Best Pick with John Dorney, Jessica Regan and Tom Salinsky Episode 5: American Beauty (1999) Released 28 March 2018. For this episode, we watched American Beauty, written by Alan Ball and directed by Sam Mendes, both making their feature film debuts and both winning Academy Awards. Music was by Thomas Newman (nominated) and cinematography was by Conrad Hall (won). The cast includes Kevin Spacey (winning Best Actor), Annette Bening (nominated), Thora Birch, Alison Janney, Peter Gallagher, Mena Suvari, Wes Bentley, Chris Cooper. In total, the film won five awards from eight nominations, the best haul of any film that year. Next time we will be discussing Ben-Hur. If you want to watch it before listening to the next episode you can buy the DVD or Blu-Ray on Amazon.co.uk, or Amazon.com, or you can download it via iTunes (UK) or iTunes (USA). To send in your questions, comments, thoughts and ideas, you can join our Facebook group, Tweet us on @bestpickpod or email us on [email protected]. You can also Tweet us individually, @MrJohnDorney, @ItsJessRegan or @TomSalinsky. You should also sign up to our mailing list to get notified as soon as a new episode is released. Just follow this link: http://eepurl.com/dbHO3n