Best Picture and Director 1991

1927/28 through 1997

What are your choices for Best Picture and Director of 1991?

Beauty and the Beast
15
21%
Bugsy
2
3%
JFK
3
4%
The Prince of Tides
1
1%
The Silence of the Lambs
15
21%
Jonathan Demme - The Silence of the Lambs
24
33%
Barry Levinson - Bugsy
0
No votes
Ridley Scott - Thelma & Louise
2
3%
John Singleton - Boyz N the Hood
1
1%
Oliver Stone - JFK
9
13%
 
Total votes: 72

HarryGoldfarb
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1991

Post by HarryGoldfarb »

The 1992 ceremony was also the first one I saw. I was 11 years old, and besides getting excited about the Beauty and the Beast nominations, the experience ended up being a great introduction to my love of cinema. I remember wanting to know everything about all the nominated films.

Back to the subject of then-favorites, I remember that in Venezuela a TV American special was broadcast with spanish subtitles that was titled something like "Road to the Oscars" or something like that, in which though voice-over a host talked about the nominees, scenes from the nominated films were shown, and every so often, an African American film critic gave his predictions. I don't remember his name, but it's a shame his foreshadowing ended up being all wrong: he predicted as winners Juliette Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, Susan Sarandon, Nick Nolte and Bugsy for Best Picture. Regarding The Silence of the Lambs he said something like he did not understand why the Academy nominated it. I never saw him again; I guess those televised predictions didn't help him much in his career, though I still agree with him that Lewis would have been a terrific and deserving winner.
"If you place an object in a museum, does that make this object a piece of art?" - The Square (2017)
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1991

Post by Reza »

Big Magilla wrote:Nick Nolte was the early favorite for Best Actor as was Anthony Hopkins for Supporting Actor but when he refused to be nominated in the supporting category, all bets were off.
I had no idea it was at the insistence of Hopkins that he was nominated in lead instead of in support where he actually belonged.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1991

Post by Big Magilla »

This was one of the most unpredictable Oscar races in history in all major categories.

Best Picture was considered up for grabs. All five nominees plus Thelma & Louise were strong contenders for nominations which any one of them conceivably could have won.

Demme and Levinson were early favorites for Best Director based on their New York and Los Angeles wins. Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis were early favorites for Best Actress with Jodie Foster considered most likely to benefit from the two cancelling one another out.

Nick Nolte was the early favorite for Best Actor as was Anthony Hopkins for Supporting Actor but when he refused to be nominated in the supporting category, all bets were off.

There was no favorite for Supporting Actress until Mercedes Ruehl began to dominate the precursors. Jack Palance became a slight favorite for Supporting Actor after the Globes, but there was no guarantee he would win.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1991

Post by mlrg »

Tonight I rewatched The Silence of the Lambs and it still holds up very well.

This year’s ceremony was the first I watched live on television. I was 13 at the time and had no idea who was the favorite to win the top categories going into Oscar night. Does someone remember who were the favorites?
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1991

Post by Reza »

Voted for Beauty and the Beast and Jonathan Demme.

My picks for 1991:

Best Picture
1. Beauty and the Beast
2. Thelma and Louise
3. The Silence of the Lambs
4. J.F.K.
5. Bugsy

The 6th Spot: The Fisher King

Best Director
1. Jonathan Demme, The Silence of the Lambs
2. Ridley Scott, Thelma and Louise
3. Terry Gilliam, The Fisher King
4. Oliver Stone, J.F.K.
5. Barry Levinson, Bugsy

The 6th Spot: Agnieszka Holland, Europa Europa
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1991

Post by Eric »

Sorry, The Silence of the Lambs has always seemed, to me, exactly the sort of thriller that's embraced by people who say things like "The Silence of the Lambs is WAY more than a thriller," as Tee did below. Then again, any crossover is probably going to offend die-hard genre buffs.

01. Poison
02. JFK
03. My Own Private Idaho
04. The Rapture
05. Jungle Fever
06. Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse
07. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
08. Defending Your Life
09. Van Gogh
10. Madonna: Truth or Dare
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1991

Post by Mister Tee »

Interesting post in general, Uri, particularly that on-the-money observation that Scott/Demme would have more typically been assigned one another's films (reinforced by the fact that Scott did the Silence sequel).

