Leading up to the 97th Academy Awards, I will be revisiting some of the most heavily-debated and controversial Oscar choices. Will the victors keep their crown or will a new winner emerge? Today, we look back on 1994's controversial Best Picture race.

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1994 is an iconic year for movies. Robert Zemeckis capped off a decade-long stretch of box office dominance with Forrest Gump, the year’s second-highest-grossing film and a bonafide cultural phenomenon. Quentin Tarantino, having established himself with Reservoir Dogs two years prior, launched himself to incredible critical and commercial success, setting the stage for one of Hollywood’s most acclaimed directorial careers.

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The Lion King grossed nearly $800 million on its way to becoming one of the most heavily merchandised films ever and the world’s most profitable home video release. Sandra Bullock cemented herself with Speed, one of the best action films of the decade. Hugh Grant found similar success with Four Weddings and a Funeral; Jim Carrey ruled the world with Dumb and Dumber and The Mask, the latter of which made Cameron Diaz a household name. James Cameron scored another box office titan with True Lies, Gen-X found their cinematic mirror in Reality Bites, and Peter Jackson and Kate Winslet burst onto the scene with Heavenly Creatures.

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After all was said and done, five movies were honored by the Academy with a nomination for Best Picture, and the ultimate choice, Forrest Gump, still proves controversial. Many defend its win, and even more chastise it. It’s time to review the nominees and put this 30-year-old matter to bed. Without further adieu, it’s time to redo one of the Academy’s most hotly debated choices.

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Forrest Gump:

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Robert Zemeckis’ 1994 juggernaut is cinematic cynicism at its worst, carefully crafting itself, from its historical contortions to its generic, Boomer-ific soundtrack, to succeed without doing anything impressive. Films like this can be harmlessly enjoyable if executed well, but Forrest Gump is dull. Tom Hanks does his damnedest, and Alan Silvestri’s score is fantastic, but if nothing else, Forrest Gump could have at least been fun. Without that key element, we can only decry everything that's off-base, and that's a lot.

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Four Weddings and a Funeral:

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Judging movies retrospectively is always tricky, in this case, due to the novelty of Hugh Grant’s sputtering charm in 1994, which has since worn thin. Setting that aside, Four Weddings and a Funeral inspires a chuckle or two (the moment where Grant gets trapped when a newlywed couple stumbles into their honeymoon suite is classic), and it's certainly charming, but it isn’t uproarious, is romantically lacking, and features an excruciating performance from Andie MacDowell.

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Pulp Fiction:

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The dialogue is fantastic, and the most iconic scenes, like Samuel L. Jackson’s Ezekiel 25:17 monologue, are electrifying. However, Quentin Tarantino’s magnum opus is stylized to the point of self-indulgence, exploits that style to compensate for a crippling lack of substance, and suffers from the death knell of a gimmicky film: needing the gimmick. Absent the lack of chronology, Pulp Fiction is a boring movie that no one can actually tell you why they enjoy, only what it does.

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Quiz Show:

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Robert Redford’s docudrama about the 1950s quiz show scandal is not a wasted opportunity, only one you wish he’d better capitalized on. The music cues are obvious, the dialogue is occasionally too guiding, and that old-fashioned heavy-handedness makes Quiz Show less a work of art than an overly earnest exercise in historical thrills. Nonetheless, it’s still a tight, brilliantly-acted film that’s genuinely entertaining and invests you in each step of its scandalous true story narrative.

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The Shawshank Redemption:

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Ludicrously, Frank Darabont’s saccharine drama has sat atop the IMDb Top 250 for years. It’s a cloying, badly-paced mess with a wooden central performance from Tim Robbins, countless asinine developments, and brazen attempts at melodrama. It evades risk entirely, happy to swim in the warm waters of mediocrity and exploit its lack of daring to generate faux mass appeal. It’s the most maddening movie ever made, primarily because its legacy is entirely undeserved.

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And the Oscar goes to…….

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Quiz Show takes the crown, as it’s the only genuinely good movie in the bunch. While viewed reverentially, 1994 was not strong. However, despite a default victory, Redford’s film is strong; had it waltzed away with the title, it would’ve earned it more on merit than based on the strength of its competitors.