Annette Bening, the Romantic Comedienne

Andrew here. I could not let the celebration of 1995, which ends with tomorrow's Smackdown, pass without singling out one of the most important performances of the year from my favourite actress.

The American President represents a key moment in my Bening love affair because this – her tenth film after seven years in the business – represents my first meeting with her, and it was obsession at first sight. But enough about me. This mostly forgotten gem allows Annette to perform in a cadence that she's been rarely allowed to show her abilities - Annette Bening, at 37 years old, the best romantic comedy heroine of the 90s...

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Vintage '95

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...

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"Sometimes, being a bitch is all a woman has to hang onto"

As we continue celebrating 1995 with the imminent Smackdown, here’s Murtada with a new edition of Great Moments in Screen Bitchery.

Remember the endless jokes last year about that often repeated line in The Imitation Game (We won’t repeat it here - you've heard it enough). Well in Dolores Claiborne a better line is repeated by different characters at different times and yet no one cringes. It's so good you relish it instead. In fact I’d go as far as to say the line is what the movie is all about.  Say it with us after the jump...

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1995 Bonus Podcast !

We're spoiling you with two podcasts this week. We'll talk Ant-Man and Southpaw tomorrow night but here's an extra bonus episode in which Nathaniel, Nick, and Joe each recommend a 1995 film they remember loving that they'd like to revisit or wish that more people would talk about. The conversation wanders, as it does, to the Best Actress race, Scorned 2 ??? "Meryl's third Oscar!" talk (duh), and the films of Michael Mann ???

Contents (45 minutes)
00:01 Mia Kirshner in Atom Egoyan's Exotica 
04:30 Kathy Bates as Stephen King's Delores Claiborne
07:45 Lili Taylor of The Addiction
10:55 Random loved titles: Babe, Nixon, etcetera
14:10 Actresses of 1995 outside the Best Actress nominees: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Toni Collette, Holly Hunter, Parker Posey, Rene Russo, Ashley Judd, and more...
31:11 Get Shorty
34:30 Michael Mann films and Heat

Ashley Judd in "Heat"

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes.  Continue the conversation in the comments...

1995 Bonus Chit Chat

1995: The Year Jane Austen Came to the Movies

Our look back at 1995 continues with Lynn Lee on an unexpected breakout...

Clueless turned 20 this week, but as the Internet has constantly reminded us, it hasn’t aged a day.  At once timeless ("a classic," as Cher would say) and delightfully dated, it’s a modern riff on a period piece – Jane Austen’s Emma – that's become something of a period piece itself. The latter aspect tends to draw attention away from the former, but I happened to see the movie again at a recent party and was reminded not just how perfectly it captures the ’90s, but also (1) how brilliantly it adapts Emma, and (2) how 1995 really was the breakout year for Jane Austen in film. 

Keep in mind that prior to 1995, the only film version of a Jane Austen novel was the 1940 B&W “Pride & Prejudice” starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier.  1995 changed all that...

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