Paul’s Place > Talkin’ ’bout da Movies > Paul’s Oscar Pix > 2002

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Friends,

I know you share with me a deep sorrow about recent events, and I suppose we all wish on some level we could go back to those halcyon days—it seems like so long ago now—those days before Ethan Hawke could legally bill himself as “Oscar nominee Ethan Hawke.” But we can’t. Nothing will ever be the same again, and this is something we each have to live with for the rest of our lives. I believe that through solidarity and the urge to persevere, we can help each other make it in this strange world in which we now find ourselves.

The rules: Every year I make predictions in all eight “major” categories plus a bonus category, which this year is Best Animated Feature, being given this year for the first time. I also use this space to talk about movies in general and why I love and hate them equally, share unimportant tidbits about my life and current events, comment on actresses I’d like to sleep with, and generally spend about 8000 words being an utter prat. I can do this because this is my Web site and I own it. You can expect to disagree violently with at least one thing, and perhaps most things, I say here. Cope.

Huh. I made much last year about how rotten 2000 was for movies, and all through 2001 I was sorta under the impression that things had improved, but then Oscar time rolled around and once again I had a heck of a time scraping together a list of ten movies for this list. The big studio releases were mostly craptastic, of course, but even a lot of the indie efforts were uninspired and disappointing (I’m lookin’ in your direction, David Lynch). If it hadn’t been for the small spurt of quality at the end of the year this might be more of a Top Six List, or whatever. Starting with number one:

Ghost World—The “comix” artist Daniel Clowes is probably best known among movie buffs for his poster for Todd Solondz’ 1998 film Happiness: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Dylan Baker, and Jane Adams stare out at the viewer, quiet desperation painted on their gormless faces like clown makeup, with the rest of the ensemble cast arrayed behind them wearing looks of concern, depression, and various other negative emotions. The sense of alienation that Clowes captures so perfectly in the poster is very much on display in Ghost World, Terry Zwigoff’s film of Clowes’ graphic novel of the same name, which itself was compiled from a series of stories he created for his comic book Eightball over a period of five years. (There are no ghosts in the movie, in case you were wondering; the title is open to interpretation but probably refers most closely to that strange time right after high school in which you must be an adult, because you can buy cigarettes and porn and stuff and don’t have to go to school anymore, but you sure as hell don’t feel like one.)

The story, briefly: Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) spend their time aimlessly feeling superior to others. One day they play a cruel prank on an older man, Seymour (Steve Buscemi), which leads to an unlikely friendship between Seymour and Enid. The movie explores the ways in which Enid’s relationship with Seymour, Rebecca and others changes and grows as she begins to feel her life spinning out of control, not because of anything major that happens but just because of the changes that happen as you get older and the circumstances of your life complicate in ways you weren’t expecting.

Zwigoff, of course, is the man behind the acclaimed documentary Crumb, and the spirit of underground cartoonist R. Crumb pervades this film, from Seymour’s extensive collection of ancient jazz and blues 78’s (a real-life passion of Crumb’s) to the barely-disguised sense of self-loathing shared by the two main characters, who feel nothing but contempt for the world and the great mass of humanity but who would secretly—or not so secretly—give it all up for the chance to be normal.

I imagine you probably have to be a certain kind of person to be affected by Ghost World exactly as I was. Still, it’s a very true film that offers a new and uncommon take on the well-worn genre of coming-of-age films, and there’s probably something in it for a lot of people.

The rest of the best, in no particular order:

Amélie (Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain)—Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s candy-colored romance about young Amélie Poulain (the freakishly beautiful Audrey Tautou), who delights in helping others yet cannot help herself in the most important matter of all—say it with me—lo-oove. Jeunet’s film is itself a giant love letter to Paris, but it is not the dirty, graffiti-ridden Paris that exists in the real world, but rather the Paris that exists in the hearts of all proud Parisiens, the Paris remembered by everyone who has visited it, even if they know it wasn’t really like that. And of course Amélie herself, a kind of French Ally McBeal who isn’t a lawyer and, you know, doesn’t suck and all, is one of the more memorable characters to have been realized on the silver screen over the past few years, and richly deserves to be the single word in the English version of the title.