It may well be that we underrate Scott's contribution because his subsequent career (Black Hawk Down maybe aside) has been so disappointing. After Thelma I was firmly in his corner, but, over the years, I've come to think of him as what Andrew Sarris has called a "parsley" director: sitting atop/decorating a variety of meals/films, but never seeming to provide the flavor on his own. You make me want to take another look at Thelma, to see how it fits into his overall filmography.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1991

Post by Uri »

Like Tee, had it been possible, I’d go for T&L for picture and Demme for director (if only for his loveliest of acceptance speeches). But I do want to try and make a case for Scott. I totally agree that what made SotL so special were Demme’s particular sensibilities that according to conventional, formulaic wisdom must have seemed totally wrong for the material. The same can be said about T&L and Scott too, (in a way, switching them would have made much more sense). If we were talking about actors and roles, both would be classified as fortunate cases of inspired miscasting.

Yes, consensus seems to be that T&L strength lies in its script, which indeed is a brilliant one, but Scott’s very apparent style is far more than an elegant vehicle for the material he’s working with. What he’s bringing to the table is a gift for alienation. His choices streamline the narrative and crystallize its themes and give this film an almost abstract quality. For instance, it seems the iconic landscapes here are not dissimilar to those of outer space in Alien or futuristic LA in Blade Runner – they are as stylized and surreal, and I guess it has a lot to do with the fact that for Scott, being a foreigner of a certain generation, they are what they were when he had his first encounter with them – magical movie sets, not real, tangible places. Another very typical Scott touch is the way he makes a very clear distinction between a very humane and easy to relate to protagonist set against a universe populated with seemingly hostile strangers (aliens, androids, Japanese, native Americans, Romans, Somalis or, as is the case here, males). And the political aesthetics manifested here (and this is a very political piece) appear to me to be distinctively non American yet very much what expected of someone whose artistic education and apprentice happened in the very Marxist milieu of British Art schools and the BBC of the ‘50s and ‘60s. So yes, for all the great stuff Khouri’s script was filled with, it was the way Scott (and not, say, Hallstrom) realized it (and choosing what the parts of it that were dropped from the finale cut) that made it such a distinctive, exhilarating and influential piece.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1991

Post by Mister Tee »

1991 was, for me, so obviously better than the years preceding that it floored me to hear most critics grousing in annual summaries about “picking the best of a bad lot”. I decided then that most critics’ default position was disappointment (though some did manage to praise 1993 as a solid vintage). I mean, a year earlier, Awakenings, Ghost & Godfather III were among the best picture choices. Here we’re talking about a field so strong (with one exception) that Thelma and Louise, Boyz n the Hood, The Fisher King and Grand Canyon – well praised, commercially successful films – were boxed out. And that doesn’t even cover smaller films, like The Commitments (a personal favorite – easily Alan Parker’s most enjoyable effort), Barton Fink or Europa, Europa. It was also a year where two hugely praised efforts – Silence of the Lambs and Beauty and the Beast – were among the year’s top grossers, a rarity by then. And two other films – Thelma and JFK – entered the public dialogue in an engaged way we hadn’t seen since the 70s.

The exception mentioned above, of course, is The Prince of Tides, a dreadful soap opera that somehow got enough of a pass from mainstream critics it stole a spot on the best picture ballot. The fact that the perennially-more-discriminating directors’ branch left Streisand off should have been a badge of honor, but somehow it all turned into a woe-is-her/cosmic injustice party. As the folks at Film Comment opined in their Oscar predictions article, “People ask How could they nominate Prince of Tides for seven awards and skip best director? -- that sentence should be stopped after the word ‘awards’”. I found Conroy’s novel an overextended mess, but Streisand somehow managed to make even less of it – emphasizing the weakest elements (esp. the “romance” between her and Nolte), and melodramatizing many scenes (none worse than that scene of Nolte threatening to drop the Stradivarius off the terrace). Godawful movie.

Boyz n the Hood’s place on the ballot is something of a complicated matter. Back around then, there’d been a few films (notably New Jack City) centered on black urban violence that had drawn large opening weekend crowds (some, at least reportedly, marred by fights breaking out in theatres). Boyz n the Hood was in line with that trend – it had a big opening -- but it also got way better reviews than any other film of its ilk. More integrated audiences started turning out, and the film ended up making quite a bit of money. The combination of that and the reviews – a match of quantity/quality that, as I’ve often said, wasn’t happening regularly in this era – put the film in the Academy conversation, and got it two prime nominations. I was of mixed opinion about this. I think the film is interesting, and has nice moments (I especially liked Ice Cube’s bemused “I guess I’m supposed to do something about this” near the climax). But I also think some of the dramaturgy is pretty humdrum – the sibling rivalry feels like it’s triple-underlined, and many plot turns come out of Screenwriting 101. I don’t think Singleton had near the talent of Spike Lee; I view this nomination as largely historical happenstance.

