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1990
The winner is listed first, in CAPITAL letters.
Actor:
JEREMY IRONS in "Reversal of Fortune", Kevin Costner
in "Dances With Wolves", Robert De Niro in "Awakenings",
Gerard Depardieu in "Cyrano de Bergerac", Richard Harris
in "The Field"
Actress:
KATHY BATES in "Misery", Anjelica Huston in "The
Grifters", Julia Roberts in
"Pretty Woman", Meryl Streep in "Postcards from
the Edge", Joanne Woodward in
"Mr. & Mrs. Bridge"
Supporting Actor:
JOE PESCI in "GoodFellas",
Bruce Davison in
"Longtime Companion", Andy Garcia in "The
Godfather, Part III", Graham Greene in "Dances
With Wolves", Al Pacino in "Dick Tracy"
Supporting Actress:
WHOOPI GOLDBERG in "Ghost", Annette Bening in "The
Grifters", Lorraine Bracco in "GoodFellas",
Diane Ladd in "Wild at Heart", Mary McDonnell in "Dances
With Wolves"
Director:
KEVIN COSTNER for "Dances With Wolves", Francis Ford
Coppola for "The Godfather,
Part III", Stephen Frears for "The Grifters",
Barbet Schroeder for "Reversal of Fortune", Martin
Scorsese for "GoodFellas"
 The
Best Picture winner, co-producer/director/actor Kevin Costner's
three-hour epic and revisionistic western film Dances With
Wolves was an anomaly win in Oscar history - it was only
the second time that a western genre film won the Best
Picture Oscar. [The first Best Picture western film
was Cimarron (1930-31), sixty years earlier.] However,
some argued that Costner's (another actor-turned-director)
romantic-epic film shouldn't have been categorized as a Western.
Dances With Wolves was honored with twelve nominations
and seven Oscar wins - Best Picture (Costner), Best
Director (for Costner's directorial debut film), Best Adapted
Screenplay (Michael Blake), Best Cinematography (Dean Semler),
Best Sound, Best Original Score (John Barry), and Best Film
Editing. The pretentious, but visually-impressive film told
the saga of a Civil War Union officer, Lt. John W. Dunbar,
who became disillusioned, headed west, and eventually found
peace away from white civilization with nature and the Lakota
Sioux. The film contained long portions of the Sioux-Lakota
language and detailed the native American culture. Its tagline
was: "Lt. John Dunbar is about to discover the frontier...within
himself."
The other four Best Picture nominees were:
- director Penny Marshall's psychological drama Awakenings (with
three nominations and no wins), a semi-true account of a
doctor who 'awakens' catatonic patients with an experimental
drug
- director Jerry Zucker's highly-successful,
romantic comedy/fantasy Ghost (with five nominations
and two wins - Best Supporting Actress and Best Screenplay),
about a murder victim who protects his wife through a psychic
- director Francis Ford Coppola's long-awaited
gangster epic sequel The
Godfather, Part III (with seven nominations and snubbed
with no wins, although both previous parts of the saga won
Best Picture Oscars - and it was the first of only two trilogies
to have all three films nominated for Best Picture) - an
extension of the Mafia-tale about an older crime kingpin
Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) and his temperamental, trigger-happy
nephew (Andy Garcia) and daughter (Sofia Coppola)
- director Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas (with
six nominations and one win - Best Supporting Actor), a violent
and foul-mouthed adaptation of Nicholas Pileggi's non-fiction
book Wiseguy, about thirty years in a contemporary
Brooklyn Mafia family and about federally-protected witness
Henry Hill
Two of the directors of Best Picture nominees
were not selected as Best Director nominees: Jerry Zucker for Ghost,
and female director Penny Marshall for Awakenings. [Marshall's
failure to receive a Best Director nomination was interpreted
as sexist. Up to this time in Oscar history, only one women
had been nominated for Best Director - Lina Wertmuller for Seven
Beauties (1976), and female director Randa Haines had been
passed over four years earlier as Best Director for her Best
Picture-nominated Children of a Lesser God (1986).]
The two directors put into their slots for films
without Best Picture nominations were Stephen Frears for The
Grifters (with four nominations and no wins), a shocking
film-noirish tale of three con artists - a film adaptation
of Jim Thompson's hard-boiled novel, and director Barbet Schroeder
for the dramatic Reversal of Fortune (with three nominations
and one win - Best Actor), the story of Harvard law professor
Alan Dershowitz's defense appeal of Claus Von Bulow's conviction
for attempted murder of his wife.
