‘Jerry Maguire’ Should Have Swept The 1996 Oscars

The 1996 Academy Awards represented a revolution for independent cinema. After a seriously lackluster year for studio Oscar hopefuls — movies like The Crucible, Evita, and The Evening Star failed to ignite the film community — Oscar voters made an unprecedented turn towards the indies, and especially towards Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax stable. On nomination morning, four of the five nominees for Best Picture were independent productions: The English Patient, Shine, Secrets & Lies, and Fargo. The fifth and lone representative of the mighty movie studios was Jerry Maguire.

The position of lone Goliath in a sea of Davids never quite fit Jerry Maguire. For one thing, it was a contemporary romantic comedy, which is not exactly one of Oscar’s preferred genres. In that regard, sweeping romance/war drama The English Patient and portrait-of-an-artist-with-mental-problems Shine were both far more traditional Oscar movies. Written and directed by Cameron Crowe, Jerry Maguire had made it onto the short list  by force of sheer culture-enveloping public affection. In a year when Hollywood wasn’t able to connect to the public on much of anything, Tom Cruise’s desperate sports agent was there with a movie full of catchphrases, cute kids, and a romance that audiences really got behind. All told, Jerry got five Oscar nominations, winning for Cuba Gooding Jr.’s live-wire performance as hotshot football star Rod Tidwell and nothing else.

But what if justice had truly prevailed that Oscar night? What if Jerry Maguire — a film that celebrates its 20th anniversary today — had swept the Oscars?

Caveat #1: Fargo is one of the all-time greatest movies ever made; any kind of fun we have today by advocating for a Jerry Maguire sweep should not be read as a condemnation of Fargo. Just pretend that Fargo was released the year prior, when it should have beaten Braveheart for Best Picture.

Caveat #2: Hating The English Patient is cheap and hacky in 2016. That’s not what this is. The English Patient is a very good movie.

Best Picture

Jerry Maguire should have defeated The English Patient for Best Picture. Harvey Weinstein is forced to wait two more years for Miramax to get their first Best Picture winner (when Shakespeare in Love defeats Saving Private Ryan).

Pros: Romantic comedy becomes a viable avenue for Oscar glory. More romantic comedies are made. Better romantic comedies are made. More movies are made that are about sports but not really about sports, y’know? More people go see Kirsten Dunst and Paul Bettany in Wimbledon. Kirsten Dunst and Paul Bettany get Oscar nominations for Wimbledon.

Cons: Every movie for the next five years must include a cute little kid who spouts off factoids. The micro-genre of Catchphrase Comedy catches fire.

Best Actor

This one is a big one. Tom Cruise, the powerhouse life force behind Jerry Maguire, wins the Academy Award on his second try. This one’s kind of a no-brainer. Geoffrey Rush is a flustered whirlwind in Shine, yes, but is the world appreciably worse if he doesn’t win the Oscar for it? Does anyone, in 2016, wonder why Geoffrey Rush doesn’t have an Oscar by now? Probably not. Meanwhile, Tom Cruise’s career might have gone in a completely different direction.

Pros: Now lauded for his rom-com prowess, Cruise doesn’t feel the need to go quite so hard down the action-star lane. Maybe he doesn’t abandon it entirely, but he almost certainly makes more romantic comedies. He and Zellweger make at least one more movie together. Freed from the questions of whether he presents realistically as a romantic hero, Cruise maybe doesn’t even feel the need to jump into a marriage with Katie Holmes quite so impulsively, who knows?

Cons: We almost certainly get at least one movie where Tom Cruise and Kate Hudson play a romantic couple.

Best Actress

[Remember, Fargo doesn’t exist. Deep breaths, we’ll all get through this.]

In 1996, Renee Zellweger campaigned as a supporting actress, which made a certain sense at the time. She was a newcomer with zero name value who was dwarfed by Cruise in the film’s marketing. Everybody but Cruise felt “supporting.” Zellweger managed a SAG nomination, but she was left off the Oscar ballot. In truth, Zellweger is very much a co-lead of this movie and ought to have been campaigned as such. She wins the Oscar on her very first nomination.

Pros: Zellweger ends up winning the Oscar for what may well remain her best screen performance. Her Dorothy Boyd is a perfect balance of optimism and wariness, of self-awareness and romantic yearning. She manages to make a practical case for pure idealism, and she ends up being the best on-screen partner Cruise has ever had. Also this means Zellweger doesn’t have to win for Cold Mountain in 2003, which means today we are all talking about Academy Award winner Shoreh Aghdashloo.

Cons: Zellweger’s early Oscar struggles — she was snubbed for both Jerry Maguire and Nurse Betty — led to her taking big chances in her career, whether it was going British (Bridget Jones’s Diary), attempting a musical (Chicago) or doing whatever the hell it was she did in Cold Mountain. Losing that Renee Zellweger might change some things for the better, but it might change some things for the worse.

Best Supporting Actor

Cuba Gooding Jr. won in real life; Cuba Gooding Jr. should win in this fantasy exercise. You either love the performance or you think it’s too much, but the bottom line is that Cuba’s Oscar win led to this moment, one of the greatest bits of behind-the-curtain Oscar footage ever:

Best Supporting Actress

On Oscar night, Juliette Binoche pulled off one of the biggest upsets in Oscar history when she was named Best Supporting Actress over Lauren Bacall. In our hypothetical mirror universe, it’s a different actress who pulls off the shocker. With Zellweger in Best Actress, the true best supporting actress of Jerry Maguire can finally get her due. Regina King is SO DAMN GOOD in this movie! Not nearly enough people talk about this. Playing Rod Tidwell’s wife, King gave us a woman who was both passionate about her husband and a stone-cold businesswoman, never sacrificing one side in favor of the other. She’s a fully flesh-and-blood woman when almost any other movie makes her a fretful wife on the phone. Regina King finally started getting her due at last year’s Emmys when she won for American Crime. What this article presupposes is: what if she got her due two decades sooner?

Pros: REGINA DAMN KING WOULD HAVE AN OSCAR.

Cons: Juliette Binoche would now be our greatest Oscar-less actress.

Best Director / Best Original Screenplay

Cameron Crowe with the two-fer! Before Birdman two years ago, the last man to win Oscars in Original Screenplay and Director was Billy Wilder for The Apartment, so Crowe pulling that off would have probably made him the most celebrated director in Hollywood.

Pros: Maybe if Cameron Crowe has been a two-time Academy Award-winner, Almost Famous would have actually made money at the box-office and been a Best Picture nominee like it deserved to be.

Cons: Crowe’s present-day doldrums with films like Aloha and We Bought a Zoo were probably inevitable, and we’d all feel that pain much more acutely if he were a two-time (three-time? He probably still wins for Almost Famous) Oscar winner.

Best Original Song

In 1996, Best Original Song went to “You Must Love Me,” the ballad that Andrew Lloyd Webber tacked onto Evita and that Madonna sang to the very edge of her range on the Oscar stage. In our perfect Jerry Maguire universe, the Oscar goes to Bruce Springsteen for the version of “Secret Garden” that played on the radio with Jerry Maguire dialogue laid on top of it.

Pros: It’s a milestone moment for music-with-movie-dialogue, and it culminates with a 2005 Oscar win for Kathleen “Bird” York, when her version of “In the Deep” with dialogue from Crash mixed in upsets “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” for the Best Original Song trophy.

Cons: There are no cons. We’d even get to see Springsteen accept the award from the First Wives Club!

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