In Tuesday’s Valentine’s Day announcement of the 1994 Oscar nominations, one people’s choice story-Paramount’s “Forrest Gump”-got an overwhelming kiss of approval from the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Another one-Chicago’s “Hoop Dreams”-got a kick in the teeth.
The academy made “Forrest Gump” an overwhelming favorite in the 67th annual Oscar race by handing it 13 nominations, one shy of the record (14, for 1950’s “All About Eve.”)
It also gave multiple nominations to the four other 1994 Best Picture candidates: Quentin Tarantino’s hip film noir, “Pulp Fiction” (7), the ’50s Charles Van Doren TV scandal expose, “Quiz Show” (4), the sprightly British romantic comedy “Four Weddings and a Funeral” (2) and, a surprise selection, the grimly inspiring Stephen King-derived prison movie, “The Shawshank Redemption” (7).
But the Chicago documentary “Hoop Dreams,” which followed the surprising and often poignant fortunes of two city high school basketball players, Arthur Agee and William Gates-and which had won every major documentary award the nation’s film critics could hand out-lost on two counts: Not only was it ignored for the Best Picture nomination, for which it was a long-shot candidate, but it was not even among the five nominees in the Documentary category.
It did receive a consolation prize from the academy’s editing branch, which named the “Hoop Dreams” tandem of Frederick Marx and Steve James as one of the five Best Film Editing candidates.
The astonishing Best Documentary shutout of “Hoop Dreams” seemed outrageous to many.
“I’m devastated,” said Barbara Kopple, who has won two Academy Awards for her documentaries “Harlan County U.S.A.” (1977) and “American Dream” (1989). ” `Hoop Dreams’ should have been nominated for Best Picture and/or Best Documentary. It’s the kind of film that really takes us where we’ve never gone before: It has drama; it has character; it has captured history.
“For this film not to have been nominated . . . I can’t understand where their minds are. It makes me not respect the academy very much.”
The slight to “Hoop Dreams” was not unexpected by people in the know. The film’s makers-Chicagoans Peter Gilbert (cinematographer), James (director) and Marx (editor)-had privately conceded they might have a better shot for Best Picture than Best Documentary.
And the reason lies both in the curious composition of the academy’s documentary branch and its long history of rejecting both critically hailed and popular films.
In the Oscars, approximately 5,000 Academy members vote on the Best Picture selections. Nominations in other categories are done by specific academy branches; the nearly 1,300 members of the acting branch, for example, vote on the acting nominations. But special committees nominate the foreign-language, documentary and short films.
Composed of 47 members-some documentary specialists, many not-drawn from all branches of the academy, the documentary section has been embroiled in controversies on an almost yearly basis.
Recent non-fiction gems or classics that failed to survive the nomination process include “The Thin Blue Line” (1988), “Roger and Me” (1989), “Brother’s Keeper” (1992), “Paris is Burning” (1990), “A Brief History of Time” (1992), and Claude Lanzmann’s Holocaust epic “Shoah” (1985).
Included among the five nominees this year was a selection bound to raise new controversies: “Maya Lin: A Strong Vision,” a little-known film made by Freida Lee Mock. Mock is a one-time documentary branch chairperson. (By academy law, she could not participate in the voting.)
Mitchell Block of Direct Cinema, a longtime committee member and documentary distributor who has seen a number of his films win nominations, told the Associated Press that the three-hour “Hoop Dreams” may have suffered in the voters’ eyes from its length. “If it was a really tight two hours, it might have sailed through.”
His remark seemed ironic, given “Hoop Dreams’ ” accolade from the academy’s editors.
Yet James, Marx and Gilbert-who spent seven years on their project-were philosophical about the results.
Said Gilbert: “I was disappointed. But I saw most of the documentaries this year. And I was really upset that films like `Crumb,’ which I think is a brilliant film, and Michael Apted’s `Moving the Mountain’ weren’t nominated either.”
James concurred: “Clearly I’m disappointed. The Best Picture talk was heady stuff, but it was always, in our minds, a pipe dream. The documentary nomination, I think, in my heart, I really believed we were going to get it.
“I think it would be interesting to see a voting committee that was made up, if not exclusively, then to a much larger extent, of documentary filmmakers themselves.”
Added Marx: “Obviously we’re very disappointed. But it’s not the end of the world. Ultimately, the documentary committee can nominate who they will. But clearly the critics and the public have a different point of view.”
Meanwhile, “Forrest Gump” seemed on the road to an Oscar-night sweep. Included in the triumphant “Gump” entourage were the slow-witted but tender-hearted Gump himself: actor Tom Hanks, last year’s winner for his portrayal of an AIDS-stricken attorney in “Philadelphia.”
Nominated along with Hanks were “Gump” screenwriter Eric Roth, cinematographer Don Burgess, composer Alan Silvestri and two former Chicagoans: director Robert Zemeckis and supporting actor Gary Sinise. Sinise, co-founder and onetime artistic director of the city’s storied theatrical group Steppenwolf, got the nod for his role as Forrest’s tormented Vietnam commander, Lt. Dan.
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The Best Actor category included Paul Newman as the irascible small-towner Sully of “Nobody’s Fool,” John Travolta as the heroin-addicted hit man of “Pulp Fiction,” Morgan Freeman as the wise old jailyard procurer of “Shawshank Redemption” and Nigel Hawthorne as the barmy monarch of “The Madness of King George.”
Notably absent was one of the year’s most highly praised performances: Tommy Lee Jones’ blistering warts-and-all portrayal of baseball legend Ty Cobb in “Cobb.”
In a year that saw 1993’s supporting actor winner (for “The Fugitive”) perform strongly in five different movies-including a fine job in a gentler key as the nuclear specialist of “Blue Sky”-Jones may literally have canceled himself out.
Ironically, two of Jones’ 1994 leading ladies-Jessica Lange in “Blue Sky” and Susan Sarandon in “The Client”-received Best Actress nominations. And Lange, with the Golden Globe and several critics awards under her belt, has to be considered the front-runner.
Joining Lange and Sarandon in the Best Actress category are Winona Ryder as the radiant Jo March of “Little Women,” two-time winner Jodie Foster for her portrayal of a wild child in “Nell” and Miranda Richardson as poet T.S. Eliot’s mentally afflicted first wife in “Tom and Viv.”
The supporting actor and actress nominations are headed by the performers who have dominated the critics’ awards: Martin Landau as the elderly, drug-ravaged Bela Lugosi in “Ed Wood” and Dianne Wiest as the hilariously egocentric diva of “Bullets Over Broadway.” And three key nominations for Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Red”-for Best Direction, Original Screenplay and Cinematography-seemed a voters’ answer to the Foreign Language Committee’s disqualification of “Red”-the official Swiss nominee-as insufficiently Swiss.
“Gump,” the wistful and technologically miraculous tall tale of a sweet Southern bumpkin who manages to triumph over all the turmoil of the ’60s and ’70s, received a thumping validation from the academy.
Based on Winston Groom’s satiric novel, the $300 million-plus-grossing film was thrust into the front-runner’s position by an academy damned as a bastion of left-wing elitism by the very commentators who had hailed “Gump” as an attack on ’60s politics and protests.
Overwhelming box-office success rarely carries a movie to Oscar heights. It did little for all-time box office champs-and Oscar also-rans-“Jurassic Park,” “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial” or the “Star Wars” trilogy.
“Gump,” however, geared for a more adult audience, seems in a different category. It may not threaten the all-time Oscar win record of 11 (for 1959’s “Ben Hur”). But a multiple victory seems increasingly likely.