The Royal Tenenbaums—How can I possibly say enough good things about The Royal Tenenbaums? Director Wes Anderson and his writing partner, actor Owen Wilson, maintain the high level of excellence they set with Bottle Rocket and surpassed with Rushmore. Anderson’s latest movie, starring Gene Hackman as the patriarch of a screwed-up family of former child prodigies, is everything it should be; Anderson’s trademark period soundtrack, random absurdities (Ben Stiller’s character and his children spend the entire movie in identical track suits, for no apparent reason), and elderly Indian friend Kumar Pallana, who appears in all of his movies, are all accounted for here, yet it never feels routine or annoying because Anderson is a genius at creating the kind of mild whimsy his likeably nerdy characters evince.

Together (Tillsammans)—The young Swedish director Lukas Moodysson was previously best known on these shores for Fucking Åmål (released in the United States, for obvious reasons, as Show Me Love), a warm, bittersweet comedy about two teenage girls in a boring little town undergoing the painful process of falling in love with each other. Moodysson’s new film Together is different in subject matter, but maintains the sweet, humanistic tone that worked so well in Fucking Åmål. Together introduces us to the residents of a Stockholm commune in 1975, at precisely the moment at which they’re all starting to really hate each other; the living situation is further destabilized when the sister of one of the residents moves in with her two children to escape an abusive husband. Moodysson makes his characters come alive with rich, filled-out characterization that brings out their essential decency while making it clear why the communal lifestyle didn’t really last much past the mid-70s.

Together seems to be one of those films that flew underneath most people’s radar last year. Very few critics cited it as one of their favorites and it was never considered to have even the slightest chance of being nominated for any significant Academy Award. This is a real shame, and you, dear reader, would be well advised to seek it out when it is released on video.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring—I loved this movie up and down, which might surprise some people considering that I—nerds, geeks, and assorted other dorkweeds: are you sitting down?—didn’t particularly care for the books.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was an unparalleled world creator who took a minor children’s book he had written ten years prior (The Hobbit) and used it to create a massive universe with an epic struggle between good and evil that stretched over thousands of years. It is therefore doubly tragic that Tolkien was such a lousy writer. The Fellowship of the Ring is overly long, repetitive, and prone to lapse into passages like “But in the wearing of the swift years of Middle-earth the line of Meneldil son of Anárion failed, and the Tree withered, and the blood of the Númenoreans became mingled with that of lesser men. Then the watch upon the walls of Mordor slept, and dark things crept back to Gorgoroth. And on a time evil things came forth, and they took Minas Ithil and abode in it, and they made it into a place of dread; and it is called Minas Morgul, the Tower of Sorcery. Then Minas Anor was named anew Minas Tirith, the Tower of Guard; and these two cities were ever at war, but Osgiliath which lay between was deserted and in its ruins shadows walked.” And of course much ink has been spilled over Tolkien’s creaky dialogue, the sort of “Yonder lies Mount Yrnwllythll, home of the elves of yore” dross that’s ruined a thousand Renaissance Faires.

Of course it’s not exactly fair to blame Tolkien for originating a tradition that’s since been degraded by countless fanboys and pulp authors, any more than the creators of Casablanca should be held responsible for all the dumb “Play it again, Sam” jokes we’ve been subjected to over the past 60 years. Still, it hardly seems too much to ask that such an influential work be at least a tolerable read. (Tolkien’s son Christopher tells of an occasion when Tolkien was reading The Lord of the Rings aloud at Oxford, only to be interrupted by his colleague and friend Hugo Dyson, groaning “Oh, no, not another fucking elf!”)

Fortunately, the transition to the screen largely eliminates the problems inherent in Tolkien’s dull, cluttered writing while keeping its breathtaking scope and story. At times it seems like half of The Fellowship of the Ring is about walking: first they journey to Bree, then they journey to Rivendell, then they journey to Moria, then they journey to Lothlórien, then they journey to somedamnplace else; sometimes something happens to them along the way, usually it doesn’t. Jackson compresses these interminable hikes into mere minutes on screen without reducing the majesty of, for example, the perilous adventure on the pass of Caradhras. This leaves more time to advance the story without depriving the viewer of the amazing scenery of New Zealand, where the movie was filmed, and the richly realized characters of the epic. Tolkien’s stilted dialogue, too, is a much better fit for the inherent unreality of the screen than for the printed page. The result is a movie that, at two minutes shy of three hours in length, never drags, and leaves the viewer wanting more. Indeed, upon arriving home from the theater I immediately picked up The Two Towers, the second book in the trilogy, to bone up on the subject before the movie comes out next Christmas—and any film that can make me voluntarily read a J.R.R. Tolkien book is remarkable indeed.

