1992 – Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supp Actor, Supp Actress, Cinematographer, Score, Short

by Allan Fish

Best Picture Unforgiven, US (7 votes)

Best Director Clint Eastwood, Unforgiven (7 votes)

Best Actor Denzel Washington, Malcolm X (9 votes)

Best Actress Emma Thompson, Howards End (10 votes)

Best Supp Actor Gene Hackman, Unforgiven (8 votes)

Best Supp Actress Judy Davis, Husbands and Wives (8 votes)

Best Cinematography Philippe Rousselot, A River Runs Through It (6 votes)

Best Score Wojciech Kilar, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (7 votes)

Best Short A Sense of History, UK, Mike Leigh & Stille Nacht III: Tales from the Vienna Woods, UK, Stephen & Timothy Quay (2 votes each, TIE!!!)

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1991 – Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supp Actor, Supp Actress, Cinematography, Score, Short – RESULTS

by Allan Fish

Best Picture La Belle Noiseuse, France, The Double Life of Veronique, France/Poland, JFK, US & Raise the Red Lantern, China (3 votes each, four-way TIE!)

Best Director Krzysztof Kieslowski, The Double Life of Veronique (5 votes)

Best Actor Anthony Hopkins, The Silence of the Lambs (8 votes)

Best Actress Jodie Foster, The Silence of the Lambs (7 votes)

Best Supp Actor John Goodman, Barton Fink (8 votes)

Best Supp Actress Juliette Lewis, Cape Fear (4 votes)

Best Cinematography Zhao Fei, Raise the Red Lantern (6 votes)

Best Score Zbigniew Preisner, The Double Life of Veronique (5 votes)

Best Short Bedhead, US, Robert Rodriguez & The Comb, UK, Stephen & Timothy Quay (2 votes each, TIE!)

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1. The Great War

The iconic silhouette from the opening credits

by Allan Fish

(UK 1964 1,040m) DVD2

This business may last a long time

p  Tony Essex, Gordon Watkins  w  John Terraine, Corelli Barnett, Anthony Jay, Ed Collins  ph  various  ed  Barry Toovey  m  Wilfred Josephs  narrated by  Michael Redgrave (with Ralph Richardson (Field Marshal Haig), Emlyn Williams (Lloyd George), Marius Goring, Sebastian Shaw, Cyril Luckham)

The Great War is the sort of television event that truly deserves the epithet milestone.  It’s the first truly great documentary series produced not only by the BBC but arguably anywhere in the world.  It really has, the best part of half a century later, stood the test of time.  And time itself is very much to the forefront here; the achievement all the greater for contriving to remain in the British public consciousness for the forty years it was unseen on TV after its first broadcast.  It was the template from which such later documentaries as The World at War and even Ken Burns’ The Civil War took their cue, but it was more than that.  The most remarkable thing about it is that, for all the black and white interviews with the survivors of the calamity, it’s an incredibly modern achievement. 

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1990 – Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supp Actor, Supp Actress, Cinematographer, Score, Short – RESULTS

by Allan Fish

Best Picture GoodFellas, US (12 votes)

Best Director Martin Scorsese, GoodFellas (12 votes)

Best Actor Jeremy Irons, Reversal of Fortune & Paul Newman, Mr & Mrs Bridge (4 votes each, TIE!)

Best Actress Joanne Woodward, Mr & Mrs Bridge (5 votes)

Best Supp Actor Joe Pesci, GoodFellas (14 votes)

Best Supp Actress Annette Bening, The Grifters (6 votes)

Best Cinematography Pierre Lhomme, Cyrano de Bergerac (4 votes)

Best Score John Barry, Dances With Wolves & Danny Elfman, Edward Scissorhands (4 votes each, TIE!)

