy Awards, of course, where it won seven of its twelve nominations. Among them: Blake for Best Adapted Screenplay (they'll forgive anyone if they succeed) and Costner for Best Director and Best Picture.

Not bad considering some of the competition it was up against at both the box office and the awards run. Among which were these films: 

1990: Gangsters Galore

Fall 1990 was all about organized crime. Don't believe me? The films I capsule below run from September 14 to October 5, just shy of a month. There are seven films in all (though films I've defended before - Texasville and Henry & June - were released September 28th and October 5th, respectively). Four of those films deal with organized crime. And one film released around the same time - September 19th, to be exact - is considered by many to be the grand poobah of organized crime flicks.

GoodFellas is, perhaps, the most iconographic film in Martin Scorsese's career. Yeah, yeah, Taxi Driver, but I guarantee you know more people that have seen GoodFellas, that will quote GoodFellas without realizing they're quoting GoodFellas, than you will people who've seen Taxi Driver...or even The Departed. Think of the music video for Ashanti's "Foolish" or the multiple references on Family Guy or Animaniacs' "GoodFeathers" (an entire segment on a children's show based around imitations of the core three GoodFellas actors as pigeons). It's a movie that's permeated the culture, like Scarface or, hey, The Godfather. It's a movie significant enough to warrant its own making-of book, the indispensable Made Men by Glenn Kenny. Like the movie? Read the book, it only heightens the experience.

GoodFellas claimed the #1 spot its first weekend, taking over for Postcards from the Edge (more on that one below). That was it. Never hit the top spot of the box office again. By the end of its run, it made about $47M off a $25M budget. But that's just theaters: its life on video, DVD, and TV is...immeasurable. To see it is to love it: the Los Angeles Film Critics, the New York Film Critics, and the British Film Academy all named it the Best Picture of the Year in 1990! In national telecasts, the American Film Institute named it among the Top 100 American Films of All Time in both 1997 and 2007! Roger Ebert called it the best mob movie ever! The Sopranos creator David Chase credited that movie with the series' inception!

With many films, we look back at all their Oscar nominations and question the very meaning of the word "best." With GoodFellas, we see its one win (Best Supporting Actor - Joe Pesci) and four other nominations (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress - Lorraine Bracco, Best Adapted Screenplay) and question why it didn't get more?

Anyway. Here are the films it came out alongside:

1990: Ghost Makes the Most

Take a look at the announcement of the nominees for the 63rd Academy Awards. Particularly, 2:52 onward. Listen, you'll hear murmurs, stunned surprise, as the third Best Picture nominee is named: Ghost.

Well, why not Ghost? A supernatural romance about a murdered man's ghost trying to save his living girlfriend from being the killer's next victim, it's a film with something for everyone: hot protagonists (Patrick Swayze! Demi Moore! Tony Goldwyn!), Whoopi Goldberg providing comic relief, heartfelt conversations about faith and the afterlife, about love and the expression of it, and the kind of ending guaranteed to wring tears. Critics, from what I can tell, were generally, "Eh," on it, with the main criticisms being its various tones and the "sentimental" finale.

Audiences, on the other hand, loved it. In its first weekend following its July 22nd release, Ghost settled for the #2 slot while Die Hard 2 took #1. The week after, it was #1; by the end of the year, it was the top-grossing movie of 1990 - not just in the USA, in the world. It brought the Righteous Brothers' recording of "Unchained Melody" back to the Billboard charts. In the leadup to the Oscar nominations, it was acknowledged as among the best of the year by the American Society of Cinematographers, the American Cinema Editors, the Writers Guild of America, and the Golden Globes. Before its Best Picture nomination, it had already, that very morning, captured nominations for Best Supporting Actress (Whoopi Goldberg - who won), Best Original Screenplay (which it won), Best Film Editing, and Best Score. The critics were shocked and appalled, but people liked the movie!

I'll get more into my own feelings on Ghost when I discuss the Best Picture nominees. I've also already given my thoughts on The Two Jakes (August 10) and The Exorcist III (August 17). So here are other releases comprising Summer 1990...