Plus—and I cannot stress this enough—there was NO TOM BOMBADIL in the movie. Call me old fashioned, but any book that has a character who introduces himself by singing “Hey dol! Merry dol! ring a dong dillo!” and does not immediately get the shit beat out of him by the other characters has a major, major strike against it. The film, thankfully, did not brook any of this nonsense.

Monster’s Ball—Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton strike notes of existential sadness as the wife of an executed man and the prison guard who executed him, who through plot contrivances best left unexamined find themselves in an unlikely romance.

Memento—A brain-damaged man vows to kill the person who raped and murdered his wife in an attack that deprived our hero of his ability to form new memories. He cannot remember anything that has happened since the attack, relying instead on Polaroids, note cards, and tattoos to tell himself the story of his quest for vengeance. And—get this—the movie is backwards, with the newest events being shown first and the oldest being shown last. This setup practically screams “gimmick,” and there’s a lot of justification for that view. Still, a movie can be high-concept and gimmicky and still be quite good, and Memento works as a fast-paced thriller that keeps you thinking.

Another thing I like about Memento is that it features Jorja Fox in a minor role as Guy Pearce’s late wife; she currently stars as Sara Sidle on C.S.I., which is my favorite show at the moment, after having done time as Dr. Maggie Doyle on ER and Secret Service Agent Gina Toscano on The West Wing. Yeah, now you know who I’m talking about. I think Jorja Fox is the sexiest woman on TV right now; she’s got a real ass-kicking-tomboy air about her that perfectly fits the socially-underdeveloped forensic scientist she plays on C.S.I. Plus she’s got this weird vocall thing that she dooes where she draws out random syllablles for a fractionn of a second longer than most peoplle, with just a hint of a rising intonation at the ennd?, which hits exactly the right went-to-high-school-on-the-West-Coast-in-the-1980s note for the character she plays on the show and is also sexy as hell somehow. She’s also said to be a vegetarian, but I guess no one’s perfect. Where was I? Memento, right. Anyway, it’s kind of surprising that it didn’t get a lot of nominations; it was considered an Oscar front-runner for most of the year. It’s good to see that the screenplay was nominated, at least.

Sexy Beast—Ben Kingsley is marvelous as Don Logan, a Cockney gangster who visits a retired colleague (Ray Winstone) and attempts to bully him into—can you guess?—one last score. The fact that Logan’s efforts at persuasion actually take up the bulk of the film distinguishes this movie from the rest of the galaxy of heist pictures.

Bully—Larry Clark’s uncompromising film tells the shocking true story (is there any other kind?) of an aimless group of teenagers who gang up to murder one of their number, who has been physically and emotionally brutalizing one of them. The crime feels more real than most cinematic murders, due to its amateurishness and the film’s focus on the supremely foolish actions of the perpetrators before and after the killing.

Clark has been accused, with some justification, of voyeurism, pedophilia, and various other acts of moral depravity, as his camera leers at his young actors’ nude bodies and lingers during their frequent, appallingly explicit sex scenes. I choose to be charitable and assume that his intention here is to make the viewer uncomfortable, rather than aroused; certainly, this is one of the least erotic movies I’ve ever seen. Clark obtains very naturalistic performances from all his actors, including standouts by Brad Renfro as the ambiguously tetched target of their victim’s sadism; Rachel “Mrs. Macauley Culkin” Miner, who gets a whole lotta naked in this film, as Renfro’s girlfriend and the “mastermind” of the plot; and Leo Fitzpatrick (Kids, Storytelling) as the “hitman,” who is only marginally more competent than the others.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch—John Cameron Mitchell moves his high-energy off-Broadway rock opera to the silver screen and stars as Hedwig, the transvestite singer who follows her ex-lover, a famous goth rocker who stole her songs, around the country as he tours. Great soundtrack.