Best Short The Cow, USSR, Aleksandr Petrov (3 votes)

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2. Our Friends in the North

by Allan Fish

(UK 1996 628m) DVD2

Because tomorrow’s too late

p  Charles Pattinson  d  Pedr James, Simon Cellan Jones, Stuart Urban  w  Peter Flannery  ph  John Daly, Simon Kossoff, John Kenway ed  Greg Miller  m  Colin Towns  art  Rob Hinds

Christopher Eccleston (Nicky Hutchinson), Daniel Craig (Geordie Peacock), Gina McKee (Mary Soulsby), Mark Strong (Tosker Cox), Peter Vaughan (Felix Hutchinson), Freda Dowie (Lorrie Hutchinson), Daniel Casey (Anthony Cox), Tracey Wilkinson (Elaine Craig), David Bradley (Eddie Wells), Malcolm McDowell (Benny Barratt), Alun Armstrong (Austin Donohue), Tony Haygarth (Roy Johnson), Saskia Wickham (Claudia Seabrook), Donald Sumpter (Harold Chapple), David Schofield (John Salway), Daniel Webb (Ron Conrad), Peter Jeffrey (Colin Blamire), Nicholas Selby (Sir Edward Jones), Louise Salter (Julia Allen), Angeline Ball (Daphne), George Sweeney (Leonard Harris), Geoffrey Hutchings (John Edwards), Jo MacInnes (Francine Volker), Julian Fellowes (Claude Seabrook), Terence Rigby (Berger),

There are some works in all art-forms that defy convention, that break rules and are imperishable to the mind’s eye.  Peter Flannery’s monumental TV drama of the mid-nineties is just that and more.  Of all the British TV dramas in this selection, along with numerous European TV masterpieces from directors as important as Kieslowski, Fassbinder, Bergman, Reitz and Syberberg, more than any other this masterpiece belongs up there with them in the stratosphere.  This is, in many ways, the British Heimat, and also comparable to the later drama The Best of Youth which covered a similar period in time in Italian history.  For anyone who lived through the period of 1964-1995, this is not just compulsive viewing, it’s like reading your own life story.

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3. Fawlty Towers

by Allan Fish

(UK 1975/1979 380m) DVD1/2

Or, watery fowls…or, flay otters…or, farty towels…or, flowery twa…never mind

p  John Howard Davies, Douglas Argent  d  Bob Spiers  w  Connie Booth, John Cleese  m  Dennis Wilson  art  Peter Kindred, Nigel Curzon

John Cleese (Basil Fawlty), Prunella Scales (Sybil Fawlty), Andrew Sachs (Manuel), Connie Booth (Polly Sherman), Gilly Flower (Miss Tibbs), Renée Roberts (Miss Gatsby), Ballard Berkeley (Maj.Gowen), Brian Hall (Terry the Cook), Joan Sanderson (Mrs Richards), David Kelly (O’Reilly), Robin Ellis, Bernard Cribbins, Geoffrey Palmer,

Sometime in 1970, at the height of their fame following the shooting of their first series, the Monty Python team stayed en masse at the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay.  There they encountered one Donald Sinclair, the proprietor of said establishment.  Here was a hotelier who threw timetables to guests when asked when the next bus to town would arrive, placed Eric Idle’s suitcase behind a garden wall believing it contained a bomb (rather than a clock), and also had the temerity to criticise American Terry Gilliam’s table manners, more precisely for holding the fork in the wrong hand (an episode that perhaps lead to an infamous sequence with a Waldorf Salad).

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1989 – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supp Actor, Best Supp Actress, Best Cinematography, Best Score, Best Short

by Allan Fish

Best Picture The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (4 votes)

Best Director Peter Greenaway, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (7 votes)

Best Actor Daniel Day-Lewis, My Left Foot (9 votes)

Best Actress Jessica Tandy, Driving Miss Daisy (10 votes)

Best Supp Actor Martin Landau, Crimes and Misdemeanors (9 votes)

Best Supp Actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, Last Exit to Brooklyn (6 votes) FRAUD, see below

Best Cinematography Ernest Dickerson, Do the Right Thing (8 votes)

Best Score Michael Nyman, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (5 votes) **

Best Short Creature Comforts, UK, Nick Park (5 votes)

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* I listed Jennifer Jason Leigh correctly in the lead actress category (as per my own choice on the topbar posted weeks ago), but this was amended in the post by someone between scheduling and posting.  All I can say is it’s extremely disappointing.

**  Alan Menken was not listed as The Little Mermaid is to all intents and purposes a musical and the score consists entirely of songs.  I have gone through this argument before.

Thank God the 1980s are over, even if in 1995 His Satanic Majesty will return with another year of unmitigated excrement.

