If only it wasn’t another incarnation of Hannibal Lecter.
In hindsight the Academy Awards sweep of Silence of the Lambs at the 1992 Oscar ceremony seems very strange. A win for a horror movie about a cannibal that took best film, best director for Jonathan Demme, best actor for Anthony Hopkins as the villain Lecter, best actress for Jodie Foster, and best writing for Ted Tally’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel–it was pretty much unheard of. The actual antagonist in the film was far creepier than Hopkins’ Lecter, played by Ted Levine, who would go on to star as the far kinder cop in Monk. The Hunt for Red October and Silverado star Scott Glenn also had a key role in the film as an FBI director.
One explanation for the Oscar wins was that the events were preceded by actual cannibalism in the news and as sometimes happens Oscar nods to movies reflecting life. The other is that it was a pretty bad year for movies, with Lambs facing off against the underwhelming JFK, Bugsy, and The Prince of Tides (it beat one acclaimed film, the bigger box office draw for the year, the successful animated Disney film Beauty and the Beast). It also beat out two of the best sci-fi films of all time: Terminator 2 and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Yet which of these are the only films that stand up to repeated viewings today? Not Lambs or Tides or Bugsy or JFK, but the now classic genre films Terminator, Trek VI, and Beast.
