Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Director 1994

The Contenders:

Woody Allen: Bullets Over Broadway
Robert Zemeckis: Forrest Gump (winner)
Quentin Tarantino: Pulp Fiction
Robert Redford: Quiz Show
Krzysztof Kieslowski: Three Colors: Red

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Adapted Screenplay 1994

The Contenders:

Forrest Gump (winner)
The Madness of King George
Nobody’s Fool
Quiz Show
The Shawshank Redemption

Oscar Got it Wrong!: Best Picture 1994

The Contenders:
Forrest Gump (winner)
Four Weddings and a Funeral
Pulp Fiction
Quiz Show
The Shawshank Redemption

Quiz Show

Film: Quiz Show
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

I really like Quiz Show. I like it because first of all, it’s a really well-made film with a fantastic cast. There were some fabrications and changes from real life to the filmed version, of course, but I’m not that upset by it. Quiz Show is a really simple film, and that’s very much the point here. The story itself is so compelling that it needed only a little massaging in places and nothing else to make it worth seeing.

The film is based around the real quiz show scandal of the late 1950s where particular contestants on game shows were fed answers to make them media stars and boost ratings. Specifically, this is the case of the quiz show “Twenty One.” The basics of the show were pretty simple and completely fascinating. Two contestants are placed in separate isolation booths and race to 21 points. The more points they go for, the more difficult the question. The catch in the game is that the contestants don’t know the other person’s score.