I agree with BJ about this being (apart from Prince) a really high-quality best picture slate. I hope he’ll understand it’s thus not a dismissal for me to say the first film of those four I’d exclude from best picture consideration is JFK. I enjoyed Stone’s film a great deal – it may be the fastest moving three-hour movie I’ve ever seen. And certainly he expanded his directorial repertoire, using associative editing in a way he never had before (though I think he used it to greater effect in Nixon). But I still find his late-reel “conclusions” (the Donald Sutherland stuff) rather ludicrous, and I also find some of the acting/staging over the top with melodrama (at one point, a voice-over says someone “noticed” something, and the character on-screen does a double-take worthy of Buckwheat). So, while I have positive feeling about the film, I don’t come close to ranking it the year’s best.

I think I saw Bugsy at precisely the right point in its release cycle – after both the initial “this could win best picture” hype and the “this is a big bore” backlash. (Sometimes I think that’s the best time to see any film; expectations are as close to neutral as they can be) It’s true, as many have said, that we didn’t need another mob movie at that point in film history. But I think Bugsy is largely under-appreciated for its very solid, witty script (centered on a history with which I was unfamiliar), gorgeous visuals, and maybe the best, most singular performance of Warren Beatty’s career. I’m not voting for Bugsy in either category – it’s not as special as the remaining films – but I think it’s a completely honorable nominee.

Beauty and the Beast was, for me, the clear high point of the Disney animation revival (certainly till Pixar stepped into the equation). I’d echo most of what BJ said about the film – I thought the opening number did an incredible job of economically introducing a full set of characters (in a way that reminded me of how Tommy Tune had staged the opening of Grand Hotel, on which my wife was then working). I think the score is generally top-drawer, and the title song is as fine a love ballad as has been written in the past quarter-century. I found the story engaging and, in the end, emotionally powerful (I even had the same choked-up again reaction to the end-title card about Howard Ashman). And much of the animation, especially that swooping dance around the ballroom, was, for the time, eye-popping. So, why don’t I give it my best picture vote? Well, because I wasn’t 5 years old when I saw it; I was close to 40. And at that point in life I was simply not inclined to deem a childrens’ movie – even one so beautifully crafted – on the same level as the best grown-up films, of which there were two exceptional examples that year. I rate Beauty and the Beast very high – third on my list of films for the year; in a lesser year (like 2008), I could have selected it. But this particular year, it’s fairy-tale-ness is for me an ultimate limitation.

For the fourth year in a row, the Academy denied me the opportunity to vote for my actual favorite film of the year, which was Thelma and Louise. I haven’t seen it in the year since, but at the time it excited me beyond belief as just the sort of film that had been missing since the 70s: a briskly entertaining, narratively inventive effort that challenged prevailing mores and made, if not heroes, sympathetic protagonists of outlaws. Callie Khouri’s script is of course responsible for much of this -- she starts with a high energy premise and goes like 60 right up through an ending that feels, in a Sondheim phrase I love, fresh but inevitable. But I love her little touches, too – the fact that Louise shoots the guy not in a moment of fear(which would have made her more clearly sympathetic) but in a moment of anger; that Thelma says “Well, he sure wasn’t expecting that!” and collapses into wildly inappropriate but unstoppable giggles. Ridley Scott, as BJ says, is secondary to Khouri in auteurship, but he applies his visual skills to give the film a strong look that enchances his story. And, of course, he gets career-level performances from two actresses (and introduces a young leading man with full charisma blazing). All this added up to an easy best picture choice for me.

