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Forrest Gump

(Best Picture, 1994)

What Should Have Won: Pulp Fiction...or any other nominee, really.

"The Official Story":  "Quite the thought provoking film, Forrest Gump is!"

What We Think Happened:  Forrest Gump won Best Picture because of a powerful publicity machine and...nope, that's it. By all accounts Forrest Gump no more deserved an Oscar than "Gomer Pyle" deserved an Emmy, as yet another comedy about a lucky halfwit. Unfortunately, the marketing geniuses behind it were not so half witted. No matter where you turned, you could not avoid the many one-liners of Forrest Gump, as if such euphemisms were the most brilliant lines ever written for any script in all of filmdom. Life is like a box of chocolates! Stupid is as stupid does! I really gotta pee! Run, Forrest, Run!

In the end, Gump is yet another case of an acceptable movie whose only annoyance is that some schmuck insisted it was the "Best Picture they saw all year." Not to be brutally frank but did these people even see any other nominee...? How about Pulp Fiction? Shawshank Redemption? Quiz Show? Heck; did they see any other movie in 1994 at all? 

Yet Gump winning Best Picture was "great' to some critics, because "everyone" loved this film. Well, everyone I know loved Ferris Beuller's Day Off, but that doesn't mean it deserved an Oscar. Forrest Gump wasn't all that and a bag of chips. If anything, it was just the chips. Think about it.

What Makes It So Embarrassing "Today": 12 years later we're still asking why  "Life is Like a Box of Chocolates." Supposedly, life is like a box of chocolates because "you never know what you're going to get." That's silly. If the chocolate is such a mystery than squeeze it until its insides pop out and the mystery is resolved. I'd recommend someone squeezed Gump until its insides popped out, but all they'd find is a hollow shell...with clever marketing.

Next In Line: "Don't Revel The Ending! You'll Learn That It Sucks!"

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