The Academy Awards have an unfair reputation among the public for being out of touch with the public’s interest in movies. When you look back at its nearly 100-year history, most of its winners for Best Picture were solid financial hits that connected with a mainstream audience. In some cases, like Gone With the Wind, The Godfather, Titanic, and recently Oppenheimer, Best Picture winners were already cultural sensations before earning the coveted award. If anything, Academy voters are perhaps too keen on the zeitgeist, as many of their winners in the last 30 years have aged as poorly as expired milk. Between Dances With Wolves and American Beauty, many Best Picture winners of the 1990s were profound at the moment but have quickly fallen out of fashion. With Forrest Gump, the crime is not just that this maudlin and simplistic 1994 drama won Best Picture, but it also defeated one of the most beloved films in recent history, Pulp Fiction.
‘Forrest Gump’ Has Aged Poorly as ‘Pulp Fiction’ Has Grown in Popularity

Robert Zemeckis established himself as a bonafide hit-maker in Hollywood after dominating the 1980s with Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. A filmmaker specializing in comedies crossed with science-fiction and adventure, Zemeckis’ first swing at prestige storytelling was an instant home run. Forrest Gump, based on the novel by Winston Groom, earned him Best Director and star Tom Hanks his second consecutive Best Actor award. Between its $678 million performance at the global box office and success at the Academy Awards, Forrest Gump was an outright triumph. No one would’ve expected that one of its Best Picture competitors, Quentin Tarantino’s breakthrough crime drama, Pulp Fiction, would be the defining film of the year (if not the decade), but the writing was on the wall over this ill-fated decision.
Pulp Fiction remains a touchstone of American cinema and pop culture, largely due to Quentin Tarantino taking the mantle as arguably the most prominent and influential director of his generation. The film, starring John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson, is the official gateway film for most budding cinephiles drawn to the authorial stamp of a director. While Gump was a popular favorite, it was clear that Pulp Fiction and its Oscar-winning screenplay represented the future of cinema, but the Academy is often stuck in the past, causing them to play catch-up and reward esteemed actors like Al Pacino and Leonardo DiCaprio decades after their respective primes. Zemeckis, a pioneer of visual effects (including the ones that have aged poorly in Gump), knows how to advance the medium, but his Best Picture winner seems to long for a return to normalcy, evident in its treacly depiction of a “simple” man who brushes up against every pivotal moment in the 20th century.
‘Forrest Gump’ Was Stuck in the Past While ‘Pulp Fiction’ Represented the Future

The jarring contrast between Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction perfectly underscores a cultural divide represented by Tarantino’s countercultural postmodernism and Zemeckis’ Baby Boomer romanticism. Where Pulp Fiction is slick and cutting-edge, Forrest Gump is hokey and pastiche. A victory for Gump signaled that the Academy wasn’t ready for the ironic ’90s, represented by Pulp in its punchy dialogue filled with pop culture references and nonlinear/tangential narrative structure, to take over the film industry’s most prestigious awards body. Tarantino relished breaking all the rules, from changing songs during the opening credits like a radio dial to manipulating time and memory during the restaurant heist. Zemeckis, on the other hand, wanted his titular hero to appeal to as broad of an audience as possible by taking the rough edges off the character and turning him into the archetypal “great man.”
The divide between Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction also applies to their expansive and eclectic soundtracks. Zemeckis’ egregious use of on-the-nose non-diegetic needle drops in his films has become a running joke for many, and the director’s love for songs that topped the Billboard charts in the ’60s and ’70s began with Forrest Gump, featuring tracks like “Fortunate Son,” “All Along the Watchtower,” and “For What It’s Worth,” songs that would become synonymous with the film’s political and social backdrop. While Zemeckis played the hits, Tarantino scoured through the B-sides and overlooked gems, crafting a diegetic soundtrack featuring a mishmash of genres and eras. Tarantino’s love of retro culture, from the ’50s diner to the use of 70s funk songs, is sampled to craft a wholly new vision of the present, and his revival of cultural relics for a stylish effect predicted our nostalgia-obsessed world today.
On a technical and craft level, Forrest Gump is not a film of poor quality, but its Best Picture honor validated the movie as an important text on American life and history, when, in reality, it plays more like a cartoon with each passing year. Regardless, Pulp Fiction doesn’t need an Oscar to validate its greatness.
Pulp Fiction is available to stream on Pluto TV in the U.S.
Watch on Pluto TV

Pulp Fiction

Release Date

October 14, 1994

Runtime

154 minutes