The Best Actor award was presented to Jeremy
Irons (with his first nomination) for his performance in Reversal
of Fortune as the icy, arrogant, and decadently-aristocratic
millionaire Claus Von Bulow who was accused of trying to kill
his comatose Newport heiress wife Sunny (Glenn Close).
The other four Best Actor nominees were:
- Kevin Costner (with his first nomination)
as idealistic frontier officer Lt. John W. Dunbar who encounters
the Lakota Sioux tribe in Dances With Wolves
- Robert De Niro (with his fifth nomination)
as Leonard Lowe - a comatose patient who was revived in Awakenings
- Gerard Depardieu (with his first nomination)
as the long-nosed swordsman/poet in French director Jean-Paul
Rappeneau's film Cyrano de Bergerac (with five nominations
and one win - Best Costume Design)
- Richard Harris (with his second nomination)
as stubborn Irish farmer 'Bull' McCabe in director Jim Sheridan's The
Field (the film's sole nomination)
The Best Actress award was given to Kathy Bates
(with her first nomination) as obsessed, psychopathic fan Annie
Wilkes for a romance novelist (James Caan) in director Rob
Reiner's black thriller Misery (the film's sole nomination),
William Goldman's adaptation of Stephen King's novel.
Her competing nominees for Best Actress included:
- Anjelica Huston (with her third nomination)
as racetrack scammer Lilly Dillon in The Grifters
- Julia Roberts (with her second consecutive
nomination) in a star-making role as wheeler-dealer Richard
Gere's fantasy Los Angeles prostitute Vivian Ward in director
Garry Marshall's Pretty Woman (the film's sole nomination)
- Meryl Streep (with her ninth nomination, and
7th Best Actress nomination) as drug-addicted film actress
Suzanne Vale in director Mike Nichols' Postcards from
the Edge (with two nominations and no wins), a disguised
semi-autobiography of Carrie Fisher (daughter of Debbie Reynolds)
- Joanne Woodward (with her fourth nomination)
as conservative, mousy, middle-aged Kansas wife India Bridge
in director James Ivory's Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (the
film's sole nomination)
In the Best Supporting Actor category, Joe Pesci
(with his second nomination) won his first Oscar award
for his ferocious performance as comically psychotic gangster
killer Tommy DeVito in GoodFellas (the
film's sole Oscar win). [The same year, Pesci starred
as a clumsy burglar in the blockbuster Home Alone starring
Macauley Culkin.]
The other four Best Supporting Actor nominees
were:
- Bruce Davison (with his first nomination)
as David - one of nine gay New Yorkers followed over a nine
year period while coping with the killer disease AIDS in
director Norman Rene's Longtime Companion (the film's
sole nomination)
- Cuban-born Andy Garcia (with his first nomination)
as Vincent Mancini - the illegitimate son and heir apparent
of godfather Michael Corleone's brother Sonny in The
Godfather, Part III
- Canadian-born Graham Greene as Native-American
Sioux Indian Kicking Bird in Dances With Wolves [Greene
was the second Native-American to receive an Oscar
nomination]
- Al Pacino (with his sixth nomination) as over-the-top
crime boss Big Boy Caprice in director/producer/actor Warren
Beatty's comic-bookish Dick Tracy (with seven nominations
and three wins - Best Art/Set Direction, Best Song, and Best
Makeup). [Pacino's nomination for Dick Tracy instead
of for The Godfather,
Part III was truly unexplainable, except for the
fact that Andy Garcia was nominated in his stead, to avoid
splitting the vote]
In 1990, Whoopi Goldberg became the second black
actress to win an acting Oscar. [The first black actress
to win an Oscar was Hattie McDaniel's win for  Gone
With The Wind (1939).] Favored to win, Goldberg (with
her second nomination) won the Best Supporting Actress
award for her performance as an imposter clairvoyant - and
then genuine psychic medium Oda Mae Brown in Ghost.
[Some interpreted Goldberg's win as a 'consolation' prize for
not winning Best Actress five years earlier when she was considered
for the award for her performance in The Color Purple (1985),
and lost to Geraldine Page's performance in The Trip to
Bountiful (1985).]