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4. The Thick of It

by Allan Fish

(UK 2005-2012 550m) DVD2

Motherwell rules!

p  Adam Tandy, Armando Iannucci  d  Armando Iannucci  w  Armando Iannucci, Jesse Armstrong, Tony Roche, Ian Martin, Simon Blackwell  ph  James Cairney

Peter Capaldi (Malcolm Tucker), Chris Addison (Oliver Reeder), Rebecca Front (Nicola Murray), Chris Langham (Hugh Abbot), James Smith (Glenn Cullen), Joanna Scanlan (Terri Coverley), Lucinda Raikes (Angela Hainey), Polly Kemp (Robyn Murdoch), Paul Higgins (Jamie), Justin Edwards (Ben Swain), Alex MacQueen (Julius Nicholson), Will Smith (Phil Smith), Roger Allam (Peter Mannion), Olivia Poulet (Emma Messinger),

There’s a moment in Armando Iannucci’s brilliant political comedy where one of the conservative yes men asks, apparently seriously, “what’s wrong with the eighties?”  He lists various pretty worthless things that most dreadfully unfashionable decade gave us.  To that list he may have added Yes, Minister, the justly revered chess game of Whitehall manoeuvring which tickled Margaret Thatcher’s previously thought extinct funny bone.  A fact that begs the question, have Tony Blair, Gordon Brown or David Cameron watched The Thick of It.  If they didn’t, and I can’t really see either of them so doing, then we can safely say that the Malcolm Tuckers of this world had something to do with it.

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5. The Singing Detective

by Allan Fish

(UK 1986 415m) DVD1/2

Ten cents a dance, fella

p  John Harris, Kenith Trodd  d  Jon Amiel  w  Dennis Potter  ph  Ken Westbury  ed  Bill Wright, Sue Wyatt  m  Stanley Myers  art  Jim Clay

Michael Gambon (Philip Marlow), Patrick Malahide (Mark Binney), Alison Steadman (Lili), Joanne Whalley (Nurse Mills), David Ryall (Mr Hall), Ron Cook (1^st mysterious man), George Rossi (2^nd mysterious man), Janet Suzman (Nicola), Leslie French (“Noddy” Tomkey), Bill Paterson (Dr Gibbon), Ken Stott (Uncle John), Jim Carter (Mr Marlow), Gerald Horan (Reginald Gibbs), Sharon Clarke (night nurse), Imelda Staunton (Nurse White), Badi Uzzaman (Ali), Janet Henfrey (schoolteacher), Lyndon Davies (Philip, aged 10), David Thewlis (soldier),

Following the transmission of the first episodes of Dennis Potter’s magnum opus on BBC1, their viewer response show Points of View was bombarded with complaints from the Mary Whitehouse brigade, including a mirthfully Pythonesque response from Colonel R.S.Vine, BSc, MRCS, LRCP, FRC Path, who called it “this extraordinarily obscene production.”  It still amazes me how truly shatteringly narrow-minded the average person is – and was – in the so-called modern age, and I’m sure it left Potter equally aghast.  It was as if sex was the only thing that The Singing Detective was about, when in actual fact it was but one layer of many.  Rather than showcase Potter as having a filthy mind, they were actually uncovering their own shortcomings.

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1988 – Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supp Actor, Supp Actress, Cinematography, Score, Short – RESULTS

by Allan Fish

Best Picture Cinema Paradiso (Special Edition), Italy (6 votes)

Best Director Krzysztof Kieslowski, Dekalog (8 votes)

Best Actor Jeremy Irons, Dead Ringers (14 votes)

Best Actress Isabelle Adjani, Camille Claudel (4 votes)

Best Supp Actor Philippe Noiret, Cinema Paradiso (Special Edition) (12 votes)

Best Supp Actress Lena Olin, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (7 votes)

Best Cinematography Giorgos Arvanitis, Landscape in the Mist & Sven Nykvist, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (4 votes each, TIE!)

Best Score Ennio Morricone, Cinema Paradiso (Special Edition) (7 votes)

Best Short The Cat Came Back, Canada, Cornell Barker (4 votes)

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On to the seventh inner circle of Dante’s hell, otherwise known as 1989.

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