Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Adapted Screenplay 1995

The Contenders:

Apollo 13
Babe
Leaving Las Vegas
Il Postino
Sense and Sensibility (winner)

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 1995

The Contenders:

Sean Penn: Dead Man Walking
Nicolas Cage: Leaving Las Vegas (winner)
Richard Dreyfus: Mr. Holland’s Opus
Anthony Hopkins: Nixon
Massimo Troisi: Il Postino

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Director 1995

The Contenders:

Chris Noonan: Babe
Mel Gibson: Braveheart (winner)
Tim Robbins: Dead Man Walking
Mike Figgis: Leaving Las Vegas
Michael Radford: Il Postino

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 1995

The Contenders:

Apollo 13
Babe
Braveheart (winner)
Il Postino
Sense and Sensibility

All the Feels

Film: Il Postino (The Postman)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

What makes you tear up while watching a film? For many people, it’s the sad stuff. For me, sad things don’t always do it to me. Certain moments seem to overload the emotional centers of my brain, though. The ending of Cinema Paradiso does it, for instance. So do the last few frames of Monsters, Inc. And, it turns out, the last 15 minutes or so of Il Postino (The Postman) do it as well. I cried like a little baby, leaking out of both sides of both eyes. Things that are overwhelmingly emotional—any emotion, it seems—are what does this to me.

Before we get into the movie itself, someone needs to explain how this works for me. Il Postino was filmed in Italian with portions in Spanish. It was nominated for Best Picture for 1995, but somehow wasn’t nominated for Best Foreign Language Feature. So it’s one of the five best years of 1995, but not one of the five best non-English films of 1995? If you needed a reason why I do the weekly Oscar posts, it’s because there are too many situations where the Academy seems to be made of mildly stupid children that need to be corrected by someone. In this case, if this happened because Italy decided that a different film was worth entering (which is evidently the case), the fault belongs to them.