“The Silence Of The Lambs” (1991)
Why Was It A Surprising Nomination? A pulpy thriller, from a director who was well-liked but never remotely registered on awards radars before, with a release on February 14th, 1991—a full thirteen months before the Oscar ceremony for which it was eligible—it’s safe to say no one was thinking Oscar. The principle cast was promising, sure—Jodie Foster was a recent Oscar-winner for “The Accused,” Anthony Hopkins was a British theater legend—but there didn’t seem to be any reason to think it was an Oscar contender any more than, say, “Sleeping With The Enemy,” which opened the week before. In fact, probably less: at least that film dealt with the serious issue of domestic violence, whereas “Silence Of The Lambs” didn’t have much in the way of subtext. Instead, it was about a cannibalistic serial killer who helps an FBI agent capture a transgendered killer who skins women’s corpses in order to make a “woman suit.” It was a horror movie (“The Exorcist” being the only other such film to get an Oscar nod), positively saturated with gore (both Gene Hackman, who originally planned to direct and play Hannibal Lecter, and Michelle Pfeiffer had pulled out of the project because of concerns about the violence), and strong language. Oh, and there’s a scene at which a character flicks semen at the heroine and tells her “I can smell your cunt.” How was this ever going to be a serious contender for an awards that had been won two years earlier by “Driving Miss Daisy“?
Why Was It Nominated? It’s a little confusing to this day, because “Silence Of The Lambs” wasn’t just nominated, and it didn’t just win Best Picture, it became one of only three films in history to win all the top five categories (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director and Best Screenplay). It wasn’t lacking in competition either, with “JFK,” “Beauty & The Beast” and “Bugsy” among the films nominated that year. There again may have been a certain extent to which it captured the zeitgeist—July 1991 saw the capture of Jeffrey Dahmer, a cannibalistic serial killer of 17 people, which helped to keep the film in the headlines. But it’s probably more that it was deemed a rare and exceptional example of the genre, one of the most widely praised since Hitchcock passed. The film had been legitimized by a premiere at the 1991 Berlin Film Festival (where Jonathan Demme won the Silver Bear for Best Director), and simply managed to keep up the momentum for the year to come.
How Does It Hold Up? “The Silence Of The Lambs” certainly didn’t date as badly as Michael Mann‘s earlier Thomas Harris adaptation, “Manhunter,” which is a great film (arguably as good as ‘Lambs’ or better), but couldn’t seem more ’80s than if the main characters were all Rubik’s Cubes and members of Duran Duran. But the countless imitators on both big screen and small have ensured that the shock of the new that came from the smart, beautifully-executed take on the serial killer genre has been dulled over the years. It’s still a high water mark for the genre, but what was once innovative now can feel like cliché after the many rip-offs.
“Pulp Fiction” (1994)
Why Was It A Surprising Nominee? Believe it or not, there was once a time before Harvey Weinstein was the Oscar-dominating beast we now know him as. That time (other than a brief warm-up with “The Crying Game,” another unlikely Best Picture nominee) came to an end in 1994: every subsequent year between then and when Weinstein left the company he founded in 2005, Miramax had at least one Best Picture nominee. That it was Quentin Tarantino‘s “Pulp Fiction” that led the way is both fitting (given their continuing work together since), and somewhat unlikely (given the nature of the film). Tarantino had announced himself as an exciting new talent with “Reservoir Dogs,” but given the blood-soaked, f-bomb-dropping nature of his debut, one wouldn’t have imagined that his follow-up would be headed to the Kodak Theater, something seemingly set in stone when TriStar, who’d been developing the project, dropped it, allegedly because studio chief Mike Medavoy found it “too demented.” The content of the film, once it was seen, looked to back that up. It had a time-jumping tripartite structure. It came close to breaking cursing records. A number of people meet splattery ends (pity poor Marvin). A vicious gang-boss is sodomized by a man in a gimp mask, only to be saved by a katana-wielding Bruce Willis. Two sympathetic characters use heroin. Christopher Walken wears a watch up his ass. But perhaps more importantly, Tarantino was a distinctive new voice, dropping pop-culture references and movie nods that likely would have been unfamiliar to a large chunk of the Academy audience. And the release of the movie, while wildly successful, was accompanied by endless think pieces, attacking the film’s use of violence, of the n-word (the Chicago Tribune tying it to “the ability to signify the ultimate level of hipness for white males who have historically used their perception of black masculinity as the embodiment of cool”), and Tarantino’s status as a sort of post-modern cultural magpie.
Why Was It Nominated? The debut of “Pulp Fiction,” not least in the midst of an awards season dominated by the rather staid, middle-of-the-road pictures, the likes of “The Madness Of King George,” “Nobody’s Fool,” “Little Women,” “Nell” and “Legends Of The Fall,” undoubtedly had a cultural impact on a similar level to that of “Bonnie & Clyde” twenty-seven years before it. EVERYONE had been talking about since it premiered at Cannes that May (where it won the Palme D’Or, to the anger of some of the local crowd). Richard Corliss in Time said “It towers over the year’s other movies as majestically and menacingly as a gang lord at a preschool,” and EW‘s Owen Glieberman added “I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a filmmaker who combined discipline and control with sheer wild-ass joy the way that Tarantino does.” Sure, it might have gone too far for some Academy members, but in a year where “Forrest Gump” dominated, you didn’t have to be a radical to want something fresh and new in there. And it helped that with Harvey Weinstein, now flush with cash after the purchase of Miramax by Disney, could really push the film. And it paid off: “Pulp Fiction” was lauded on the precursor awards circuit, and Tarantino was named Best Director by the L.A. Film Critics and the New York Film Critics.