1990: A Qualified Success

When is a hit not a hit? This is a question that has long dogged the legacy of Dick Tracy, a film that had the biggest opening weekend in Disney history, made about $103 million in the US alone, ended the year as the #9 film of 1990, and tied with The Godfather Part III as the second most-nominated film at the 63rd Academy Awards - yet still awaits a sequel. Now, you and I know a studio, especially Disney, will greenlight three sequels and a spin-off TV show if they make a penny's profit. So what happened with Dick Tracy?

Money, honey. Director-producer-star Warren Beatty was infamous for budget overruns and this was no different, as he went about $20 million or so over budget. Additionally, Disney, inspired by the marketing blitz for 1989's Batman, spent millions on toys, tie-ins, and other products, like Dick Tracy watches, Dick Tracy clocks, Dick Tracy coloring books, and so on: they sold, but not as much as Disney had hoped (though, as a child, I inherited my older cousins' Dick Tracy and Mumbles action figures, which I later gifted to my younger cousins; where are they now, I wonder?). Variety reported the total cost of making and marketing the film was about $101 million...and it is said that a movie has to make twice its budget to earn a profit. It's since gained a kind of cult status, thanks to its style and its run on television (can you believe they used to allow Madonna's nipples during the day on network TV just because they were behind negligee in a PG-rated Disney flick??). 

Was it any good though? I'll get to that somewhere down below, amidst the other Spring 1990 releases.

1990: A Star is Born

The year 1990 began with the birth of a star.

Julia Roberts was not the first choice for Pretty Woman. Hell, she wasn't the second, third, or even fifteenth choice. The studio (Disney) wanted Meg Ryan, the director (Garry Marshall) wanted Ryan or Karen Allen. Everyone in town auditioned, everyone in town turned it down. Diane Lane did costume fittings but dropped out due to scheduling conflicts. Lea Thompson and Winona Ryder auditioned, but no offer came.

And so it came down to 21-year-old Julia Roberts. Disney didn't want her, she wasn't a star - even though Mystic Pizza was a sleeper hit in 1988. Marshall did, and she didn't turn it down - she even convinced Richard Gere to accept the role of her leading man.

Well, you know the rest. Pretty Woman was an immediate box office hit worldwide, becoming, at that point, the fifth highest-grossing movie of all time. Screenwriter J.F. Lawton credits that success to Roberts' star power and her chemistry with Gere. Even critics who disliked the film praised her performance. Roberts won a Golden Globe, received nominations at the Oscars and the BAFTA Awards, and became probably the most famous actress in the entire world.

Here it is, along with nine other films from that period, in order of release:

1990: Adults Only

On the "Erotic '90s" season of her hit Hollywood history podcast You Must Remember This, Karina Longworth delves into the history of the NC-17 rating. Put briefly, NC-17 was created to replace the old X rating, a designation for adults-only entertainment - like, say, Midnight Cowboy or A Clockwork Orange - that came to be associated with hardcore pornography. Newspapers gradually refused to advertise X-rated films, theater chains refused to show them, and video rental stores refused to stock them. Studios began "neutering" their more risk-raking films, while arthouse and indie films found themselves trapped, not always able to afford appeals and re-edits. Many found critical acclaim...but no release.

One such film was Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. The character study of the titular serial killer and his spree through the rattier edges of Chicago was always going to be a tough sell, no matter what decade it was made in, but it spent four years looking for distribution even while it continued to garner positive reviews - including one from Roger Ebert himself! But distributors wanted a guaranteed R rating, something that the film, with its cavalcade of horrors including rape, murder, incest, and pederasty, was struggling to get. Not only did the MPAA give it an X rating, they told the filmmakers there were not enough cuts that could be made to make it releasable without it. An unedited, unrated version was finally released, one city at a time: good reviews, good box office (it made back six times its budget), even five nominations at the Independent Spirit Awards. Still, it was a four-year road, all due to the stigma of the X.

