so can anybody answer Nick's rules and regulations question re: Casablance. I shrugged it off at first but it's continued to bug me. Is it because NY didn't count for releases back then?

also curious to hear any defence or, ok, any further dogpiling on Forrest ;)

I think it's because How Green Was My Valley was actually released in New York in the December, whereas Casablanca's showing in November of 1942 was only a premiere? At least that's the way it looks.

I watched Valley in anticipation of this and liked but didn't love. It reminded me a lot of The Stars Look Down, a Carol Reed film made the year before. While that was a lot more scathing towards capitalism etc. I think Ford's film does well in trying to represent the internal conflicts of working class life, even if it doesn't get much past dirty looks and broken windows. The scene where the sons take a stand against the father was a little rushed, but I like how it totally gets the inter-generational dynamic right, and how tradition doesn't necessarily mean solidarity.

Gump, well, it feels like such a backwards film. It seems to be more concerned with the audience registering with the events of war etc. and the pretty simple, cliche hangups of its characters than saying anything about life. Aside from that it's "like a box of chocolates" of course, which is just a roundabout way of saying it's random.

Hollywood has a long history of reducing the south to a series of ugly generalities but in my mind Forrest Gump stands as the most insulting. Gump isn't so much a character as he is a caricature---the synthesis of every dim-witted southern stereotype committed to film. And that accent! Having lived all my life in the south I can think of no one (legitimately mentally handicapped or not) who talks like that. If the intent was to take the viewer's mind off of how uniformly awful the accents were in the supporting cast than all I can say is job well done.

Well I agree with all of the flaws against Gump I don't hate it honestly.

And while it has a lot of conservative values I'm not overly big on, it does also have a mother who has sex with a person to help her son, lots of giving to charity and a stand against racism, of sorts, at a time when Republicans weren't in that mindset.

Not a big defense but I've heard this stated by defenders. For me, despite all its flaws, I get caught up in all the gunk and melodrama of the whole thing and would be a liar if I said otherwise. Is it a great movie, not at all. I just feel very similar for this film as I do Titanic. Should it have won a ton of awards. Nope. Judged on its own though, its solid enough entertainment if drenched in syrup.

"but it will always go down on my list as the biggest "We are completely out of touch" sign in the Academy's history."

Far be it from me to think that the "general public" and their opinion should count for much of anything, but I'm sure there are MILLIONS that adore Forrest Gump. I'm not a big fan - I haven't seen it in a long time though so who knows - but the movie DID gross $330mil in the US (compared to Pulp Fiction's $108mil) so one could argue that the Academy was merely "out of touch" with those who would take part in a series such as Best Pictures From the Outside In.

I think the more "what the fuck were you people doing to ignore it?" moment of that particular year was Hoop Dreams being snubbed from Best Documentary. Since it's probably one of the three finest films of the 1990s (I rank Jackie Brown and KBV1 over "Pulp Fiction" in QT's oeuvre) THAT is unforgivable.

Nice one, once again, guys.

I'd hate to choose between Ford and Welles myself. In neither case is their 1941 work among my very favorites but they're both great films, better than the other nominated competition. I'm glad this discussion didn't focus so much on Kane (even if it started with it) as so many Oscar-related articles on How Green do. What most outraged Citizen Kane fans of today usually don't remember is that the Academy Awards were at first cancelled due to Pearl Harbor that year, and only re-instated because there were calls from around the free world to keep it going "to boost morale". It seems impossible that something as cynical (some might say clear-eyed, but hey) as the Welles film might have won more than a token award or two (two would have been nice) in such a climate.

As a follower of minutae, I of course find myself hung up on the question of the Ford film's eligibility, considering the Casablanca question. According to Inside Oscar, Zanuck released the film on the last day of eligibility just so it would be fresh in voters' minds (sound familiar?), so if the imdb is correct, perhaps the last day of eligibility for a year used to be in early January- and Casablanca's L.A. release was in late January 1943.

