CRITICS' CHOICE

OWEN GLEIBERMAN BEST ACTOR: JOHN TRAVOLTA A star is born-again. Whether he's informing his partner about the glories of Amsterdam hash bars (''You'll dig it the most!''), dancing the twist with Uma Thurman (the most ecstatic scene of the year), or doing a bathroom soliloquy on whether to obey his head or his hormones, in Pulp Fiction Travolta rediscovers the beautiful, goofball humanity that made us fall in love with him in the first place.

BEST ACTRESS: JESSICA LANGE As the troubled, sexy, emotionally promiscuous Army wife in Blue Sky, Lange seems to spill over the edges of the screen. She creates one of the most convincing portraits in movies of someone who is fated to live on the fault line between sanity and instability, love and destruction.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: MARTIN LANDAU Samuel L. Jackson soars to fiery greatness as the oratorical hitman of Pulp Fiction, but Landau's performance as the washed-up Bela Lugosi-pathetic, heroic, scabrously funny-is a movie unto itself.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS : DIANNE WIEST What makes Wiest's performance so exquisitely comic is its double-tiered slyness-the way her boozy grande dame manipulates the very theatricality that renders her a sublime figure of foolishness.

BEST DIRECTOR: QUENTIN TARANTINO You can feel the pulse of excitement in every detail of Tarantino's work. He's a new-style American virtuoso who is somehow able to combine the gifts of Martin Scorsese and Preston Sturges.

BEST PICTURE: PULP FICTION Not just a feel-good movie but a feel-alive movie, Tarantino's thrilling, mazelike crime epic accomplishes what the greatest films of old Hollywood did: It raises pop inspiration to the level of art. If that isn't worth an Oscar, I don't know what is.

LISA SCHWARZBAUM BEST ACTOR: PAUL NEWMAN Nigel Hawthorne acts up a great storm, but Newman makes great acting look like a breeze-and, in the process, inspires everybody else in Nobody's Fool to do better work too. This is what confidence looks like.

BEST ACTRESS: WINONA RYDER Fresh without being fey, sincere without being tremulous, Ryder has grown into a performer of unexpected depth and maturity. In Little Women, even more than in The Age of Innocence, she pulls off the neat trick of creating a credible 19th-century heroine for a 20th-century audience.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: PAUL SCOFIELD His Van Doren pere in Quiz Show is so perfectly patrician and so astonish- ingly imperious that the skill involved doesn't even hit you until Van Doren fils has crumbled and the credits have rolled.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: DIANNE WIEST Slouching and drawling in proportions calculated with calipers, Wiest turned what could have been a lazy caricature of a drink-loving, fading leading lady into a piquant gin fizz of a broad.

BEST DIRECTOR: QUENTIN TARANTINO Because he made the movie that set Hollywood moviemaking on its ear; because he revived the once-brilliant career of John Travolta; because now everyone-everyone-will take peanut pay for the chance to work with him-it's a Tarantino world. We just twist in it.