The Snub That Still Hurts: Goodfellas amused us and the Oscars needed to show a little respect

Seven: that's how many Oscars Dances With Wolves took home the night of March 25, 1991, an entire Academy in thrall to Kevin Costner's amber waves and white-savior gaze. While Wolves and its majestic mullets ran the boards, Dick Tracy eked out three, Ghost two, and Goodfellas just one: Joe Pesci for Best Supporting Actor.

And yet it's not posters of a windblown Costner or Warren Beatty's banana-yellow fedora that still adorn dorm-room walls more than three decades on. It seems silly to argue about Goodfellas' place in the cultural firmament now, when the movie has held its God-level ranking in gangster films for so long. But it's worth remembering how wrong the voting body was on this one (confoundingly, it would be another 16 years before Martin Scorsese finally got a directing statuette, for 2006's The Departed).

Pesci's win is its own reward, though it still feels at the very least like a misdemeanor that Ray Liotta, as the real-life New York mobster Henry Hill, and Robert De Niro, as his neighborhood mentor, never even got nods. (And all the writing and production prizes that might have been, too; that nightclub tracking shot alone!) Beneath the blood spatter and bada-bing quotability — who among us hasn't muttered, "What do you mean funny, like a clown? Do I amuse you?" under their breath to a chortling boss or a rude barista — Goodfellas is still, simply, a great movie: a story so rich with pathos and humor, hubris and betrayal it's positively Shakespearean, an American tragedy written in bullets and tomato gravy.

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