OSCAR POTSHOTS: THE SOUND AND FURY

Okay, Gene and Roger, now you can sound off:

Siskel would have replaced Paul Newman with Jeff Goldblum for “The Fly”--ignored, Siskel figures, because of the Academy’s anti-sci-fi bias. (Sigourney Weaver only got on because “it was such a weak year for actresses.”) Siskel only liked Matlin and Kathleen Turner of the whole best-actress batch--where Chloe Webb (“Sid and Nancy”) and Cathy Tyson (“Mona Lisa”) should have been included. He’d put “Blue Velvet” in for “The Mission (“a sort of a ‘holier than thou’ picture. It was noble and well-intentioned but it featured the weakest acting that Robert De Niro’s ever done”).

Ebert would pull “The Mission” (“a boring and shapeless movie that didn’t have any particular center to it”) and “Lesser God” (“a very safe, mainstream middle-of-the-road, tear-jerker romance”), inserting “Sid/Nancy” and “‘Round Midnight.”