The other nominees for Best Picture of 1994 were `Pulp Fiction', `Four Weddings and a Funeral', `The Shawshank Redemption' and `Quiz Show'. ANY ONE of these would have been a deserving winner (my personal favourite was probably `Quiz Show'). Yet, of course, the award went to `Forrest Gump'. I took this as a deep personal affront. I took every undeserved success and wreath of flowers laid at the door of this miserable film as a personal affront. It was a standing insult to my belief that `Forrest Gump' was just too stupid to succeed for very long. Ah, well. Life imitates art.

Make no mistake: `Forrest Gump' is not just stupid but a hymn to stupidity, an extended celebration of stupidity as a virtue. Gump is as innocent as they come and we're clearly meant to think that this is a good thing. The trouble is that Gump has purchased his sainthood too cheaply. He does not, for instance, display any real courage in the Vietnam War: he gives the appearance of courage only because he's too dumb to work out what's going on. (If only a bomb had landed on his foot. It would have knocked some of that insufferable self-assurance out of him, at the very least.)

The film is just one big, long appeal to the Pope to have Forrest Gump canonised, and is about as bearable as any such appeal - and, as is so often the case, the subject of this appeal is someone you wouldn't want to spend five minutes with.

`Forrest Gump' is one hundred and forty-two minutes long.