Even if one received a theatrical release, there was still the home video market to consider. Take The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, a British arthouse flick about a crude gangster who buys a swank restaurant, only for his wife to use it for assignations with a more genteel individual: a flick of food and fucking, in other words. While this masterpiece had a modest reception in its native Britain, the controversy over its material and subsequent unrated release gave it enough publicity to make it millions in the USA. But large chains like Blockbuster had their own policies about stocking films that were or were almost deemed X by the MPAA; to get around this, Miramax released two versions on VHS. The first was the original theatrical cut; the other, an R-rated version that ran 30 minutes shorter for wider video release. 

Miramax seemed to have enough, and it took on the MPAA with the release of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!. Directed by Pedro Almodóvar and starring Antonio Banderas as a hot but unwell young man who kidnaps his favorite porn actress (a terrific Victoria Abril, executing a highwire act of terrified and turned on) in the hopes of making her fall in love with him, it was already was a hit in its native Spain, where it became the country's #1 film of the year. It's a dark comedy, a melodrama, a romance: it's provocative, to say the least - and for the sin of including a woman both using the toilet and experiencing sexual pleasure, it was slapped by the Motion Picture Association of America with an X rating. Miramax took the MPAA to court, arguing that the outdated ratings system was failing to distinguish art from pornography, sabotaging the business - and, frankly, seemed to be exercising its power over foreign and independent films in particular, films willing to take on subject matter the major Hollywood studios wouldn't touch.

Miramax lost its case, but that same year, the MPAA came up with a new rating: NC-17. Standing for "No Children Under 17", it was supposed to be a more respectable alternative, signifying that something was strictly for adults but not necessarily pornography. Still, as Miramax complained, the designation seemed reserved more for adult films focusing on sex rather than on hyperviolence.

This certainly seems to be the case with the first film released bearing the NC-17 designation, Henry & June, a biopic based on the diaries of Anaïs Nin, detailing her relationship with Henry Miller (author of Tropic of Cancer) and his wife June. It's a patient, beautifully-shot movie, whose sex scenes are, yes, erotic and character-building, whose plotting and philosophy are absolutely geared to an over-17 adult sensibility. Yet when mainstream critics viewed it, they dismissed it as a big tease - the consensus seemed to be that the rating was a big tease, as the film didn't have enough sex or nudity or eroticism to maintain an audience member's interest. Ah, well. The film went on to gross over $11 million in the US and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography.

Studios still try to avoid NC-17 much like they did the X, but it still pops up every now and then. Some recent famous examples: Shame and Killer Joe (2011), Blue is the Warmest Color (2013), and Blonde (2022), whose star Ana de Armas was nominated for Best Actress. Exhibitors are still wary of screening them since the rating automatically limits their ticket sales; its reputation for being reserved for hypersexual films doesn't help, either. It's not just that studios need to grow some balls: audiences need to grow up.

Anyway! Sunday we start delving into the movies themselves, in order of release. And we begin with the movie that made Julia Roberts a star...

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1990: Back to the Well

We live in the age of the legacy sequel. Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, The First Omen, Alien: Romulus, Twisters, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Apartment 7A: these are all from this year alone, all dependent on the audience's memory of specific plots, imagery, and often even characters of films released before the turn of this century. Nostalgia is in! Some say it's because audiences miss the films of old, we're chasing the high of our youth - certainly making a semi-sequel/remake to 1996's Twister suggests this.

Now, obviously, when I looked at the Oscar nominees of 1990, I knew I would get to revisit the legacy of The Godfather thanks to The Godfather: Part III, which revisits characters introduced to audiences in 1972's The Godfather and last seen in 1974's The Godfather Part II. What I did not expect was to run into three more films following up with icons of early-70s cinema.