Thank you all for giving me some very good reasons to dislike Forrest Gump other than it beating Pulp Fiction.

I look forward to having a reason to dislike Schlinder's List other than the fact that it beat The Piano, The Remains of the Day and Farewell My Concubine. (Secretly nominated over The Fugitive.)

Brook -- i love rewriting history too. Isn't it cool that the Academy was so daring in 93' and also nominated Trois Coleurs: Bleu !

Brian -- thanks for the inside oscar reminder.

Cal -- maybe you're on to the answer with the "premiere" notion. Those release date listings can totally throw you off. Sometimes they refer to actual releases. Sometimes to festivals. Sometimes to premieres.

anon -- i assume based on its box office take that even southerners loved Forrest Gump though. How to explain it...

I emailed the research librarians at the Margaret Herrick library about the eligibility dates--it's been a good way to settle these questions before.

Glenn: sorry, I should have added "with what constitutes a good film" to my "we are so out of touch" complaint. Of course, that doesn't really change your point, since I'm sure those vast numbers of people who loved Forrest Gump but didn't see Pulp Fiction would argue that they do know what constitutes a good film.

Great entry as always. With Forrest Gump, it was so popular, one of the highest-grossing films of the year along with The Lion King. Which puts the Academy in a Catch-22 -- when it goes with highest-grossing films, it's usually criticized, and when it ignores some highest-grossing films (Dark Knight), it's criticized. I'm not putting Forrest Gump in the same league as Dark Knight, but the point is that people vascilate on the Academy rewarding or ignoring highest-grossing films. It was just last year, when No Country won, that everyone said how the five films nominated were collectively the lowest-grossing lineup of all time and complained about this. Anyway, one point I think both Forrest Gump and HGWMV have in common is how they are a snapshot of their respective eras. HGWMV a sentimental, earnest melodrama, and FG, a big, popular, lightweight piece of entertainment. FG lost against some great movies, both nominated and non-nominated. HGWMV used to be a favorite of mine, but the more I watch it, the more it feels disjointed and more a film to be admired than loved. Wonderful moments throughout (I love Maureen O'Hara's wedding veil blowing in the wind) but as a whole perhaps overplaying its hand emotionally.

yes, the "out of touch" argument definitely has more components than just box office. In other years we've covered for example. I don't think that American Beauty was ever considered "lesser than" say The Green Mile... even with the public though the public bought more tickets to The Green Mile. Just one example and probably a bad one.

But i think the "out of touch" issue often refers to a combo of box office/public acceptance and critical consensus, too.

and since Pulp Fiction was a WAY bigger hit than anyone besides maybe Tarantino expected it to be* and not just on the coasts, i think one can make an argument that the public loved it exuberantly too, just maybe not quite as much as the critics.

*I still remember bitchy quotes from Oliver Stone before it came out about the amount of press Tarantino was getting all for a movie (Reservoir Dogs) that barely did any box office and he said something to the effect of 'Natural Born Killers will make more in its run than Tarantino movies combined will ever make'. Then of course Pulp Fiction opened and became a smash doubling the box office of NBK.

P.S. i'm aware I've lost the thread because i like talking about Pulp Fiction more than Gump ;)

Nathaniel R --- Everyone's mileage differs. I never meant to imply that my feelings toward the film hold true for everyone south of the Mason-Dixon line. I actually know several people who genuinely like the movie and they often accuse me of overanalyzing it (though even they admit that it can't be called an accurate portrait of the region or its people). Still, to me, the film is a perfect example of the fly-over mentality that many in Hollywood have toward the south. They don't really take the time to understand it so they fall back on lazy stereotypes.

And then there's Dave Kehr, whose knowledge and taste almost universally respected among cinephiles. But he considers Zemeckis a more major artist than Altman. Inspired by this conversation, I looked up Kehr's 1995 Film Comment article Who Framed Forrest Gump, and found, if not exactly swaying defense, then at least an interesting one.

