A decade or two will sometimes offer a clarifying, cut-through-the-bullshit perspective, especially when it comes to Oscar winners. It’s been 25 and 1/2 years since the 1992 Oscars were handed out on 3.29.93, so I figured I’d run through the top-ranked winners and decide if any mistakes or oversights were made.

Best Picture: Giving it to Clint Eastwood‘s Unforgiven was the right call. It’s a rugged, scrappy western full of irony and lament and all kinds of tortured guilt and self-loathing on the part of Eastwood’s Bill Munny character, and it simultaneously takes a hard look at Hollywood’s whole violent tradition of glorifying frontier justice. And yet Martin Brest‘s Scent of a Woman, manipulative and pandering as it sometimes was, offers a richer emotional catharsis. It has three or four big-payoff scenes compared to Unforgiven‘s two — “we all got it comin'” plus the violent barroom finale.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]