It began in August with The Two Jakes, a follow-up to 1974's Chinatown. The original's Oscar-nominated star Jack Nicholson, Oscar-nominated producer Robert Evans, and Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Towne all reunited for the sequel, with Nicholson pulling double duty as director. Joe Mantell, Perry Lopez, James Hong, and Faye Dunaway (via voiceover) all reprise their roles from the original; joining the ensemble are Harvey Keitel, Meg Tilly, Madeleine Stowe, and Eli Wallach, who also has a significant role in The Godfather Part III. It's an interesting movie, especially if one is familiar with Chinatown's production, particularly how director Roman Polanski helped shape it into the coherent, suspenseful narrative we all know and love. The Two Jakes is awfully vague by comparison. To many, that's a sign of weakness: the plot's confusing, the threads go nowhere, the pace is ponderous, there's lousy voiceover, my God, how could this be Chinatown! Well, it's not Chinatown, it's The Two Jakes, and it's about an older, wearier Gittes seeing echoes of the past even as its signposts are developed into oblivion. Its constant callbacks to Chinatown can be frustrating...or they can, like Agatha Christie's final Poirot novel Curtain, serve as a reminder that we are doomed (fated?) to return to the places and people most significant to us, that, as Paul Thomas Anderson would say in 1999's Magnolia, "We may be through with the past but, the past ain't through with us." It's an untidy film, but, it's haunting enough to justify any supposed cash grab.

One week after The Two Jakes debuted, The Exorcist III hit theaters. The second sequel to 1973's The Exorcist also saw a change of directors: instead of William Friedkin, William Peter Blatty helmed, his first time since 1980's The Ninth Configuration. Blatty, author of the original 1971 novel, producer/writer of the original film, and winner of the 1973 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, adapted his own sequel novel, Legion. This one has Lt. Kinderman, a cop who played a supporting role in the original's events, taking center stage as he investigates a series of murders that don't just mimic the M.O. of an executed serial killer - they may be the work of his demonic spirit possessing another. George C. Scott takes over for Lee J. Cobb in the Kinderman role. As the number indicates, there was already a sequel to The Exorcist - 1977's The Heretic - but Blatty makes sure that we forget that film ever existed, never references it, pretends it didn't even happen. Hell, even the III and the climactic exorcism were both forced on him by an insistent studio: he wanted to maintain the Legion title, more fitting for the nature of the forces of evil Kinderman is up against (indeed, that's the title of the Director's Cut released by Scream Factory in 2016), while the exorcism feels as tacked-on as it is. When it's about a policeman trying to reconcile faith with his job - not just the existence of demons in a grounded world, but even the possibility of a caring God in a world so full of suffering - it's downright moving and scary.

(Where was Friedkin in all this? Making The Guardian, about a nanny who is actually a kind of part-tree Druid nymph who sacrifices her charges to an ancient arboreal deity. It sounds mad but, sadly, is actually quite dull. Just as an exorcism was shore-horned into Legion, supernatural forces were shoe-horned by the studio into Friedkin's film. It's not great. It's not even good.)

Jake Gittes without Roman Polanski, Kinderman without Friedkin: at least Peter Bogdanovich got to return to the director's chair for Texasville, his followup to 1971's The Last Picture Show, both based on books by Larry McMurtry. While the first film is an ensemble piece (albeit with Timothy Bottoms and Ben Johnson at the center), the second is very much through the eyes of Jeff Bridges' Duane. All of these legacy sequels deal, in some way, with weariness, regret, and generally looking around at the world twenty years later and going, "Is this all there is?", with each one giving a different answer - or taking a different tack in how they answer. Texasville, because it is focused on a small town full of the same people who'll never leave, is more poignant, more effective in this regard than the others because...well, because the stakes are so small. No demons, no criminal conspiracies, just people living, getting older, reevaluating their choices. Like the movies above, this was a box office failure, a fact that, according to IMDb, sabotaged early Oscar buzz for Annie Pott's performance as Bridges' wife who, somewhat too understandingly, befriends his old flame Jacy Farrow (yes, Cybill Shepherd, absolutely glorious). Its reception is so unfair, but so is Bogdanovich's reaction: he believed his vision was compromised, and there are cuts that run thirty minutes longer, with Criterion's recent release including a black-and-white version (The Last Picture Show was black-and-white as well, but Texasville was released in color); I haven't seen these versions, but the latter feels like even Bogdanovich may have missed how The Last Picture Show works as bilious nostalgia while Texasville is reality hitting you in full color, finding beauty without silver and shadows to lean on. I love this movie, I love it more than I do The Last Picture Show, and I think that flick's a bloody masterpiece.

