Re: Best Screenplay 1995
Posted: Tue Sep 23, 2014 9:13 pm
Until Mister Tee wrote it below, I hadn't realized that The Usual Suspects, Nixon, AND Toy Story -- the top candidates in the Original category, I feel -- had all been left off the WGA list. (Though I assume the Pixar effort was ineligible under the no-cartoons-allowed clause.) Then I checked the Globe nominees -- nope, none of them made it there either. (Mr. Holland's Opus?! Sheesh!) Had I been watching in '95, I imagine I'd have had real enthusiasm for the fact that so many deserving but on-the-bubble candidates made it into one lineup.
As for alternates, certainly voters could have come up with better choices than Braveheart, choices which others have cited already -- Seven, Before Sunrise, The American President; all very different films, but with singular merits.
After the WGA win, the potential for a Braveheart victory must have seemed mortifying. It's a lousy movie, full of relentless violence, silly faux historical dialogue, and a storyline that doesn't even cohere as interesting drama. By the time I got to the "They will never take...OUR FREEDOM!" speech -- which I had seen countless times already on TV, probably beginning that Oscar night -- I wasn't even really sure what that monologue was supposed to mean in context of the plot I was watching. Thank god it didn't win, but loathsome even as a nominee.
I enjoyed Mighty Aphrodite well enough, and I think it has a lot of typically funny Allen one-liners, and an endearing sweetness to it (that near-end scene between Allen and Sorvino with the baby stroller makes for a very unexpectedly touching finale). But it also seems like the kind of movie where even the elements that work about it don't all seem like they're working together. Which is to say, I think the Greek chorus scenes are inspired, but at some point they started to be distracting from the main narrative...and I think Sorvino's call girl is a very funny creation, but in a way that feels like she barreled in from another story entirely. This isn't a nominee I find deeply objectionable, but it isn't one of Woody Allen's top tier efforts either.
Amazingly, I managed to see The Usual Suspects years after its release, without any knowledge of The Big Twist. And I was pretty floored by the final revelation, though I wouldn't want to undersell the earlier portion of the movie either -- it had a twisty narrative that was very engaging, a lot of crackling dialogue, and a winning collection of oddball underworld characters. I expected it to triumph with us here, given that, of all of the nominees, it feels first and foremost like a singular writing achievement. But it doesn't quite get my vote, and the reason is because, although the ending is pleasingly shocking, I don't think it really adds up to all that much more than that. After I followed a fairly intricately worked-out plot for the majority of the movie, all of a sudden it was just up-ended, but to what end? For me, Memento's final reveal seemed far more organically tied to the narrative/thematic concerns of the rest of the film, and made me re-evaluate them in a new way. The Usual Suspects just seemed more like a neat "gotcha," which isn't something to knock, but it's also not something that wowed me as fully as it did many.
I count myself a pretty big fan of Oliver Stone's work from the mid-80's to the mid-90's, and Nixon was basically his last triumph. I think it's a pretty wonderful movie -- one of the year's best -- structured like a chaotic kaleidoscope of history and memory, portraying Nixon's rise and fall like an almost deeply inevitable tragedy, and finding a ton of compelling insight along the way. Obviously, I wasn't around during any of Nixon's political campaigns or terms in office, but he seems like one of America's most fascinatingly complicated presidents, whose flaws as a leader stemmed from the deeply insecure feelings he had about being in that position in the first place. Stone (and company) found such wonderful ways to articulate this, as in Nixon's comment to the Portrait of Kennedy ("they look at you and they see who they want to be, they look at me and they see who they are") or his exchange with the students at the Lincoln Memorial, creating a portrait of a man who never gave up on his ruthless goal of becoming President of the United States, yet always felt unworthy of being in the company of those who would be far more admired. It's a hugely ambitious movie, perhaps not always streamlined in the writing as economically as it could have been, but pretty thrilling from beginning to end. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten a single vote.
But I voted for Toy Story, which of course I adored as a kid. But I watched it again a few years back, right before the third installment came out, and I found it to be a tremendously efficient piece of writing. Yes, the Pixar template has been watered down in recent years, both by the studio itself, and its imitators. But those elements which many of us have enjoyed in the studio's triumphs over the years (a gaggle of inventive characters, lickety-split dialogue exchanges that just burst with cleverness, and a deeply felt emotional core) bloomed pretty brightly this first time around. And, perhaps more than anything, the screenplay highlights just how well the gang at Pixar worked out their stories, with cleverly planted plot elements paying off in hugely surprising ways ("THE MATCH!") in a manner that seemed effortless, though, of course, it was the result of a lot of fine tuning in the narrative department. And scene by scene, the writers came up with just wildly imaginative stuff, from the little green monsters worshpping "the claw" to the Frankensteined toys in Sid's bedroom, while poignantly tracking both Woody and Buzz's journey to the realization that neither of them are quite as special as they thought they were, a thematic undercurrent I find far from infantile. Pixar has released many wonderful entertainments over the years, but I still think this is their finest hour, and the screenplay gets my vote.