DVD KORNER: Last year I condemned the film industry for its puzzling attitude towards DVD releases: “Will they give us Citizen Kane on DVD? No. Will they give us The Godfather on DVD? No. Will they give us Star Wars on DVD? No. Will they give us Cop and a Half? Oh yes, oh yes indeed. Cop and a Half they’ll let us have.” The picture looks a lot better this year, thankfully: Citizen Kane has been released in a deluxe two-disk set, which includes two audio commentaries by Peter Bogdanovich and Roger Ebert and the Oscar-nominated full length documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane. Likewise, the Godfather Trilogy is now out in a five-disk set, one of which is set aside for extras. We haven’t seen any of the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD yet, but Episode I: The Phantom Menace is out on two disks as well, though we’re still waiting for the Jar Jar Binks-free version. Cop and a Half, I regret to inform you, is still in print and available for purchase.

So let’s see: the 2001 movies I own on DVD right now are Ghost World and Shrek, and I think that’s about all. I’d like to get Together, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Fellowship of the Ring when they come out, and maybe Amelie, though I don’t know about that. Mostly I bought old movies last year, including the aforementioned Godfather trilogy and Citizen Kane, the Criterion Collection edition of Fritz Lang’s legendary German Expressionist masterpiece M, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the greatest spaghetti western of all time.

ZUT ALORS!: Amélie is the most famous film to come out of France last year, but it was only one of several worthy French films I saw. The others include:

The Closet (Le Placard)—A sad sack (Daniel Auteuil) decides to pretend he’s gay to keep from being fired from the condom factory where he works; wackiness ensues. The Closet is a hilarious French sex comedy in the tradition of La Cage Aux Folles and is in many ways a mirror image of the older movie; how far we have come since 1978. 

Fat Girl (À ma soeur!)—A grim, disturbing film from the ever-cheerful Catherine Breillat (Romance), who likes to show erect penises in her movie by way of exploring the destructive side of the sexual impulse, Fat Girl tells the story of two teenage sisters, the dumpy, overweight Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux) and her pretty, elegant sister Elena (Roxane Mesquida), as they plot, somewhat mercenarily, to lose their virginities while on vacation at a seaside resort. If made in the United States, a film fitting that description would probably be a cheesy teen flick starting Tara Reid and Ashton Kutcher. Instead, it’s an unflinching, brutal drama with a shocking ending that hits you like a two-by-four. Definitely not for everyone.

With a Friend Like Harry (Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien) Michel (Laurent Lucas) runs into Harry (Sergi López), an acquaintance he almost remembers from high school, by chance at a highway rest stop. Harry insinuates himself into Michel’s life, turning Michel’s every barely-expressed wish into horrifying reality. With a friend like Harry... well, you finish the sentence. López is entertainingly creepy as the helpful Harry; Sophie Guillemin is hot as Harry’s overripe girlfriend Plum.

MOVIES I WISH I’D SEEN: There aren’t enough hours in the day and there aren’t enough days in the week, and inevitably there are movies that slip through the cracks. Normally it’s no big deal—that’s why God gave us video stores, after all—but with the paucity of truly great films on my top ten list this year I can’t help but wonder if seeing a few of these might have helped me round it out. Most of these movies are in that strange twilight zone of existence wherein they’ve long departed from theaters but have yet to come out on video, making them impossible to see anywhere.

Donnie Darko—Honestly, I think I missed this one because when it came out I subconsciously thought, “What, that Al Pacino movie? Hasn’t that one come and gone already?”

L.I.E.: I don’t actually remember this film opening around here, though surely it must have. Brian Cox got a lot of notice for his performance.

The Gleaners and I—French New Wave director Agnes Varda’s documentary of the lives of France’s gleaners, people who scavenge orchards and alleys for food or objects that others have left behind (a practice that has been protected by French law since the 16th century). It will not surprise you to learn that The Gleaners and I, 2001’s most acclaimed documentary, was not nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar by the film-school hacks and failed auteurs in the documentary branch of the academy. What I find amazing, though, is that they also did not nominate Amir Bar-Lev’s (also well-reviewed) The Fighter, which makes the two documentary categories entirely Holocaust-free for the first time in five years. More on this story as it develops.

