How a movie that swept the board at the Razzies won Tom Hanks an Oscar: “I was fascinated”
Obviously, the Razzies and the Oscars exist at opposite ends of the awards season spectrum. And yet, in one of those weird domino effects that can only happen in Hollywood, a movie that swept the board at the former was the inspiration behind Tom Hanks claiming gold at the latter.
As one of his generation’s finest actors, Hanks was much more familiar with the Academy Awards than the Golden Raspberries, until recently. He wasn’t even nominated for a Razzie until 2022, by which time he’d already scooped back-to-back Oscars for ‘Best Actor’ and been shortlisted another four times.
However, thanks to an ill-advised choice of roles, he’s now a two-time Oscar winner and a two-time Razzie winner, having been named the winner of ‘Worst Supporting Actor’ for Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, which also saw him share the ‘Worst Screen Combo’ gong with “his latex-laden face and ludicrous accent.”
Back in the early 1990s, Hanks stumbled upon a screenplay from an up-and-coming writer that captured his attention, and he seriously considered reuniting with his Splash director, Ron Howard, to make it a reality. With the benefit of hindsight, he ended up dodging one of cinema’s most embarrassing bullets, with the film finally making it onto the screen as Kevin Costner’s The Postman.
Admittedly, a lot of the blame for the post-apocalyptic disaster’s colossal failure can be laid at the door of its director, producer, and leading man, who went full Kevin Costner on the script and turned it into a blockbuster-sized ego trip that failed so dismally it effectively killed his A-list career in one fell swoop.
Not only was it a box office catastrophe that critics eviscerated, and rightly so, The Postman also swept the board at the Razzies by winning all five of the trophies it was nominated for: ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Director’, ‘Worst Actor’, Worst Original Screenplay’, and ‘Worst Original Song’, and it couldn’t have happened to a more fitting, and interminably dull, film.
Hanks revealed he’d been “fascinated by a script entitled The Postman, which was written by Eric Roth” before he’d even signed up for Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump, and after meeting the scribe in person and later discovering he’d been tasked to pen an adaptation of Winston Groom’s novel, he knew it was in good hands because “that guy can write anything.”
Instead of headlining Roth’s post-apocalyptic literary adaptation, he took top billing in his more whimsical literary adaptation, and it’s fair to say he got the better end of the deal. Forrest Gump won six Oscars, including one each for Roth and Hanks, and became a certified cultural juggernaut.
Three years later, The Postman limped into theatres and was immediately declared dead on arrival, dragging Costner’s career into purgatory along with it. And to think, that was the screenplay that convinced Hanks that Roth was the ideal candidate to pen Forrest Gump, so it must have been chewn up and spat out by a hell of a Hollywood meat grinder to turn out the way it did.
