30 Years Later, We’re Still Confused About the 1995 Best Actress Oscar Race

The first Oscars ceremony I remember being aware of was in 1991 when I was ten years old, falling asleep before the Academy decided Dances with Wolves was a better film than Goodfellas. Something must have imprinted in me because the films of 1990 would become consequential in my Oscars origin story. I’ve written for this very website about Misery being my ultimate sick-day film, about my love of Postcards from the Edge and once spent 3 hours discussing the 1990 Best Actress race on the podcast And the Runner-Up Is. 

However, it wasn’t until the 1995 ceremony, celebrating the movies of 1994, that I fully immersed myself in all things Oscars. Before Twitter, chat rooms, and message boards, magazines were basically the internet.  At thirteen, I was already a devoted reader of Entertainment Weekly, Movieline, and Premiere; The USA Today Life section and Siskel & Ebert’s If We Picked the Winners were my church and I never missed a service.  I had managed to see all five Best Picture nominees; the math of a portly middle schooler sneaking into Pulp Fiction and staying awake for Quiz Show is unimportant. However, it wasn’t the Best Picture race that truly hooked me on the Academy Awards, though I am comforted by the knowledge that even as a teen, I rejected Forrest Gump. This might be shocking to hear, considering that I am a gay man in his forties who spends a substantial amount of time talking about movies online, but it was the Best Actress lineup that pushed me and Oscar from a situationship with a questionable age gap to a committed, lifelong relationship. 

This wasn’t just any Best Actress race. This was one of the strangest, most unpredictable, what-if-filled lineups in Oscar history. It had everything: A winner from a movie that had been shelved for four years and has long since been forgotten! A frontrunner disqualified because of a technicality! A snubbed Meryl Streep with a gun on a raft! Tay in the Wind, Tay in the Wind! Thirty years later, I still wonder how many different ways it could have turned out. 

The race seemed like an oddity even leading into the 1995 ceremony, but it feels downright chaotic with the gift of hindsight. It’s odd enough that Lange won for a movie that was meant to come out four years earlier, but the field felt particularly thin and grabbaggy. For one thing, none of the Best Actress nominees came from a Best Picture contender, which was rare: It happened in 1990, but you’d have to go back to 1963 to find another instance, and it wouldn’t happen again until 2003. Comparatively, this year all the Best Actress nominees come from films nominated for Best Picture. The potential frontrunner in the most lauded performance of the year – Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction – was deemed ineligible for debuting on HBO before its theatrical release, a true LOL now. That’s not to mention Winona Ryder coming out of nowhere with a nomination for Little Women, Susan Sarandon winning a BAFTA for a John Grisham adaptation, and the overlooked performances, any of which could have made this category 63% more interesting. 

Let’s take a look back, shall we? 

Jessica Lange, Blue Sky (Winner)

The winner that night was Jessica Lange for Blue Sky, which was filmed in 1990 and sat on the shelf while Orion Pictures, the studio behind it, went bankrupt. By the time it was finally released, it felt like a relic from a different era. More specifically, it felt exactly like the movie Jessica Lange would follow up her 1989 Best Actress nomination for Music Box with. Lange played an unstable military wife to Tommy Lee Jones in a role tailor-made for Oscar attention. She was glamorous, tragic, and explosive in a way that had become her stock and trade over the previous ten years and five Oscar nominations. 

Lange entered the ‘80s shoulder-to-shoulder with Meryl Streep and Glenn Close as Hollywood’s trio of preeminent prestige actresses; the three of them racked up 15 Oscar nominations across the decade. Lange had won a Supporting Actress Oscar for Tootsie in 1982, which always felt like a consolation prize. That same year, Lange was a Best Actress nominee for her playing Frances Farmer, the tragic 1930s actress, in Frances, but was consistently the bridesmaid to Streep’s seismic performance in Sophie’s Choice. While Streep and Close had some of their long-heralded careers’ best performances during this run, like Silkwood or Dangerous Liaisons, Lange received nominations for films that essentially don’t exist:  Country, Sweet Dreams, and Music Box are all so generic they sound like movies Jenna Maroney would star in for a 30 Rock joke. 

At first glance, Lange’s win felt inevitable—an overdue Oscar win for a respected actress. Upon further examination, it wasn’t overdue (she was already an Oscar winner!), and her victory was more of a default than a passionate endorsement. She won the Golden Globe for Drama and LAFCA but couldn’t squeak out a win at SAG and was blanked at BAFTA. She wasn’t the overwhelming critical favorite, nor was Blue Sky, which bombed at the box office. Ultimately, her win felt like she was simply the last person standing. 