George Washington—Not about the president at all, but about a racially mixed group of kids growing up in a small North Carolina town. I think I was out of town the weekend this was in theaters.

Amores Perros—I’ve heard a lot of good things about this Mexican import. Don’t know too much about it beyond that.

The latter two movies are actually out on video right now. However, the management at the Hollywood Video across the street from my new apartment has apparently decided that if they stock more than one copy of each title there won’t be enough room for the 600 copies of American Pie 2 currently on the shelves, and unsurprisingly, both movies are always out. So I guess I’ll just have to wait.

On to the nominees...

Nominees:
A Beautiful Mind
Gosford Park
In the Bedroom
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Moulin Rouge!

Who Should Win: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

I don’t know why I’m always mildly surprised when only one or two of my favorite films each year is represented in the list of nominees. This year is even more of a problem, because I didn’t even like some of the movies on my top ten list all that much, and even that wasn’t enough to get them nominated.

As always, then, the nominees in decreasing order of irrationality:

In the Bedroom—I know a lot of people really liked In the Bedroom, but I personally found it predictable and kind of cold. Director Todd Field uses a lot of slow fades into and out of scenes, which was apparently a conscious stylistic choice of some sort, but it feels like riding in a car with a clogged fuel line. Ultimately this is an awkward and rather amateurish tale of loss and vengeance that doesn’t cover as much new ground as it should, though it is redeemed somewhat by fine acting all around. Nice work by William Mapother as Marisa Tomei’s dangerous ex.

Gosford Park—Robert Altman hasn’t been on top of his game for many years, but Gosford Park is  a pleasant, though unexceptional, comedy/murder mystery about the upstairs-downstairs relationship between masters and servants in 1930s England. The fact that it’s even here indicates that the Church of Altman still has some fervent worshippers in Hollywood these days; if exactly the same movie had been made by, say, Wayne Wang, it probably would not have been nominated. Points off for contributing to the continued employment of Ryan Phillippe.

Moulin Rouge—“Aw, damn,” I said when the nominations came out, “now I have to watch Moulin Rouge.” I rented the DVD and slouched home with it, disconsolate at the prospect of blowing an entire evening on the thing. And then something very strange happened: I didn’t hate it. It’s a little like having the guy sitting next to you on the bus scream in your ear for two hours, but you’d be surprised at how non-agonizing that can be. Director Baz Luhrmann and stars Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor create a fascinatingly unreal world where scenery-chewing is the order of the day and the more over-the-top the better. I recommend it.

A Beautiful Mind—I read Sylvia Nasar’s book about John Forbes Nash, Jr., when it first came out and thought it was the best book of the year, so it’s hard for me to consider the movie version of it in isolation, which I think is the only fair way to review it. There has of late been a steady drumbeat of criticism, mostly being channeled through conservative pundits and pawns like Matt Drudge for some reason, complaining that the film whitewashes the facts of Nash’s life, leaving out references to his alleged homosexuality and anti-Semitism and to the son he fathered by another woman before he married his wife.

These charges are almost entirely bullshit: Nash made some incoherent remarks about Jews at the height of his delusional phase, and Nash denies—and author Nasar herself does not believe—that his “intense emotional attachments” to other men were primarily homosexual in nature. The circumstances surrounding the existence of Nash’s illegitimate son are fairer game, but are peripheral at most to the story told by the book and the film. It’s difficult to know who is responsible for these scurrilous charges, which A Beautiful Mind director Ron Howard compares, with justification, to Lee Atwater’s unholy campaign of innuendo and dirty tricks against Michael Dukakis on behalf of “Daddy” George Bush in 1988. Miramax, the studio that usually engages in the most obvious Oscar campaigning, doesn’t really stand a chance this year with In the Bedroom. New Line, the studio behind Fellowship of the Ring, is the most obvious beneficiary of any misfortune to befall A Beautiful Mind, but evidence points away from them, according to insiders. We must consider the possibility that there are people out there destroying A Beautiful Mind for the sheer pleasure of the exercise—and, in the case of Matt Drudge, through his own rampant stupidity.