How Does It Stand Up? Ok, so don’t all yell at once, but if, like this writer, you were a touch too young to see the film on initial release, and came to “Jackie Brown” first, “Pulp Fiction” isn’t quite the game-changer it seemed at the time. By that point, we’d sat through the imitators, and fallen for the director’s richer and more humane follow-up, so when we finally got to ‘Pulp,’ we enjoyed it enormously, but it feels more cartoonish and slight than ‘Brown,’ or indeed many of the director’s other films. Ok, you can start yelling now.
“Black Swan” (2010)
Why Was It A Surprising Nomination? Love it or loathe it (there are plenty in both camps, though we land firmly on the love side), the across-the-board success of “Black Swan” (which, alongside its Best Picture nomination and four others, also made more than $300 million worldwide) still remains something of a head-scratcher. Director Darren Aronofsky had previously made a black-and-white headfuck about maths and mysticism, a brutal drug-addiction drama that ended with amputation and a double-headed dildo, and a critically-derided box-office disaster involving Incas, cancer and a bubble-shaped spaceship. His latest didn’t seem like it would be much more Oscar-friendly either: a retelling of “Swan Lake,” set in the world of contemporary ballet, but turned into a psychological horror movie that nodded to Polanski and giallo. It also featured some fairly unpleasant violence and body horror, and an attention-grabbing lesbian sex scene between the two female leads (one of whom was Mila Kunis, an actress who’d never even been adjacent to awards fare in the past). The film’s grand, realism-defying camp proved divisive with critics too: Leonard Maltin said he “couldn’t stand” the film, labelling it “ludicrous”, while The Hollywood Reporter gave it a backhander by calling it a “guilty pleasure,” and Kenneth Turan called it “high-art trash” in the LA Times.
Why Was It Nominated? The film certainly benefited from the expanded Best Picture field introduced the previous year: for the first time in sixty years, there were ten Best Picture slots rather than five, which allowed more esoteric fare like this to make the cut. But given the film’s other nominations (including Aronofsky for Best Director), it’s more than possible that it would have made the cut if there were only five nominations. Despite the naysayers, the film did have a broad swath of critical support, and it helped that even the harshest critics had kind words to say about lead Natalie Portman, who won Best Actress, and the buzz around whom probably got more Academy members to watch the film than might have otherwise done. Setting it in the ballet world undoubtedly helped to lend a veneer of class that it probably wouldn’t have had if it was a more straight-ahead psychological horror, allowing arthouse crowds to flock to the film without feeling guilty, as well as letting actors draw parallels with their own struggles back in the day. And a successful premiere at the Venice Film Festival (before shifting to Telluride and TIFF) again helping to legitimize it and distance it from the more genre-y elements, was only one aspect of a very strong campaign from Fox Searchlight, who’d really found their Oscar feet a couple of years earlier with “Slumdog Millionaire.”
How Does It Hold Up? Well, it’s only been three years, but those who loved the movie (it was this writer’s favorite film of 2010) haven’t changed their tune—it’s a balls-to-the-wall feat of pure filmmaking from Aronofsky, centered around a gorgeous, career-defining performance from Portman.
“Amour” (2012)
Why Was It A Surprising Nominee? Take it from someone who left it out of their final Oscar nomination predictions a year ago: while there was always the possibility that “Amour” would be an Oscar nominee, it sometimes seemed like it had an insurmountable mountain to climb to get there. For one, the Academy were less friendly to nominating international fare than they’d been in, say, the 1970s: twelve years had passed since the last foreign-made, foreign-language Best Picture nominee (“Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon“) and even that was made with some U.S. money (“Life Is Beautiful” and “Il Postino” had been the only other two in the decade before that.) The film also came from Michael Haneke, the Austrian director whose films were so austere and bruising that the idea of him being a Best Picture nominee (and even Best Director, and three other nominations, which he also picked up) would have qualified as a hilarious gag only a year earlier. “Amour” was perhaps a little softer, in that no one is raped or drowned or cuts their own throat, but it was still an emotionally-punishing tale, set entirely in one increasingly-claustrophobic apartment, in which an elderly man cares for his immobile wife after she suffers a stroke. Again, up against more obvious crowd-pleasers like “Argo” or “Life Of Pi,” it didn’t seem to stand a chance, especially given that its subject matter risked reminding the mostly aged Academy membership of their own mortality.
Why Was It Nominated? Well, the film had a few things on its side. Haneke had become a more familiar face in the U.S. in the years running up to “Amour,” making his English-language debut with the “Funny Games” remake, and being nominated for Best Foreign Language Film with previous picture “The White Ribbon.” He’d also cast it with two legitimate icons of French cinema, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, both of whom had extraordinary careers of working with some of the greatest-ever filmmakers behind them. And it came pre-approved: like the previous year’s nominee “The Tree Of Life,” it had premiered at Cannes to rapturous reviews (The Guardian called it “film-making at the highest pitch of intelligence and insight,” and Manohla Dargis labelled it “a masterpiece about life, death and everything in between”), and picked up the Palme D’Or. Perhaps most importantly, despite Haneke’s reputation, and the devastating nature of the film, the title wasn’t misplaced—the film unmasked a new tenderness in the director, proving unspeakably moving whereas his other films had remained distanced.
How Does It Hold Up: Again, we’re less than two years gone from the film’s premiere, so it doesn’t quite have the required distance. This writer prefers some of Haneke’s other films (namely “Caché” and “Code Unknown“) but it’s still a major work by an absolutely major filmmaker.