I hope I'm not misstating things too badly when characterizing his argument as this: Forrest Gump may have been co-opted by the right, but in fact it's a biting critique of the American system, which is rigged against individuals who actively try to enact political change, and set up so only those who float along like a feather in the wind can achieve success.

I'm not exactly buying it, but figured it was worth bringing up.

I think there's more going on in Gump than is on the surface, and while I go back and forth on whether I even LIKE it and certainly don't think it belongs anywhere near any best picture trophies, I think the temptation to just write it off (as with most Zemeckis films) by serious cinephiles is a touch irritating. I'm fairly charitable towards the Kehr reading listed above, even if I find the film's handling of Jenny fairly offensive and oft-indefensible (more so than Kehr does, it would seem). It's always been surprising to me that the right so easily co-opted it (though the time it came out in American history also made that easy) when it could so easily be read the opposite way -- as a brutal satire of the conservative movement.

No matter. It's decidedly a problematic film, but I think we write it off at our peril. If we're picking Zemeckis, I'd rather watch Back to the Future or Roger Rabbit (one of the five or ten best films ever made about Hollywood) over and over and over again.

@Todd: I can see where you're coming from, but it's hard to see the right as "co-opting" the movie, since all of its fundamental stances -- regarding gender, regarding war veterans, regarding race, regarding nostalgia (for an America and a South that never was...), regarding education, regarding that total 180 that Mike mentions about what counts as "history" once the movie hits the Reagan era -- all seem to resonate so heavily with the 1994 rightwing ideological platforms. I don't see how to connect the dots as "a brutal satire of the conservative moment" because the story, the photography, and the score just ladle adoration onto Forrest and his gleaming, bucolic plantation house and so roundly condemn almost all of the people that Kehr wants to see the movie as sympathizing with. That sympathy usually only arrives after they die (Jenny, Bubba) or do about-faces to become more positive about Forrest (Lt. Dan) or turn out to be as stunted as Forrest is (Bubba again).

I think Back to the Future is a great movie, Romancing the Stone is close, and though I don't remember it well enough to say, Roger Rabbit is a fond memory. But I just don't see how Forrest Gump is recuperable as art. At the level of filmmaking, story structure, what have you, it sometimes hums along admirably (but usually to a disturbing ideological strain), but it just as often breaks down completely, or relies on D.W. Griffith-era bathetic devices.

eeek. Brian I almost wish i hadn't read that comment because I always liked Dave Kehr before. But I can't imagine a world where Zemeckis is more important than Altman (unless you're talking about just the mainstream world in which case yes. If you're talking about the cinema. Hells to the no)

But that said I actually don't dislike Zemeckis. I love a few of his films but I literally think that Gump is his worst movie. And by a significant margin. It's just so offensive and reductive.

Todd... i wish i was sympathetic to the reading (since Forrest Gump is never going away) but I'm not. It sounds like a reading that's totally projected onto the movie by a liberal who happens to love the movie. It's an itchy graft. I don't see how the movie supports it (and I just barely watched the movie for this article so it's fresh in the memory) particularly in that the anti-war people are cartoons, so I don't see how the movie is secretly supportive of them and critiquing the system that makes it hard for them. The only person the movie seems to care about at all is Forrest... Jenny is not even viewed all that sympathetically (despite Jenny's love) since one is reminded in several shots and sequences that she is a rather large part of her own problem.

Let me just clarify that I'm not saying people who weren't cinephiles or critics loved Pulp Fiction - I know many who do - and there's no denying that it a smashing great movie, but as BGK mentioned, the Academy gets criticised for awarding populist movies (and it's fair to call Forrest Gump that) and gets criticised when they don't. I surely understand Forrest Gump's win more than... well, a lot of other Best Picture winners, that's for sure.

I wish Pulp Fiction had won too, but I can think of other films that exemplify the Academy's limitations as a time-tested quality monitoring time capsule.