The other four Best Supporting Actress nominees
were:
- Annette Bening (with her first nomination)
as provocative con artist Myra Langtry in The Grifters
- Lorraine Bracco (with her first nomination)
as Henry Hill's wife Karen in GoodFellas
- Diane Ladd (with her second nomination) as
Marietta Pace - Nicolas Cage's possessive mother in director
David Lynch's erratic and surreal Wild at Heart (the
film's sole nomination)
- Mary McDonnell (with her first nomination)
as Sioux Indian Stands with Fist - an emotionally-traumatized
white woman captured and raised from childhood by Indians
in Dances With Wolves
Never-nominated actress Myrna Loy received
an Honorary Oscar this year, "in recognition of her
extraordinary qualities both on screen and off, with appreciation
for a lifetime's worth of indelible performances." She
was best known for her appearance opposite William Powell
in The
Thin Man (1934) series of six films. Sophia Loren
was also presented another Honorary Oscar - "one of
the genuine treasures of world cinema who, in a career rich
with memorable performances, has added permanent luster to
our art form." She
had been nominated as Best Actress for Marriage-Italian
Style (1964), and won her only Best Actress Oscar
for Two Women (1960).
Oscar Snubs and Omissions:
The biggest omission of the year was the Coen
Brothers' neglected and fresh gangster film Miller's Crossing (see
below for acting omissions) - with no Best Picture, cinematography,
or screenplay nominations. In addition, actor/director Jack
Nicholson's The Two Jakes, a sequel to Polanski's Chinatown
(1974) was completely overlooked: Nicholson's dual
roles, screenplay by Robert Towne, Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography,
and Harvey Keitel as the "other" Jake. And female
director Penny Marshall was overlooked as a Best Director nominee,
even though her film Awakenings was a Best Picture nominee.
There was no recognition for the latex animatronic costumes
(by Jim Henson Productions) for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
The Movie, for Jim Henson's last-produced film - director
Nicolas Roeg's - The Witches with Anjelica Huston, or
for Michael Caton-Jones' story about a WWII B-17 bomber and
its crew, Memphis Belle.
Bruce Joel Rubin won the Best Original Screenplay
Oscar for Ghost, but his co-scripted screenplay for Jacob's
Ladder (with no nominations) was neglected. Stephen Frears'
The Grifters contained marvelous performances and
had four prominent nominations (Best Actress - Anjelica Huston,
Best Supporting Actress - Annette Bening, Best Director,
and Best Adapted Screenplay - Donald E Westlake), but ended
up with no Oscars.
The following were not nominated for their
acting performances - note that the first four films listed
here were 'quality' gangster films - 1990 was a glutted year
for the genre:
- John Turturro as bookie Bernie Bernbaum, Garbriel
Byrne as Tom Reagan, Marcia Gay Harden as Verna, or Albert
Finney as Leo in Miller's Crossing
- Al Pacino as violent Mafia head Michael Corleone
in The Godfather, Part
III
- Ray Liotta as 'wiseguy' gangster Henry Hill,
Robert DeNiro as mobster/hitman Jimmy Conway, and Paul Sorvino
as mob boss Paul Cicero in Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas
- Gary Oldman as Hell's Kitchen gang member
Jackie Flannery in Phil Joanou's first big-budget film State
of Grace
- Richard Gere as sadistic rogue cop Dennis
Peck in Mike Figgis' Internal Affairs
- Michael Gambon as Albert Spica - the Thief
in Peter Greenaway's British film The Cook, the Thief,
His Wife and Her Lover
- Robin Williams as the experimental doctor
in Awakenings
- Sean Connery as defecting Soviet submarine
Capt. Marko Ramius in John McTiernan's political action thriller The
Hunt for Red October (with three nominations, Best
Editing, Best Sound, and Best Sound Effects (win))
- Paul Newman as the other half of the middle-aged
midwestern couple in Mr. and Mrs. Bridge
- Mia Farrow as the title character in Woody
Allen's Alice
- Debra Winger as a Sahara Desert-dwelling American
in a romantic triangle in Bernardo Bertolucci's visually-stunning The
Sheltering Sky
- Uma Thurman as bi-sexual June Miller in writer/director
Philip Kaufman's NC-17 rated Henry & June
- Meg Ryan in a tri-part role as office secretary
DeDe, LA debutante/socialite Angelica Graynamore, and Angelica's
blonde half-sister Patricia in the romantic comedy fantasy Joe
Versus The Volcano
- Glenn Close as playboy Claus Von Bulow's (Oscar-winning
Jeremy Irons) threatened heiress wife Sunny (who narrated
her earlier life with him in flashback) in Reversal of
Fortune
- Jennifer Jason Leigh as a prostitute in Miami
Blues
- Tim Robbins as tortured, hallucinating ex-Vietnam
vet Jacob Singer, and Elizabeth Pena as Jezzie - his mysterious
live-in girlfriend and co-worker, in Adrian Lyne's supernatural
horror-thriller Jacob's Ladder (with no nominations)
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