Scott doesn’t get my director vote, though, because I thought at the time, and still do, that Jonathan Demme did a world-class job guiding Silence of the Lambs. He’s hardly the first director one would think of to helm a thriller, but that’s part of what makes the movie so special. He handIes the suspense aspects beautifully – especially that brilliantly edited sleight of hand near the end -- but the film exists on a higher plane throughout because of Demme’s visual finesse and his humanistic touch. Surely part of the reason Hopkins’ Lecter feels like a lead performance despite limited screen time is the way Demme shoots those jail-house encunters with Foster; they make the film a character piece as much as a thriller. I’d also note Demme’s taste and tact in mounting this story. There’s a scene where Clarice accompanies Crawford to an autopsy for Buffalo Bill’s latest victim. Demme takes us into the room, but at first only shows glimpses of the grotesquely mangled body on the table – a bit of shoulder here; a glimpse of leg there. He gradually acclimates us to what’s going on, until, finally, he displays the body full-on – and by then the audience is ready to accept it without it seeming grisly. This down-in-the-trenches approach keeps the story at a human level, and achieves what Demme has claimed he hoped for: a film that, despite centering on two serial killers, is a moral work. This is a film that recognizes evil will always be with us – that final shot suggests evil walking into infinity – but at the same time makes the narrative point that the saving of one human life is worth celebrating . The Silence of the Lambs is WAY more than a thriller; it’s a wonderful movie, period, largely thanks to Demme. He gets my director vote with ease and, in the absence of Thelma and Louise, my best picture selection as well.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1991

Post by MovieFan »

Picked Stone and JFK. Great year though and I have no problem with The Silence of the Lambs winning all the awards.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1991

Post by Greg »

The Original BJ wrote:But in Best Picture...well, there's a movie that has reached me even more deeply over the years. Going to the theater to see Beauty and the Beast in the days before Christmas in 1991, at five years old, is probably my earliest filmgoing memory, and one of my most cherished. . . .
It's somewhat amazing that you can have such vivid memories of something you saw when you were five.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1991

Post by Greg »

Voted for JFK, my favorite film, and Stone.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1991

Post by Okri »

1991 films I'd like to see recognized: My Own Private Idaho and Life is Sweet. I'll defend The Fisher King as well, though more for LaGravanesse's script and the performances.

I don't have much to say about Bugsy or The Prince of Tides.

I find Beauty and the Beast MASSIVELY overrated. The score is beautiful, the animation less so (I was surprised at just how less it was, compared to how I remembered, when I last visited it). It's a charmer, but I don't quite get how it snuck in and got that best picture nomination. John Singleton's nomination is more impressive for the record than the filmmaking, but it's still an exciting nomination simply because AMPAS rarely goes there.

I find it weird that Scott snuck in without the film, as opposed to the other way around. His direction is certainly solid (though nowhere near his early film run) and would be an okay winner after the Levinson-Stone-Costner run, but he's up against two pretty remarkable efforts.

And this is where I get a little stuck. Stone is the man behind the movie in JFK. It's got his mark. And it's breathtaking. From a craft standpoint, the sheer brilliance of this movie is remarkable. The relentless pace. The staggering ambition. Yeah, his thesis is that every man, woman and child alive in 1963 was responsible for JFK's death is crackpot, but deliriously so. The movie wouldn't exist were it not for him and that it can hold my attention without pause for over three hours is astonishing.

The Silence of the Lambs is less the mind of one director and more the exquisite alchemy of acting, writing and directing that never fails to astonish. In real terms, I probably would've given Demme the oscar twice already - for Stop Making Sense and Something Wild. In our terms, I've given Stone the oscar once and this'll be my only chance to credit Demme. So he and his film get my votes. But it's a pretty awersome choice to get to make.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1991

Post by Heksagon »

80s are over, and we are seeing the signs of that with this pretty good lineup. Two excellent films (The Silence of the Lambs and The Beauty and the Beast), two solidly good films (Bugsy and JFK) and one borderline good film (The Prince of Tides). This is probably the best lineup since... I'd say 1975, although 1976 and 1980 are close.

Not only that, but they also got the winner right, as both my votes go to The Silence of the Lambs.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1991

Post by The Original BJ »

Had Thelma & Louise been nominated for Best Picture -- as it most definitely should have been -- this would have been one of the greatest Best Picture lineups ever. As it stands, it's still full of some very impressive movies, though the stinker hogging a spot on the ballot lessens it slightly.

I can't say that beyond that, I'm terribly bothered by any other omissions. I'd probably rate The Fisher King and Grand Canyon as the next best, for their ambition, though I don't think either movie is so perfect I'd have to have them in the lineup.

The Prince of Tides is the worst. THE WORST. At its heart, it's a movie with two paradoxical problems. First, it feels the need to throw in everything but the kitchen sink as an explanation for Nick Nolte's troubles, so it just piles on one melodramatic plot point after another to show just how overwhelmingly messed up Nolte's history is. And then...problem two...it STILL feels the need to basically sum up the reason for Nolte's drama by reducing it to One Horrible Incident From the Past, in a climactic flashback that I found almost laughable in its hysterics. This is a maudlin, ridiculous movie, directed with maximum corniness by Streisand, starring Streisand in an utterly silly role. Thank god she was omitted under Director, and a pox on those who bemoaned her exclusion as some kind of sexist plot!