You're right that they get criticized either way but with Pulp Fiction they could've had both. It's tough to imagine a film that fresh / weird / auteurist doing such boffo business now but it finished in the top ten of the entire year box office wise. That's rare for BPs these days

Hmm. Good job going the entire entry without mentioning the Citizen Kane controversy with William Randolph Hearst that probably zinged its Oscar chances, but I suppose that's to be expected, since the entry is about How Green Was My Valley. I'm a bit surprised at the lack of reference in the comments.

Anyways, I'd hate to be the one to defend Gump, but I do have something to say regarding the running scene. I've read the original Winston Groom novel (I feel it's vastly superior to the film). In the novel, Gump is more of an autistic savant than mentally handicapped, so he has an unnatural strength with numbers. That led to a story arc where he is selected as an astronaut and flown out into space with a CB female astronaut and a chimpanzee named "Sue". The mission ends disastrously, and the trio crash lands in a jungle in Papua New Guinea, where Gump meets a London-educated cannibal who takes a liking to him. He teaches Gump chess, which Gump turns out to be a master. The cannibal spends the next three years trying to beat his protege.

I'm guessing when Eric Roth wrote the screenplay he decided the arc doesn't exactly fit in with his visions of the Forrest Gump story, so he excised it. However, he has to find something to fit in with the three-year timeframe of the arc in the novel, so the running scene was born. Anyways, that's just my guess. The sequence in the novel is a bit mindblowingly unrealistic, but it's preferable to the running.

ajnrules: I'm not sure that Groom's original construction would have helped salve any of my problems with the film, because becoming an astronaut, etc., is the same kind of active disengagement with the politics of the time that the running scene exemplifies. Leaving town on foot and ignoring the 1980s is no different than leaving on a space shuttle.

And I'm with Nick and Nathaniel on the Dave Kehr reading: it's completely, utterly unsupported by the film.

I like Forrest Gump. There, I said it. Just because it's cynical about 1960s counterculture doesn't mean it should be written off as some kind of Gingrich-esque polemic. I liked Hanks' performance, I thought it was often very funny and even legitimately moving, though in that middle-brow "I want to cry, not think" kind of way. And just because it undeservedly won the Best Picture Oscar over Pulp Fiction doesn't mean you have to crucify the whole damn movie; put the blame where it's due and crucify the academy.

Is it one of the best movies ever? No. But dammit, it's good. I've gotten into the same kind of arguments with people about American Beauty, another good movie that was retroactively panned because of academy hype. That, too, was a bit shallow, and its themes a bit warmed-over, but its merits outweighed its flaws. Just because a few industry blowhards point their cigars and go "BEST FUCKING PICTURE I SEEN IN A DECADE!" critics feel the need to tease out the movies every flaw.

While you bring up some interesting points, I still like the film. Also, the film was based off of a book, in the book it ends much like the movie, but I believe there was a sequel written all about Forrest in the 80s and 90s.

While there are certainly stereotypes throughout the film, I think you're taking it too seriously. The goal of the film wasn't to make serious commentary on society. Rather, it serves to show some of the most defining cultural moments through the eyes of someone who is simple, and to go after the basic point that, i think, "all you need is love." Perhaps it is too optimistic for a pessimistic world, but the "everything will be alright" attitude isn't something that should be scoffed at.

Matthew: We're crucifying the movie because we don't think it's good, not because it won Best Picture. I suppose you could say that that's the real reason, because without its Best Picture win we wouldn't have any reason at all to talk about it, but our problems with the film go far beyond the fact that it was undeserving of the big prize.

Scott: I don't think you can say it's not trying to make a serious commentary on society and then say it's just trying to show some of the most defining cultural movements. It's offering a commentary and making judgments on those events, and it's saying that everything will be all right as long as you stick to the straight and narrow and don't be too adventurous. It's very political, even though it couches its politics in maudlin homilies.

Everyone: I emailed the reference librarians at the Academy's library about the How Green and Casablanca eligibility question, and here's their answer:

The answer is simply a matter of how the eligibility period for each award year was defined.