I have to put aside such considerations and decide how I feel about the movie without regards to my enjoyment of the source material or my distaste for the whispering campaign against it. And it turns out the movie is...fine. It hit all the right emotional notes, and Ron Howard handles Nash’s story, which in many ways is tailor made for the screen, competently and enjoyably. Nash’s delusions are handled very differently than the way it happened in real life, but in a way that transferred better to the screen. It just wasn’t transcendent, which any Best Picture ought to be.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring—I love The Fellowship of the Ring this year for the same reason I loved Titanic back in 1997: it’s a great big movie, full of sound and spectacle, that in its sprawling scope and note-perfect execution recalls both the cast-of-thousands epics of the early 1960s and the Selznick/DeMille extravaganzas of the 20s and 30s. This is what movies were meant to be, what Hollywood was meant to be, and I embrace it unashamedly.

Who Will Win: A Beautiful Mind

The campaign against A Beautiful Mind has been handled so badly by its practitioners that at this point it’s probably a lock on the sympathy vote alone. It would have been a lock without the campaign anyway, so I guess God’s in his heaven and all is right with the world.

Missing: all the rest of the ones I named above

So exactly one of my favorite films of 2001 was nominated for Best Picture. That’s about par for the course. If nothing else, it makes it easy to figure out which one I want to win.

Nominees:
Russell Crowe, A Beautiful Mind
Sean Penn, I Am Sam
Will Smith, Ali
Denzel Washington, Training Day
Tom Wilkinson, In the Bedroom

Who Should Win: Tom Wilkinson, In the Bedroom

I really don’t care about this one. I’ve only seen A Beautiful Mind and In the Bedroom, and I thought Crowe and Wilkinson were both very fine, though neither made me stand up and take note like a tremendous acting performance should. I’m choosing Wilkinson because although most of the Oscar buzz has been around Sissy Spacek’s role in the movie, I thought all along that his performance was more impressive.

Who Will Win: Denzel Washington, Training Day

Russell Crowe probably torpedoed his chances of winning this award when he physically roughed up the director of the BAFTA Awards telecast for cutting part of his acceptance speech. The most obvious beneficiary would seem to be Denzel Washington, who despite being one of the finest actors of his generation has never won the Best Actor award. I’m betting that Crowe’s BAFTA imbroglio might be all the excuse the Academy needs to finally honor Washington.

Missing: Billy Bob Thornton, The Man Who Wasn’t There

Just about every film critic in America ridiculed Sean Penn’s “look at me, I’m a tard!” role in I Am Sam as shameless, over-the-top Oscar-mongering. If the voting members of the Academy had any self-awareness at all, they might have taken note of this and looked elsewhere to see if they might find actors who are more deserving of the award. They did not do this, and the most egregious victim of their oversight is Billy Bob Thornton, who gave us not one but two Oscar-caliber performances this year. Much of his buzz has recently been centered around his role in Monster’s Ball, but I prefer his bravura performance as Ed Crane, the melancholy barber who takes control of his destiny for the first time in his entire life and pays the ultimate price for it, in The Man Who Wasn’t There. It’s easy to get an Oscar nod by screaming or crying or playing a handicapped or mentally retarded person; the kind of low-key, quiet complexity that Thornton displays in these two roles is infinitely harder to pull off and tends not to get recognized.

Nominees:
Halle Berry, Monster’s Ball
Judi Dench, Iris
Nicole Kidman, Moulin Rouge!
Sissy Spacek, In the Bedroom
Renée Zellweger, Bridget Jones’s Diary

Who Should Win: Halle Berry, Monster’s Ball

I’m a big fan of Halle Berry’s work in Monster’s Ball, where she covered the gamut from subdued and depressed to hysterical in a very believable, non-showy way. So non-showy, in fact, that she doesn’t have a realistic chance of winning.

Who Will Win: Sissy Spacek, In the Bedroom

Too often, female parts in movies are still seen as types, rather than fleshed-out characters. I have therefore devised a set of rules to help me make predictions in the Actress categories. I have previously told you about the Limey Rule (“When all else fails, go with the limey”), and the more powerful Ho Rule (“Everybody loves a ho!”). This year we’ve got Judi Dench, as always, filling the Limey role, while the Ho role goes unfilled (sorry, Bridget Jones doesn’t qualify). So one might think Dench has the inside track, but for the heretofore-unrevealed Raw Nerve Ending Rule (“Raw nerve ending = Oscarama, baby!”) And so my prediction goes to Sissy Spacek, who emoted all over the screen in In the Bedroom.