The nomination for John Singleton (incidentally, the only Best Director nominee I have met personally) must have been met with unique enthusiasm because of both his race and age, and though I don't think he was nominated ONLY for those reasons, I have to imagine that the spectre of Spike Lee's recent snub helped him more than it hurt. I'm a bit iffy on the nomination myself -- I think from a fundamental technical level, Boyz N the Hood is a bit of a ragged piece of work -- but at the same time, the movie is directed with some urgency, and it feels like the breakthrough work of a filmmaker excited with the medium and passionate about what he has to say with his story. Given where Singleton's career has gone since then -- generic action-movie land -- it's even easier to downgrade this nomination in retrospect, though it's also disappointing he didn't build on what did seem like genuine promise.

Barry Levinson's nomination is essentially the flip-side of Singleton's: Levinson doesn't seem to place much of an individual stamp on Bugsy, and it's directed in a way that's fairly restrained, tasteful but lacking edge. That said, technically, the movie is immaculate, full of sumptuous sets and costumes and beautifully captured images. Bugsy definitely isn't a bracing movie -- obviously, it's no Goodfellas. But it's an entertaining film, and by combining the settings of Hollywood and The Mob, the film does a fairly good job of showing how Bugsy Malone's success as a gangster had its own celebrity-like rise and fall. The script meanders a bit, and I'm glad the movie was mostly shut-out of those top categories it seemed like it could win at one point, but I don't object to the sizable nomination haul for such a classy, well-detailed effort as this.

I would rate the remaining four movies at the "excellent" level, and would have been enthused to watch any of them win major prizes.

I can't imagine those involved with The Silence of the Lambs expected they were making anything other than a first-rate thriller -- I certainly don't think the team assumed they'd sweep the Oscars. And yet the same Academy that had just annointed Rain Man, Driving Miss Daisy, and Dances With Wolves went for a violent, disturbing thriller over more safe alternatives. As for what put the movie over the top, you could make a pretty good argument that the sensational acting duet between Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster made the film a far more psychological, emotionally stirring experience than many crime thrillers. Or perhaps it was Ted Tally's script, full of wit and delectable dialogue (including the invented-for-the-movie final button, "I'm having an old friend for dinner") that made the film feel like a truly exciting piece of writing even beyond its twisty plot. And, of course, you'd have to credit Jonathan Demme, for crafting one great suspense sequence after another, whether as florid as Hannibal Lecter escaping in the elevator shaft or as quiet as Hannibal and Clarice's first meeting. Demme just plays the audience like a violin -- I'll never forget the first time I saw the now-famous cross-cutting sequence, jumping back and forth between Buffalo Bill inside the house, and the FBI team circling it, only to cut to him answering the door to reveal Jodie Foster. I audibly gasped during this moment, and it wasn't just because of Demme's slight-of-hand. It was because I was so drawn in to the complexity of the narrative, and was so emotionally invested in Clarice's journey, that this moment registered as far more than a cheap surprise. When a movie provokes that kind of physical response, it's hard to deny the numerous levels upon which it is working, and the skill at which its director is reaching his audience. In the end though, I feel like there are even more major achievements on the ballot, so it doesn't get my votes.

Thelma & Louise received most of its acclaim for its screenplay, and rightfully so. Callie Khouri's script is a dazzling piece of writing, which only starts by creating two hugely fascinating characters (and as early as the film's opening moments, as we see how each woman is packing for the trip, Khouri establishes key differences between these two characters that will guide them throughout the rest of the film). It then takes them on a wild adventure, during which things go from bad to worse to disastrous, and though there are a lot of thrills along the way, there are also a ton of laughs. And, of course, the movie concludes with that hugely famous finale, which even after all of these years, still manages to thrill on a visceral, emotional level. But one cannot credit the movie's success entirely to Khouri (and those two wonderful actresses at its center). Nope, Ridley Scott deserves a lot of praise as well, and I say this as someone who doesn't think all that much of his filmography. It's not that I think Scott is an untalented stylist -- far from it, actually. It's just that, for the most part, Scott rarely gets a chance to showcase his genuine visual gifts on material that much interests me. But with Thelma & Louise, he has a great script, and thus he has the opportunity to create an exciting visual world -- in this case, a tantalizing and haunting portrait of the American Southwest -- that perfectly complements this story. And that final shot really is just perfection. I don't think that Scott's work is strong enough to get my vote, especially given my lack of enthusiasm for his career overall, and the fact that the film's script is its key element. But this a splendid movie, and the high point of his career in my book.