As stated in the printed rules book for the 1941 (14th) Academy Awards, the eligibility period was for: "motion pictures first released during the calendar year of 1941 and/or first publicly exhibited (previews excluded) in the Los Angeles District before January 12, 1942."

And the eligibility period for the 1942 (15th) Academy Awards was for: "motion pictures first publicly exhibited (previews excluded) in Los Angeles between January 12, 1942, and midnight, December 31, 1942, such exhibition being for a consecutive run of not less than a week after an opening prior to midnight of December 31, 1942."

So Casablanca's New York premiere didn't count, and it didn't do its qualifying run until January 1943, thus it's a 1943 film according to the Oscars. And How Green's January 8 opening in LA got it in under the January 12, 1942 wire for 1941 eligibility.

But the important question is: how do we get our hands on those printed rule books? Every Oscar nut should have copies!

Thanks for doing the legwork. Sometimes AMPAS can be annoyingly self-important but in terms of historical archiving I'm glad that they take themselves so seriously.

Sigh. God, everyone hates this movie. I like it. (And no, I'm not talking about your 1941 movie, though I like that too - it seems to have enough defenders for the moment).

You can put a good deal of my affection down to childhood nostalgia, sure (I was 10 when the movie hit theaters and its soundtrack - more on that in a moment - provided the music for a cross-country trip with my family one summer later), but there's a good deal about the movie that's defensible from the craft to the imagination of the story and even (gasp) to its themes. An in-depth defense will have to wait for a blog post, though I'll let you know when I do so (I've been wanting to write this for a while, ever since the inevitable Benjamin Button comparisons arose a few months ago).

For the mean time, a few points.

The movie's a goddamn comedy! Yes, it mixes sentiment with humor, but there's a lot of rather dry, almost satiric humor throughout the picture - something that has been consistently and egregiously missed by its critics over the years who act as if the whole thing's one long cry-fest with a few corny, dew-eyed jokes thrown in.

Though largely conservative (I don't entirely buy the liberal re-reading), the movie allows room for ambivalence. It pokes fun at the radical rhetoric, and druggy fashions of the 60s, but can't resist getting caught up in the spirit a little bit (how could it? its makers were boomers too...). Which brings me to...

The music? Sorry, this is a great soundtrack, at least the first half. The supposed sin of obviousness is grossly overstated when it comes to music. I like it as much as the next guy when I hear some obscure Stones track pop up in a Wes Anderson movie, but when you use famous songs well, in a proper context, it can have tremendous effect. Again, I'm biased because that supposedly bargain-bin CD (a tape, actually, in my case) provided the soundtrack for a pivotal period in my life, but I tend to be a connoiseur of music in movies, and while this certainly isn't up there with Scorsese (or Tarantino, for that matter) and the excellent choice, and honestly, use, of tracks make up for the occasional pile-on and trite over-use.

The rest of my defense will have to wait for another day. Suffice it to say that Gump may not be a great movie, but it is a good one and while I understand the hate, I think there's more room for honest - and defensible - disagreement than is typically allowed.

(By the way, I've heard that some of those behind PF, whether just the moneymen or Tarantino himself, defended Gump against its Pulp-rules, Gump-drools detractors, citing, among other things, the humor and the character of Lt. Dan. Not sure if they were just being generous, but I tend to agree with their defenses.)

It may be that they knew Pulp Fiction's legacy would be stronger as a Cannes-winning Oscar-loser than as a film that cleaned up every prize possible. Gosh I'm cynical!

Tickled to learn that my hunch on the 1942 eligibility issue was bourne out by your research, Mike!

Loved HGWMF, hated FG. There was something that the FG trailers led me to believe about the movie that was savaged by the reality. Only thing about it I liked was the theme music. And I'm a conservative boomer. I lived through that history.

FG, like TITANIC after it and RAIN MAN before it, was rewarded I feel simply because it was a dramatic non-genre (a dirty word to the Academy esp this year) movie that became the highest grossing film (domestic) of it's year.