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 Original Screenplay 1995

The Contenders:

Braveheart
Mighty Aphrodite
Nixon
Toy Story
The Ususl Suspects

Dick Nixon Before He Dicks You

Film: Nixon
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on laptop.

If you go into Nixon without knowing it was directed by Oliver Stone, you’d know it was an Oliver Stone film within a few minutes. I’d seen pieces of it before, but only pieces, but I remember those pieces well, much of that coming from Stone’s style. What I find interesting here is that the Stone movie I am most reminded of when watching Nixon isn’t Platoon or JFK but Natural Born Killers. There’s a great similarity in style here—the fragmented narrative, the montage pieces, the shifts to archival footage that unites those two films in particular.

The version of Nixon I located was the director’s cut, which adds almost half an hour to a film already hitting north of three. The main benefit of the extended cut of the film is the inclusion of Sam Waterston as CIA director Richard Helms. I like Sam Waterston, but I’m not sure he was worth the extra 28 minutes.