As for alternates, certainly voters could have come up with better choices than Braveheart, choices which others have cited already -- Seven, Before Sunrise, The American President; all very different films, but with singular merits.
After the WGA win, the potential for a Braveheart victory must have seemed mortifying. It's a lousy movie, full of relentless violence, silly faux historical dialogue, and a storyline that doesn't even cohere as interesting drama. By the time I got to the "They will never take...OUR FREEDOM!" speech -- which I had seen countless times already on TV, probably beginning that Oscar night -- I wasn't even really sure what that monologue was supposed to mean in context of the plot I was watching. Thank god it didn't win, but loathsome even as a nominee.
I enjoyed Mighty Aphrodite well enough, and I think it has a lot of typically funny Allen one-liners, and an endearing sweetness to it (that near-end scene between Allen and Sorvino with the baby stroller makes for a very unexpectedly touching finale). But it also seems like the kind of movie where even the elements that work about it don't all seem like they're working together. Which is to say, I think the Greek chorus scenes are inspired, but at some point they started to be distracting from the main narrative...and I think Sorvino's call girl is a very funny creation, but in a way that feels like she barreled in from another story entirely. This isn't a nominee I find deeply objectionable, but it isn't one of Woody Allen's top tier efforts either.
Amazingly, I managed to see The Usual Suspects years after its release, without any knowledge of The Big Twist. And I was pretty floored by the final revelation, though I wouldn't want to undersell the earlier portion of the movie either -- it had a twisty narrative that was very engaging, a lot of crackling dialogue, and a winning collection of oddball underworld characters. I expected it to triumph with us here, given that, of all of the nominees, it feels first and foremost like a singular writing achievement. But it doesn't quite get my vote, and the reason is because, although the ending is pleasingly shocking, I don't think it really adds up to all that much more than that. After I followed a fairly intricately worked-out plot for the majority of the movie, all of a sudden it was just up-ended, but to what end? For me, Memento's final reveal seemed far more organically tied to the narrative/thematic concerns of the rest of the film, and made me re-evaluate them in a new way. The Usual Suspects just seemed more like a neat "gotcha," which isn't something to knock, but it's also not something that wowed me as fully as it did many.
I count myself a pretty big fan of Oliver Stone's work from the mid-80's to the mid-90's, and Nixon was basically his last triumph. I think it's a pretty wonderful movie -- one of the year's best -- structured like a chaotic kaleidoscope of history and memory, portraying Nixon's rise and fall like an almost deeply inevitable tragedy, and finding a ton of compelling insight along the way. Obviously, I wasn't around during any of Nixon's political campaigns or terms in office, but he seems like one of America's most fascinatingly complicated presidents, whose flaws as a leader stemmed from the deeply insecure feelings he had about being in that position in the first place. Stone (and company) found such wonderful ways to articulate this, as in Nixon's comment to the Portrait of Kennedy ("they look at you and they see who they want to be, they look at me and they see who they are") or his exchange with the students at the Lincoln Memorial, creating a portrait of a man who never gave up on his ruthless goal of becoming President of the United States, yet always felt unworthy of being in the company of those who would be far more admired. It's a hugely ambitious movie, perhaps not always streamlined in the writing as economically as it could have been, but pretty thrilling from beginning to end. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten a single vote.
But I voted for Toy Story, which of course I adored as a kid. But I watched it again a few years back, right before the third installment came out, and I found it to be a tremendously efficient piece of writing. Yes, the Pixar template has been watered down in recent years, both by the studio itself, and its imitators. But those elements which many of us have enjoyed in the studio's triumphs over the years (a gaggle of inventive characters, lickety-split dialogue exchanges that just burst with cleverness, and a deeply felt emotional core) bloomed pretty brightly this first time around. And, perhaps more than anything, the screenplay highlights just how well the gang at Pixar worked out their stories, with cleverly planted plot elements paying off in hugely surprising ways ("THE MATCH!") in a manner that seemed effortless, though, of course, it was the result of a lot of fine tuning in the narrative department. And scene by scene, the writers came up with just wildly imaginative stuff, from the little green monsters worshpping "the claw" to the Frankensteined toys in Sid's bedroom, while poignantly tracking both Woody and Buzz's journey to the realization that neither of them are quite as special as they thought they were, a thematic undercurrent I find far from infantile. Pixar has released many wonderful entertainments over the years, but I still think this is their finest hour, and the screenplay gets my vote.