'Gump' Has A Head Start In The Oscar Sweepstakes The Lovable Dimwit Collected 13 Nominations, The Most For Any Movie In Nearly 30 Years. There Were Outrageous Slights, As Usual, And Independent Films To Lend A Touch Of Class.

Forrest Gump, the feel-good megahit about a simpleton with an IQ of 75, outsmarted Pulp Fiction's feel-bad hit men with .45s and all other contenders yesterday by earning 13 Academy Award nominations - the most a single film has received in 29 years.

In balloting that boasted the usual oversights and outrageous snubs, Oscar acknowledged that 1994 - widely disparaged by critics as a year of mostly undistinguished Hollywood releases - owed much of its vitality to "smaller" films by independent filmmakers. Gump, not The Lion King's Simba, took the lion's share of nominations, but the important categories were also filled with names from pictures such as Pulp Fiction, Tom & Viv, The Madness of King George, Red and Bullets Over Broadway.

Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino's wittily subversive and violent gangster comedy; The Shawshank Redemption, the moving prison drama inspired by a Stephen King novella; and the '20s comedy Bullets Over Broadway, Woody Allen's most commercially successful film since his much-publicized personal troubles, earned seven nominations apiece, it was announced early yesterday in Los Angeles.

The 13 nominations in Oscar's swooning Valentine to Gump - Robert Zemeckis' technically ingenious piece of baby-boomer nostalgia - are the most since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966. They match the number earned by Gone With the Wind (1939), From Here to Eternity (1953) and Mary Poppins (1964), and are only one shy of the record set by All About Eve in 1950.

Forrest Gump is joined in the best-picture race by Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, Robert Redford's provocative and thoughtful re-creation of '50s scandal in Quiz Show, and Mike Newell's romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral. Left out in the cold were Nobody's Fool, Bullets Over Broadway and Little Women.

Tom Hanks, a predictable but still highly deserving actor nominee as Gump, is now in a position to score a very rare double. If Hanks, best-actor winner last year as the lawyer dying of AIDS in Philadelphia, repeats his triumph, it will be the first back-to-back victories since Spencer Tracy did it with Captains Courageous (1937) and Boys Town (1938).

The other contenders for best actor are Paul Newman, the ne'er-do-well in Nobody's Fool; the resurgent John Travolta, the hit man in Pulp Fiction; Morgan Freeman, the lifer in The Shawshank Redemption; and Nigel Hawthorne, the deranged monarch in The Madness of King George.