Missing: Thora Birch, Ghost World; Audrey Tautou, Amélie

“It’s a good thing we have Thora Birch,” I used to say, “because if anything ever happens to Christina Ricci, we have a spare.” That’s not really fair to either woman, though, and least of all Birch; while both are known for their jet-black hair, moody dispositions, and jaw-dropping curves, Ricci doesn’t seem to be doing much of note with the cred she developed so carefully in movies like The Ice Storm and The Opposite of Sex. She didn’t appear in anything significant at all last year, and her next role is as trendy li’l author-slash-rotten-narcissist Elizabeth Wurtzel in the film adaptation of her unnecessary book Prozac Nation. (Wurtzel’s reaction to the destruction of the World Trade Center a few blocks from her apartment, as shared with reporter Jan Wong of Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper: “My main thought was: What a pain in the ass.... I just felt, like, everyone was overreacting. People were going on about it. That part really annoyed me.”) Birch, like Ricci a former child actress, was the only good thing I had to say about the execrable American Beauty, if you’ll recall; her role as Enid in Ghost World (a role originally written for Ricci) was in some ways a much more fully realized and self-aware version of her character in the earlier film, and on the basis of those two movies alone (let’s be kind and ignore the existence of her intervening film Dungeons and Dragons) she’s managed to capture a certain type of young-adult melancholia with a realness and honesty that is at times almost heartbreaking to behold. (And let’s not forget the aforementioned jaw-dropping curves.) Whether she can extend her range to other kinds of roles with the same realness I don’t know, but I’m pullin’ for her.

Nominees:
Jim Broadbent, Iris
Ethan Hawke, Training Day
Ben Kingsley, Sexy Beast
Ian McKellen, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Jon Voight, Ali

Who Should Win: Ben Kingsley, Sexy Beast

Training Day and Ali I haven’t seen. Ian McKellen was fine, but not remarkable. I found Jim Broadbent’s all-atwitter, all-a-st-st-stutter, so-very-British-don’t-you-know affectations almost as annoying as Geoffrey Rush in Shine. So: Gandhi it is, then.

Who Will Win: Ian McKellen, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Everyone wants Ben Kingsley to win here, so he probably won’t. The picture isn’t prominent enough and probably not a whole lot of the voters have seen it. Everyone’s seen Fellowship of the Ring.

What’s interesting about Ethan Hawke is that among people my age, at least, he was much-loved up until about 1994 and has been much-hated ever since. I believe this has everything to do with Reality Bites, the middling Gen-X movie from that year with Winona Ryder and Ben Stiller, in which Hawke’s character is the biggest tool in the entire film (and, indeed, one of the biggest in the history of cinema), yet was clearly written to be seen as the good guy and even gets the girl in the end. My theory is that this created a profound cognitive dissonance in the minds of the viewers, who could only alleviate it by unconsciously believing that the character came off as such a dickhead only because Hawke was that big of a dickhead in real life. And so an actor’s reputation suffers because a writer was appallingly blind to the perceptions of her audience. Let this be a lesson to aspiring screenwriters everywhere: it’s not just you you harm with your poor characterizations and pedestrian plotting.

Missing: Steve Buscemi, Ghost World; Eddie Murphy, Shrek

Eddie Murphy is making quite a second career for himself supplying voices for animated films and TV shows. After doing Mulan and working for a couple of years as ill-tempered housing project super Thurgood Stubbs on the late, lamented “foamation” sitcom The PJs, he was hilarious in Shrek as Donkey, a donkey, who becomes the title ogre’s constant companion on his travels, much to Shrek’s disgust. I’ve always felt that Murphy’s considerable comedic talent was best expressed through his voice, and he’s choosing vehicles that let him exercise that talent in entertaining ways.

