"Quills" received three Oscar nominations at the 73rd Academy Awards for Best Actor (Geoffrey Rush, previous winner for 1996's "Shine"), Art Direction (Art: Martin Childs, Sets: Jill Quertier), and Costume Design (Jacqueline West). The film was also nominated by the Hollywood Foreign Press, organizers of the Golden Globes, for Best Actor in a Drama (Geoffrey Rush) and Best Screenplay (Douglas Wright). The National Board of Review selected "Quills" as its Best Film of 2000. Neil Schaeffer, detailed a number of disparities between fact and film. Schaeffer, whose "The Marquis de Sade: A Life" was used by Director Philip Kaufman as reference, in a review published in "The Guardian", criticized the film for historical inaccuracies and for simplifying de Sade's complex life. Schaeffer especially criticized the depiction of the de Sade as a "martyr to the oppression and censorship of church and state" and that the film distorted facts "to a surreal and didactic conclusion that has no connection with the truth, and is probably overwrought even as a twist of a fictional plot", namely that "the seemingly good people are all bad underneath, are all hypocrites, while the seemingly bad person, de Sade, probably has some redeeming qualities". Schaeffer relates that de Sade's initial incarceration "had nothing to do with his writing" but with sexual scandals involving servants, prostitutes, and his sister-in-law. He also criticized the opening scene's implication that the reign of terror caused the "sanguinary streak" of de Sade's writing, when "his bloodiest and best work, "120 Days of Sodom", was written in the Bastille — obviously before the revolution" and not at Charenton, as suggested by the film. In contrast to the film, the historical de Sade was "not at the height of his literary career nor of his literary powers" while at Charenton, nor did he cut the "tall, trim figure of the Australian actor Geoffrey Rush" but was of middling height and, at the time, of a "considerable, even a grotesque, obesity". The manuscripts smuggled out of the asylum were not the novel "Justine", which features prominently in the film but was published thirteen years before de Sade's incarceration at the asylum. De Sade's smuggled works were not particularly outrageous, mostly consisting of conventional novels and a number of plays he worked on throughout his life in hopes of having them performed.