The Supporting Actress Smackdown 1995 Edition arrives on Sunday so let's talk context since we haven't revisited as much of 1995 as we'd hoped to! We've only hit the Jane Austen trend, Nicole Kidman's breakout year, a Bonus Podcast on Actresses and Films to Revisit, and Dolores Claiborne. Damn, we had planned much more. But many of you will already have your own personal context for the year, which isn't true of many years of "Smackdown" events so it's fine.
In many ways, though, 1995 was a completely different world. The internet was still in its list-serve infancy. The idea of computer generated movies was a joyful novelty. And aside from Batman, superheroes were still mostly relegated to "light" TV shows. Remember Teri Hatcher in Lois & Clark ?
EW photoshoot from June 1995
Great Big Box Office Hits: 1) Toy Story... the first wholly computer generated feature film 2) Batman Forever 3) Apollo 13 4) Pocahontas 4) Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls 6) GoldenEye 7) Jumanji 8) Casper 9) Se7en 10) Die Hard: With a Vengeance
Michelle & Coolio. They had a hit film, smash video, and the year's #1 single. But zero oscar nodsOscar's Best Pictures: Braveheart (10 noms / 5 wins), Apollo 13 (9 noms / 2 wins), Babe (7 noms / 1 win), Sense & Sensibility (7 noms / 1 win), and Il Postino (5 noms / 1 win).
My theories as to what was just outside the shortlist plus more '95 goodies follow...
Just outside the shortlist and probably eating into each others base given their dour but sensationally acted appeal were the Best Actor/Best Actress pairings of Leaving Las Vegas (4 noms | 1 win) and Dead Man Walking (4 noms | 1 win). Maybe Toy Story which had 3 nominations and a special Oscar to boot was also in the mix or settled for 8th place. The Globe favorite American President on the other hand all but tanked with Oscar only winning a score nomination and arguably only accomplishing that because Oscar was in the middle of their excessively weird and thankfully short-lived Golden Globe-like experiment with divvying up scores into Comedy vs. Drama.
Random List of Happenings: The OJ Simpson trial; Drew Barrymore flashes David Letterman on air; the DVD is announced... and will quickly make VHS obsolete; a gay man is murdered by his friend after admitting a crush on him on "The Jenny Jones Show,"; The Oklahoma City bombing kills 168 people; The Bosnian war finally ends after tumultuous years of violence following the breakup of the former Yugoslavia; Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford divorce after four years of marriage despite taking out a full page ad in the London Times just months earlier to proclaim their heterosexuality after persistent gay rumors (!!! I cannot find a photo of this ad on the web but I remember the story. It's not an urban legend. Anyone?); "The Soup Nazi" episode of Seinfeld airs and is an instant sensation
Magazine Covers for Context
Mix Tape (Huge-Ass Hits of '95): "Gansta's Paradise," Coolio; "Waterfalls" and "Creep," TLC; "Kiss From a Rose," Seal; "On Bended Knee," Boyz II Men; "Take a Bow," Madonna; "This is How We Do It," Montell Jordan; "Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?," Bryan Adams; "Hold My Hand," Hootie and the Blowfish; "You Gotta Be," Des'ree; "You Are Not Alone," Michael Jackson
Music: Alanis Morrissette's "Jagged Little Pill" is released on Madonna's fledgling Maverick Records label becomes the #1 best selling album of the decade and wins the Grammy for "Album of the Year"; The Smashing Pumpkins swung for the fences with a double album "Melancholy & the Infinite Sadness" which became a huge success; Selena, one of the most popular Latin music artists of all time, is fatally shot. (Later that year Salma Hayek is offered the role of Selena in a biopic and turns it down because "too early". Eventually Jennifer Lopez gets the part)
Other Arts: The gay drama "Love! Valour! Compassion!" wins Best Play at the Tonys and becomes a movie shortly thereafter. Cherry Jones & Ralph Fiennes also win Tonys in revivals of "The Heiress" and "Hamlet" respectively; "Frasier" begins its Best Comedy Series run at the Emmys with the first of five consecutive wins; Carol Shields "The Stone Diaries," wins the Pulitzer for literature and Horton Foote's "The Young Man From Atlanta" wins the Pulitzer for Drama (opening on Broadway two years later); TV series debuts include "Aeon Flux," "Xena: Warrior Princess," "Caroline in the City," and "The Drew Carey Show"; The career of the incredible comic book artist Jhonen Vasquez begins with "Johnny the Homicidal Maniac"
Daniel Day Lewis (then) and Gabriel-Kane Day Lewis (now)
Spawn of Celebrity
Daniel Day Lewis and Isabelle Adjani's kid Gabriel-Kane Day Lewis is pursuing a musical career and looks quite a lot like his dad circa My Beautiful Laundrette with current blonde dye-job. Connor Cruise, Tom & Nicole's son is grown up now, too.
Callan McAuliffe and Brandon Soo Ho
Key players (for now... a very young vintage)
Callan McAuliffe has quite a few key credits now including The Stanford Prison Experiment, Flipped and the young version of Leo in The Great Gatsby; Cody Christian, currently shamelessly flaunting his physique (seriously that last episode's workout scene was ridiculous) as a no-good traitorous werewolf on Teen Wolf; Troye Sivan, actor, singer, and YouTube personality; Nicola Peltz of Transformers and Bates Motel; Julia Montes, Filipino actress of TV & film frequently recently fending off rumors that she's involved with star actor Coco Martin (you'll know Coco if you've seen more than a couple of auteur Brillante Mendoza's pictures); Noah Gray-Cabey the little boy from television's Heroes is now a 19 year old young man for Heroes Reborn; Ross Lynch & Laura Marano as the Disney channel's Austin & Ally; Robbie Kay who played Peter Pan on that Once Upon a Time TV show and is also in Heroes Reborn and a Pirates of the Caribbean movie; Brandon Soo Hoo with several features under his belt (GI Joe, Tropic Thunder, Ender's Game) and a series regular role on the new Robert Rodriguez show "From Dusk Till Dawn"... yes, it's based on the 90s movie; Jelle Florizoone, the Belgian actor who memorably came of age in North Sea Texas (2011) was also born in 1995.
This will make you feel super old...
Little Nikki (Ambrosia Kelley) who saw The Bride kill her mother in Kill Bill Vol. 1 (she's likely sore about it), those lonely deadly Swedish kids from Let the Right One In Kåre Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson, that naughty boy forced to wear Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon (Leonard Proxauf), and the wee star of Son of Rambow Bill Milner, are all turning 20 or have already turned 20 this year.
Normally in 'Vintage' posts we list favorites in front of and behind the camera born in that year but this year is not properly aged ...
Anyone born in 1995 is only 20 at most right now and very few people make a well known showbiz mark by that age. They're still in college or hitting auditions or maybe working wage slave jobs wondering what they want to do with their lives.
More Magazine Covers For Context
Because it's fun to look at them... how will future people know what was popular when they look back at 2015?
Showtune to Go: Here's Glenn Close in her Tony winning role as silent film star Norma Desmond in Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Sunset Boulevard," which won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1995 (in an extremely dire musical year on broadway -- in fact, neither musical category had enough eligibilty for a full shortlist!). Despite persistent movie rumors, Sunset Boulevard was never filmed and Glenn Close is still waiting on that Oscar role. In the meantime she can comfort herself with her three Tonys, three Emmys, two Golden Globes and random other solitary trinkets (People's Choice, SAG, NBR)