The new age western, Dances With Wolves, is direction taken over by star Kevin Costner, seemed like a breath of fresh air at the time. In just two years, however, a more traditional western would reclaim the genre and much of 1990’s Oscar winner would look a bit silly in retrospect. But no one could foresee that at the time.

Mixing intimate scenes with breathtaking bravura action sequences, Costner’s directorial debut was one of great promise. Alas, his subsequent career behind the camera has been less than thrilling.

Nominated for twelve Oscars, Dances With Wolves won seven for Best Picture; Director; Adapted Screenplay; Cinematography; Editing; Score and Sound. Costner the actor was nominated for his sensitive portrayal of a Union Army officer in the Civil War who befriends both wolves and Indians. Graham Green as Kicking Bird and Mary McDonnell as Stands With Fist were also nominated as were the film’s Art Direction and Costume Design.

Dances With Wolves may have won the lion’s share of the year’s Oscars but the film that won the most critics’ prizes this year was Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas. Nominated for six Oscars including Best Picture; Director; Supporting Actress (Lorraine Bracco); Adapted Screenplay and Editing, it won only one for Best Supporting Actor Joe Pesci as a hood with a short fuse.

Long anticipated, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part III managed a Best Picture nomination despite a critical drubbing, most of it centered around the casting of Sophia Coppola, the director’s daughter who proved to be such a lousy actress that audiences cheered wildly when her sympathetic character dies. The film received seven nominations in all including Best Picture; Director; Supporting Actor (Andy Garcia); Cinematography; Art Direction; Editing and Song (“Promise Me You’ll Remember”). Star Al Pacino, despite early predictions, failed to nab a Best Actor nomination, although he was nominated in support for Dick Tracy.

The other two nominees, Ghost and Awakenings both failed to secure nominations for their directors, which with rare exception is not a good omen. Although Driving Miss Daisy managed to do so the year before, it didn’t look like a consecutive exception was in the cards, and it wasn’t.

Playing a phony medium who actually possesses the gift, Whoopi Goldberg was at her hilarious best as the go-between between live Demi Moore and lingering ghost Patrick Swayze in Jerry Zucker’s Ghost,and true to predictions, she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. The film also won for Best Adapted Screenplay and was nominated for Best Picture; Editing and Score.

Although Robin Williams and Robert De Niro shared the Best Actor prize of the National Board of Review as a doctor and his temporarily awakened coma patient in Awakenings, the Golden Globes would nominate only Williams and the Academy only De Niro. The Academy also nominated it for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Other films Oscar liked this year in addition to Dick Tracy included Reversal of Fortune; The Grifters; Longtime Companion; Wild at Heart Postcards From the Edge; Mr. & Mrs. Bridge; Misery; Pretty Woman; Avalon; Cyrano de Bergerac and The Field.

With acting, directing and writing nominations, it’s likely that Reversal of Fortune and The Grifters came close to nabbing Best Picture nods and probably failed by only a few votes. Clearly if this were a ten picture slate, they would have been included.

Jeremy Irons, who failed to secure predicted Best Actor nods for The Mission and Dead Ringers in the last few years, took the brass ring as Claus von Bulow, the presumed attempted murderer of his wife Sunny in Barbet Schroeder’s Reversal of Fortune. The film, which is narrated by the comatose Sunny, played by Glenn Close, gave the actor a dream role which still gets him cast as men with deep, dark secrets.

No wins, but four nominations, went to Stephen Frears’ The Grifters from Jim Thompson’s novel. Anjelica Huston won several precursor awards for her portrayal of the mother in a complicated mother-son-girlfriend relationship. Annette Bening, nominated in support as John Cusack’s girlfriend, was equally scintillating. The film’s ending still shocks.

Warren Beatty’s cleverly constructed Dick Tracy from the durable comic strip nabbed seven nominations and three wins for Art Direction; Makeup and Song (Stephen Sondheim’s “Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man”). It had also been nominated for Best Cinematography; Costume Design and Sound in addition to Al Pacino’s previously mentioned nod for Supporting Actor. Pacino as Big Boy Caprice was arguably the standout in a large cast that also included Dustin Hoffman as Mumbles; Madonna as Breathless Mahoney and Beatty as Tracy himself.

Joining Pacino, Pesci, Garcia and Greene in the Best Supporting Actor race was Bruce Davison, who had won New New Film Critics award for his heartbreaking portrayal of the gay man who must tell his lover that it’s okay to die in Norman Rene’s powerful film about the AIDS epidemic. Campbell Scott, Patrick Cassidy, Dermot Mulroney and Mary-Louise Parker also turned in strong performances.

Joining previously mentioned nominees Goldberg, Bening; Bracco and McDonnell in the Best Supporting Actress race was veteran Diane Ladd as daughter Laura Dern’s mother who plots to kill Dern’s boyfriend Nicolas Cage in David Lynch’s loopy Wild at Heart.

Surprisingly left off the Supporting Actress roster was Shirley MacLaine in a thinly disguised portrayal of Debbie Reynolds in Mike Nichols’ Postcards From the Edge, written by Carrie Fisher. Meryl Streep, who doesn’t look or act anything like Fisher herself, had the role of MacLaine’s less talented, less successful actress daughter for which she received her ninth nomination. The film also received a nomination for Best Song (“I’m Checkin’ Out”).

Streep had no chance of winning this year, the race pretty much considered to have been between Los Angeles Film Critics winner Anjelica Huston in The Grifters and New York Film Critics winner Joanne Woodward as the mother who doesn’t know how to connect with her grown children in Mr. & Mrs. Bridge. Golden Globe winners Kathy Bates in the horror film, Misery, and Julia Roberts in the popular comedy, Pretty Woman, were considered also-rans as well. Surprisingly, Bates won for what some consider a one-note portrayal of a crazy person. But then, Huston and Woodward, as well as Streep, already had Oscars and Roberts was still considered new, whereas the middle-aged Bates who had been struggling for years to achieve the success in films she had on stage was apparently seen as being at the right stage in her career.

With four nominations, Avalon, Barry Levinson’s tribute to his Polish-Jewish ancestors was nothing to sneeze at. It was nominated for Best Original Screenplay; Cinematography; Costume Design and Score.

Gerard Depardieu pulled off a rare nomination for acting in a foreign language film for Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s version of Edmond Rostand’s oft-filmed Cyrano de Bergerac, which had been nominated for five Oscars including Best Foreign Film. It won for Best Costume Design.

Richard Harris received his second career nomination for playing a bitter Irish land owner in Jim Sheridan’s The Field.

All films discussed have been released on DVD in the U.S.

This week’s new DVD releases include True Grit and The Company Men and the Blu-ray debuts of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; Hair; New York, New Yorkand The Stunt Man.