Tom Hanks Defends Forrest Gump Winning Best Picture Over Pulp Fiction
Tom Hanks defends Forrest Gump from charges it didn’t deserve to win Best Picture over Pulp Fiction. Robert Zemeckis’ heartfelt film starring Hanks as a man on a whimsical adventure through decades of American history went on to be an unlikely blockbuster, grossing $678 million in 1994. It also went on to win Best Picture at the Oscars, infamously beating out Quentin Tarantino’s groundbreaking crime film Pulp Fiction.
Tarantino’s film had of course already received plenty of critical acclaim even before the Oscars, winning the Palme d’Or at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. But when Oscar night rolled around it was the stirring and sentimental Hanks-led film that won the big prize, not Tarantino’s hip and post-modern hit-man movie. Not only was this a controversial call at the time, but to this day movie fans still argue vehemently that Tarantino’s influential movie deserved to win over the audience-pleasing and maybe even shamelessly manipulative Forrest Gump.
Related: Forrest Gump's Original Casting Plan Would've Been Much Worse
Forrest Gump star Hanks for his part is only-too-aware of the arguments against his film and in favor of Pulp Fiction. But in a recent New York Times story, Hanks went out of his way to defend his movie against Tarantino fans who dismiss it as mere “boomer nostalgia.” The actor said:
The problem with “Forrest Gump” is it made a billion dollars. If we’d just made a successful movie, Bob and I would have been geniuses. But because we made a wildly successful movie, we were diabolical geniuses. Is it a bad problem to have? No, but there’s books of the greatest movies of all time, and “Forrest Gump” doesn’t appear because, oh, it’s this sappy nostalgia fest. Every year there’s an article that goes,
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