Susan Sarandon, The Client

If there was an alternate winner in 1995, it was probably Susan Sarandon. By this point, she was already a beloved industry veteran, but the Academy could not figure out how to give her a darn Oscar. Had category fraud been committed to place her Thelma & Louise co-star Geena Davis in Supporting to avoid vote splitting, there’s a case to be made that she would’ve had a path to victory in 1991, a decade after being first nominated for Atlantic City. The following year, she was nominated for Lorenzo’s Oil, but there was no stopping the Emma Thompson train.  

This was Sarandon’s third Oscar nomination in four years – the Academy clearly liked her. Perhaps advanced buzz for Dead Man Walking, which would win her Best Actress the following year, coupled with The Client being a glossy box office hit with no veneer of prestige, cost her the win despite taking home a BAFTA for her performance as steely attorney Reggie Love. That’s too bad. File Under: We Didn’t Know How Good We Had It; Sub-File: They Don’t Make ‘Em Like This Anymore. It’s my favorite performance of the bunch. 

Winona Ryder, Little Women

Let’s never forget that in the early ‘90s Winona Ryder was The Moment. Beetlejuice, Heathers, Edward Scissorhands, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, made her a generation-defining Movie Star. Ryder was coming off her near-win one year earlier for The Age of Innocence. In that previous year, Ryder had taken home the Golden Globe and was in a neck-and-neck race with the critical favorite Rosie Perez in Fearless for Best Supporting Actress before Anna Paquin and her adorable little beret stole the show at the Oscars.  That halo effect should be given much credit for this surprise (but lovely) nomination. 

Ryder’s performance as Jo March in Little Women was beloved, as was the film. Little Women was released at Christmastime to critical acclaim and $50 million at the domestic box office. Maybe that late-in-the-year release didn’t give Ryder enough time to gain the momentum to become a serious contender, though the film received three nominations in total. While she didn’t win an Oscar, unto each generation a Jo March is born, and for Gen X, it was Winona Ryder. 

Jodie Foster, Nell

Ah, Nell. This is one of those performances designed to win Oscars—transformative, dramatic, and full of capital-A Acting. Foster plays a woman who grew up isolated in the woods, speaking in her invented language and struggling to adapt to the outside world.

The problem? No one seemed to actually like the movie all that much, from the audience to the critics. Though Foster gave the performance her all, it veered dangerously close to parody. And I don’t mean years later; It immediately felt like a punchline.

All that to say, the reason Nell didn’t make Jodie Foster a three-time Oscar winner was… Jodie Foster. She had just won an Oscar three years prior for Silence of the Lambs, which was preceded by her first trophy in 1988 for The Accused. Was she really going to win her third Oscar in six years? For a performance that, at best, was “brave” and, at worst, deeply offensive? Sure, she won the SAG Award, which proves what we already knew – the industry loves her – but even in a weak year, the Academy didn’t bite.

Miranda Richardson, Tom & Viv

Tom & Viv had all the hallmarks of an Oscar-friendly performance: biopic, period costumes, suffering, and an unstable woman at the center of it all. Richardson popped up at the Golden Globes and BAFTA, and won National Board of Review. 

Richardson was also riding a wave of momentum after coming within striking distance of an Oscar nomination for 1992’s Enchanted April and getting a Supporting Actress nod the previous year for Damaged (a deeply deranged film I can’t recommend enough). It filled the slot that seemed to be earmarked for Merchant-Ivory dramas that minted nominations in this era. Tom & Viv, however, was Merchant-Ivory lite, and Richardson was likely in a race to last place with Ryder. 

That’s to say nothing of the five deserving performances that were part of the Awards Season narrative but snubbed in favor of what ultimately became a rather strange, somewhat underwhelming lineup. While all five nominees were respected actresses delivering intense work, the women left out of the race included some of the most electrifying performances of the year. Had the Academy made different choices, this could have been one of the strongest lineups of the 1990s.

Linda Fiorentino, The Last Seduction 

No snub in 1994 was bigger—or more frustrating—than Linda Fiorentino missing out for her career-defining role in The Last Seduction. Playing Bridget Gregory, a Kathleen Turner-in-Body Heat-level femme fatale, Fiorentino delivered one of  THE performances of the year. She wasn’t just playing a “bad girl” in a noir but reinventing the archetype. 

Fiorentino won Best Actress from the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Society of Film Critics, the London Critics’ Circle, and the Independent Spirit Awards and was nominated at the BAFTAs. If you were predicting the Oscar lineup based on precursor wins, she looked like an absolute lock—except for one problem: The Academy ruled her ineligible.