Texasville and The Exorcist III began as novels, their original creators driven not by the easy buck but by the need to express their own conflicts within their lives. The Two Jakes, as documented in The Big Goodbye, The Kid Stays in the Picture, and Easy Riders and Raging Bulls, was a reunion among friends (Towne, Nicholson, Evans), seeking to recapture that moment when they were all on top of the world, together. All three flopped, and The Two Jakes has not benefited from any critical reappraisal. So, it's funny that the one legacy sequel to make money, get nominated for everything, and even get a re-release just last year, is the one whose entire creative team (to go by reports) was either cornered into it or just did it for the check. 

That would be The Godfather: Part III, in which Al Pacino returns as Michael Corleone, trying to go legit but unable to escape the consequences of his actions or the ghosts of his past. Writer-producer-director Francis Ford Coppola refused to do it until the studio told him it was happening whether he participated or not, so he might as well preserve his legacy...albeit at a discount price. Robert Duvall, nominated for his performance as consigliere Tom Hagen in the original The Godfather, did not return for Part III because the studio also tried to shortchange him. Pacino did the movie but thought it betrayed the character of Michael Corleone by making him too sympathetic. We'll discuss it much more when we get into the year's Oscar nominees. 

It's funny that legacy sequels then were not the guaranteed moneymaker they are now. Maybe it was because this was an era where they didn't have to bank on nostalgia to market films to adults. After all, this was the year with a particularly infamous innovation for cinema: the NC-17 rating. But we'll get into that tomorrow. 

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1990: An Introduction

This month we focus on 1990. Y'all decided this: I put it to a vote, and The People demanded a review of years in which Kevin Costner directed a movie. 1990 is the first such year, with Dances with Wolves.

Among the 30 films nominated in the traditional competitive categories, one finds at least one NC-17 film, 10 indies, five directed by actors, and one "legacy sequel." The 30 nominees:

But, it's not just about Oscar nominees. I watched 75 films for this, and we're gonna talk about all of them. Here they are:

Akira Kurosawa's Dreams

Alice

Avalon

Awakenings

Back to the Future: Part III

Backtrack (aka Catchfire)

Blue Steel

The Bonfire of the Vanities

The Church

Cinema Paradiso

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

Cry-Baby

Cyrano de Bergerac

Dances with Wolves

Darkman

Days of Thunder

Dick Tracy

Edward Scissorhands

The Exorcist III

The Field

Flatliners

Frankenstein Unbound

Ghost

The Godfather: Part III

GoodFellas

Green Card

The Grifters

The Guardian

Hamlet

Havana

Henry & June

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

Home Alone

House Party

The Hunt for Red October

I Love You to Death

Kindergarten Cop

King of New York

The Long Walk Home

Longtime Companion

Men at Work

Mermaids

Metropolitan

Miller's Crossing

Misery

Mr. and Mrs. Bridge

Mo' Better Blues

Monsieur Hire

My Blue Heaven

Narrow Margin

Night of the Living Dead

Nightbreed

Postcards from the Edge

Predator 2

Pretty Woman

Q&A

Reversal of Fortune

Robocop 2

Rocky V

The Russia House

Santa Sangre

The Sheltering Sky

State of Grace

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Texasville

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

To Sleep with Anger

Total Recall

Tremors

The Two Jakes

Vincent & Theo

White Hunter, Black Heart

Wild at Heart

The Witches

Young Guns II

So, where to start? Tomorrow, I'll focus on a trend that continues to this day: the legacy sequel.

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