Goodfellas opened to huge critical acclaim, and he picked up the festival’s Silver Lion award for best director. The film went on to earn six Oscar nominations, with Pesci’s terrifying turn as Tommy DeVito, based on real-life gangster Thomas DeSimone, winning him the Academy Award for best supporting actor. Goodfellas is now widely recognised as a cinematic masterpiece. Just a decade after it was released, it was selected by the US Library of Congress for inclusion in the National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”.
Source: ‘We wanted to make it real’: How Goodfellas reinvented the gangster film