It's very possible that, had I seen all of these movies for the first time as an adult, I might be voting for JFK in both categories. From a sheer craft standpoint, I find the movie completely overwhelming. The sheer number of shots in the movie -- from stock footage, to recreated black-and-white flashbacks, to the beautifully lit images of the film's present-day -- is dazzling, and I find that the film just sweeps me along from the opening sequences all the way to the courtroom finale. I know that many have issue with Oliver Stone's take on the case, at least in terms of the fudging of history. But I subscribe to Roger Ebert's slant on the movie, that Stone isn't so much making an argument for what he thinks happened to JFK, but attempting to capture the shock, the anger, the emotion, and the confusion of the assassination, the chaos of its aftermath, and the troubling holes in the government's official report. And in that respect, I think Stone's movie soars: THIS is the movie that best reflects how the Kennedy assassination impacted America, and how to this day even it remains a painful wound that has never really healed. And I don't think anyone needs to make much of a case for how Stone serves as maestro for the project -- this is a tour de force in filmmaking from the word go, a master class in editing, photography, and sound design that feels in every moment like a delicately crafted artifact, yet you barely have time to notice much of the effort that went into it because the thing moves along so breathlessly. I pick Oliver Stone as the Best Director of the nominees, and of the year overall.

But in Best Picture...well, there's a movie that has reached me even more deeply over the years. Going to the theater to see Beauty and the Beast in the days before Christmas in 1991, at five years old, is probably my earliest filmgoing memory, and one of my most cherished. From the minute the lights dimmed and that enchanting Alan Menken melody began to play, I was completely transported, and sat in rapt attention for the next hour and a half as I stared in wonder at the beautiful, oft-hilarious, deeply moving story that unfolded in front of me. Over two decades have passed since I first saw the movie, and I have seen it many times since then. And it has never lost its appeal; I find that so many moments have just etched themselves into my memory. There's the stained-glass style prologue, which ends with David Ogden Stiers's unimpeachable delivery of "For who could ever learn to love...a beast?" There's the incredibly confident opening number, "Belle," which Menken and Ashman were petrified to play for the Disney execs, because how could an animated film begin with a lengthy, operetta-style number like this!? There's the haunting moment when Belle first asks the Beast to step into the light, and then selflessly offers to take her father's place as the Beast's prisoner. There's "Be Our Guest," (the music to which Alan Menken wrote as a SCRATCH TRACK (!), only to find that after working tirelessly to come up with the "real" melody, there wasn't anything better than that first piece of music he'd effortlessly tossed off), a glorious old-fashioned musical showstopper, delivered to perfection by Jerry Orbach. There's the hilarious "Gaston" bar room number, a totally delightful piece of villainous oom-pah-pah-ing. There's the moment when Belle tries to run away, and the Beast saves her life, that leads into "Something There," a tender and thoughtful sequence that shows two characters who initially detested one another slowly realizing they had misjudged the other. There's the moment that always reduces me to a mess of tears, when the Beast shows Belle the library, and the first strains of "Beauty and the Beast" play over the soundtrack. There's Angela Lansbury's heavenly rendering of the title song, one of the most beautiful pieces of film music ever written, set to a still eye-popping computer-assisted ballroom dance. There's the moment when the Beast lets Belle go, knowing he may never see her again, because he cares about her so deeply. And there's the sob-inducing finale, when Belle tells a dying Beast that she loves him, and he transforms in front of her eyes...but she still hesitates as she looks into his human eyes before uttering "It is you," one of the most nuanced pieces of animated "acting" ever drawn for film. My god, even the dedication to Howard Ashman, who never lived to see the final film, gets to me! As does the story about the film's premiere at the New York Film Festival, where the filmmakers were a bit nervous about taking an unfinished print of a cartoon, only to receive a thunderous standing ovation from a room full of critics and cineastes who clearly knew they had just experienced something very special. I would have loved to have cheered for this movie in real time -- I can't imagine the thrill many felt hearing Kathleen Turner read off its historic Best Picture nomination on the nominations telecast -- but I can vote for it now. So, despite genuinely impressive competition, I pick the tale as old as time for Best Picture.
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