It’s laughable to think of now, as a streaming service is this year’s nomination leader, but  back in 1995, because The Last Seduction premiered on HBO before its theatrical release, it was disqualified under Academy rules. The jury is out on whether the notoriously stuffy Academy would’ve actually nominated Fiorentino’s ferocious performance two short years after snubbing Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, but her not being in the running feels like a crime.

Jamie Lee Curtis, True Lies 

Look, I’ve gone long in the virtual pages of Awards Watch on my love for Jamie Lee Curtis a couple of times, so it’s no surprise that I find her missing out on a nomination for her performance in True Lies to be a travesty. Was she snubbed because of The Academy’s bias against comedy (an action comedy no less)? Or was it category fraud that kept her from the final five? 

Curtis won at the Golden Globes as Lead in a Comedy, but at the Screen Actors Guild, she was placed in Supporting where she fell victim to the Dianne Wiest’s Bullets Over Broadway steamroller. That category confusion was disastrous for a performance that was as effortlessly charming as anything on the big screen that year but had too much stacked against it to go the distance.

Meryl Streep, The River Wild 

I’ll be honest—this one is personal. When The River Wild came out in the fall of 1994, I wanted to see it so badly that I faked being sick just to skip school and see it with my mom on opening day. And you know what? It was worth it.

We were in the biggest drought in Streep’s Oscar run since she came on the scene with her first nomination for 1978’s The Deer Hunter. The River Wild seemed like a perfect opportunity to get her back to The Shrine Auditorium as a nominee. Streep was coming off her run of comedies from 1989 – 1993 that was met with mixed results: Postcards from the Edge earned her an Oscar nomination, and Defending Your Life had the glow of an Albert Brooks production, while She-Devil and Death Becomes Her were seen as misses, despite rightful reevaluations in the coming years. Action Meryl was another pivot, more expected to get a stamp of approval from The Academy, which had awarded her seven nominations and two statues up to this point. 

The film was a box-office success, and Streep’s performance as a former white-water rafting expert forced to protect her family from a killer Kevin Bacon and John C. Reilly earned her Golden Globe and SAG nominations but ultimately, that same action bias that helped tank Curtis also gate kept Streep. 

Meg Ryan, When a Man Loves a Woman

By 1994, Meg Ryan should have been an Oscar nominee two-times over for 1989’s When Harry Met Sally…  and 1993’s Sleepless in Seattle.  Ryan’s raw, heartbreaking, unexpected performance as Alice Green in When a Man Loves a Woman, a woman struggling with alcoholism and its impact on her marriage and family, should have been a victory lap.

When a Man Loves a Woman was a modest spring hit, grossing $50 million on its way to becoming a Blockbuster video best-seller.  The performance was strong enough to earn Ryan a SAG nomination, signaling much-deserved respect from her peers. In later years, a new Academy may have embraced her risk. In 1995, her lack of traditional Oscar clout (since they had never fully embraced her rom-com successes) meant she was always a long shot.

Jennifer Jason Leigh, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle 

Playing Dorothy Parker, the sharp-tongued, troubled, and melancholic writer at the heart of the famous Algonquin Round Table, Leigh embodied Parker’s signature wit, deep loneliness, and emotional fragility. She seemed poised for her first nomination.

Leigh had flirted with Oscar before, but this performance was seemingly undeniable after being nominated at the Golden Globes (Drama) and Indie Spirits and picking up a few critics’ prizes during the season. So why did the Academy overlook her? Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle was a small, independent film that never gained much traction outside of Leigh’s performance, and that slot had already been filled by Tom & Viv.

Looking back, Leigh’s omission feels like a missed opportunity to honor an actress at the peak of her powers. Knowing that we’d have to wait two decades for her first nomination in The Hateful Eight only compounds that sentiment. 

So, where does that leave us 30 years later? Honestly, wiping the slate of nominees clean, save for Sarandon in The Client and Ryder in Little Women, two Movie Star performances that should be celebrated. I’d add Fiorentino, Leigh, and Ryan, begrudgingly leaving off Streep since she’ll have literally 14 more nominations in the coming years. My winner: Sarandon! (I miss John Grisham’s movies).

Oh, and don’t worry, I’d bump Curtis to Supporting for True Lies. And she’s my winner. 

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Eddie Mouradian

Eddie Mouradian is a consultant and entertainment writer living in New York. He has written for Newsday, Urban Daddy, Moviefied NYC, among other publications. Follow him on Twitter at @eddie_mouradian where here is likely talking about Survivor, ranting about a 20 year old Oscar snub or seeking attention with a series of not-at-all staged selfies.

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