The Oscar year 1991 may be the strangest one in the history of the Academy Awards.

Box office was down more than 6% percent from the previous year and pundits blamed the year’s mostly somber, depressing films themselves for audience doldrums.

Oddly, though, the year’s eventual Best Picture winner, Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, was itself quite somber and often depressing, albeit a lot of fun in a perverse way and one of the year’s top films at the box office.  It was also one of the few horror films to be taken seriously by the Academy and the first to win a Best Picture Oscar.

Not only did it win Best Picture, it also swept the awards for Best Actress (Jodie Foster as a somewhat naïve FBI agent); Actor (Anthony Hopkins as the incarcerated cannibal who assists her in solving the serial killings of an imitator); Director and Adapted Screenplay.  It had also been nominated for Best Editing and Sound.

Although Silence had won the both the National Board of Review and New York Film Critics Awards for Best Picture, as well as those of other local critics groups that were now beginning to pop up all over the country, it was far from a sure bet at the Oscars.  The L.A. Film Critics and had picked Barry Levinson’s gangster film, Bugsy,about the gangster who put Las Vegas on the map, and the National Society of Film Critics had gone with Mike Leigh’s slice of London life, Life Is Sweet.  The Golden Globes picked Bugsy for Best Picture – Drama over Silence; JFK; The Prince of Tides and Thelma & Louise.  Their choice of Disney’s animated musical, Beauty and the Beast as Best Picture – Musical or Comedy was seen as having a very real possibility of being the first animated feature to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar and a possible winner over all the dark material offered by the competition.

Early awards grabber Bugsy was a film more people seemed to admire than really like, but they liked it enough to give it ten nominations and two awards.  It won for Best Art Direction and Costume Design.  It had also been nominated for Best Actor (Beatty); Supporting Actors Harvey Keitel as Mickey Cohen and Ben Kingsley as Meyer Lansky; Director; Original Screenplay; Cinematography and Score.

Oliver Stone’s JFK was an audacious piece of film-making but the largely debunked conspiracy theories it espoused made it a mixed bag.  It was nominated for eight Oscars and won two for Best Cinematography and Editing.  It had also been nominated for Best Director; Supporting Actor (Tommy Lee Jones as Clay Shaw); Adapted Screenplay; Score and Sound.

Barbra Streisand was starting to get a complex.  She won the Golden Globe for her directorial debut with Yentl in 1983, but failed to receive either a Directors Guild or Oscar nomination for her efforts.  This time around she nominated by the Directors Guild but was once again snubbed by Oscar even though her film was nominated for Best Picture and six other statuettes.

Streisand’s The Prince of Tides was also nominated for Best Actor (Nick Nolte as a troubled man who falls in love with his sister’s shrink played by Streisand); Supporting Actress (Kate Nelligan as Nolte’s corrosive mother};  Adapted Screenplay; Cinematography; Art Direction and Score.

Nominated for six Oscars, and winner of two, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast became the first and thus far only animated feature ever nominated for Best Picture.  It won two Oscars for Original Score and Best Song, its beloved title tune.  It received an additional three nominations for Best Sound and Best Songs (“Be Our Guest” and “Belle”).

Other films Oscar liked this year included Thelma & Louise; The Fisher King; Fried Green Tomatoes; Rambling Rose; Fried Green Tomatoes; Boyz N the Hood; City Slickers and Backdraft, but not Frankie & Johnny; Only the Lonely or My Own Private Idaho.

Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis began awards season with a high profile dual win from the National Board of Review for Best Actress for Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise and were, in fact, the most mentioned also-rans behind Jodie Foster in other precursors.  Both were nominated for Oscars, accounting for two of the ladies on the run adventure’s six nod total.  The film had also been nominated for Best Director; Original Screenplay (which it won); Cinematography and Editing.

Mercedes Ruehl began Oscar season with a Best Actress win from the Los Angeles Film Critics as shock jock Jeff Bridges’ long suffering girlfriend in Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King.  She was subsequently reduced to the supporting categories.  Robin Willimas scored a Best Actor nomination for his portrayal of a deranged homeless man and the film was also nominated for Best Original Screenplay; Art Direction and Score.  

The previous two years’ Best Actress winners, Jessica Tandy and Kathy Bates joined forces for Jon Avnet’s film of Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes which earned Tandy a Best Supporting Actress nod as an old lady in a nursing home who regales bored housewife Bates with tales of her earlier life.  The film was also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay.   

Diane Ladd and Laura Dern became the first mother and daughter to be nominated for Oscars for the same film, Martha Coolidge’s Rambling Rose in which Dern plays a would-be prostitute presently working as a housekeeper for Robert Duvall and his hard-of-hearing wife, played by Ladd.

John Singleton became the first African-American nominated for Best Director for Boyz N the Hood, his film about a group of childhood friends who grew up in a Los Angeles ghetto.  Singleton was also nominated for his screenplay.

The third time proved to be the charm for veteran actor Jack Palance who a Best Supporting Oscar his third timeout for playing the tough old geezer cowboy in Ron Underwood’s City Slickers.

Ron Howard’s tribute to firemen, Backdraft, scored nominations for Best Sound; Sound Effects and Visual Effects.

Oscar failed to acknowledge several of the year’s best films, most notably Garry Marshall’s Frankie and Johnny featuring the terrific performances of Al Pacino and Michelle Pheiffer as a short order cook and waitress in love; Chris Columbus’ Only the Lonely featuring a wistful romance between John Candy and Ally Sheedy and the return of Maureen O’Hara as Candy’s disapproving mother and Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho featuring an acclaimed performance by River Phoenix as a gay hustler with a sleep disorder.

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