Nominees:
Jennifer Connelly, A Beautiful Mind
Helen Mirren, Gosford Park
Maggie Smith, Gosford Park
Marisa Tomei, In the Bedroom
Kate Winslet, Iris

Who Should Win: Maggie Smith, Gosford Park

To the extent that Gosford Park worked at all, it was due to Maggie Smith’s Constance, a hilariously icy blueblood who no longer bothers to hide her contempt for her social inferiors and most of her social equals. (That’s her in the previews, casually informing Bob Balaban’s movie producer character that it’s okay to divulge the plot of his upcoming Charlie Chan picture because “none of us are going to see it.”)

Who Will Win: Jennifer Connelly, A Beautiful Mind

Here we have three limeys (Helen Mirren, Maggie Smith, Kate Winslet), a ho (okay, that’s unfair, but Marisa Tomei does kinda give off that rode-hard-and-put-away-wet vibe), and a raw nerve ending (Jennifer Connelly). Raw nerve ending it is, then.

Of course, there was more to Jennifer Connelly’s performance than just losing control, but that’s what the Academy will remember. Perhaps more importantly, though, she represents the kind of come-from-behind story that people just love to hear. Connelly is only 38 days younger than me, and I like to follow the careers of people who are very close to my own age as a way to kind of gauge my own success in life, so I’m very familiar with her career path. She had a starring role in Jim Henson’s 1986 movie Labyrinth, when she was only 15. Shortly thereafter, she grew a truly amazing pair of hoo-hahs, which if anything limited her career rather than advanced it; throughout most of the 1990s, she mostly took supporting roles in quasi-exploitative B movies, while stills of her nude scene from Dennis Hopper’s The Hot Spot became some of the most downloaded images on the Internet. (I wouldn’t know anything about that, of course.) Then in 2000 she appeared in a small role in Pollock and a larger role in Requiem for a Dream, pulling in mostly positive reviews and reminding people why they liked her in the first place. And now here she is pulling in universal praise for A Beautiful Mind. Well, good for her. Here’s to rejuvenated careers.

And speaking of hoo-hahs, Kate Winslet sure is a robust young woman, isn’t she? She may not take home the statue this year, but her numerous nude scenes in Iris were reward enough for me, and, presumably, for everyone who likes to see attractive women who don’t weigh 83 pounds. Now if only we could get her to dump depraved director Sam Mendes, with whom she’s been romantically linked lately. The more painfully the better.

Okay, no more breast comments. I promise.

Nominees:
Robert Altman, Gosford Park
Ron Howard, A Beautiful Mind
Peter Jackson, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
David Lynch, Mulholland Drive
Ridley Scott, Black Hawk Down

Who Should Win: Peter Jackson, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Peter Jackson should have won for Heavenly Creatures, still my favorite movie of all time after eight years, but he wasn’t even nominated for it. I’d be tempted to want him to win for that reason even if I secretly preferred one of the other directors this year, which I don’t.

I’m about to trash Mulholland Drive unmercifully, so I should probably begin by saying that I actually liked it. I liked it because I set my expectations before I went in—expecting it not to make a bit of sense and that I should therefore just groove on the atmosphere—and Mulholland Drive fulfilled those expectations to the letter. That’s all to the good; Mulholland Drive is genuinely good if that was what you were looking for, and it was better than a lot of movies I saw last year. Yet this movie has received praise from critics and awards bodies that is so out of proportion to its accomplishments that one can’t help but focus on the disconnect. It’s hard for me to see how anyone who isn’t a hardcore member of the cult of David Lynch could consider him the best director of the year for this film.

There’s a brief scene in the movie where a film director (Justin Theroux) is directed to go way out of town in the dead of night to what appears to be an abandoned ranch, where he meets a mysterious character called the Cowboy (Lafayette Montgomery), who gives him some strange instructions. (My favorite line: “You’ll see me one more time if you do good... two more times if you do bad.”) If you had never seen or heard of Mulholland Drive and I showed you this single, three-minute scene and asked you to tell me who directed the movie it was from, you wouldn’t even hesitate before saying “David Lynch.” That’s how predictable Mulholland Drive is in its feel. From the self-conscious Doris Day affect of one of the two female leads (Naomi Watts) to the moody, atmospheric score from Angelo Badalamenti, the whole film feels like a retread of most of Lynch’s earlier work (including Twin Peaks, which I never cared for because I could tell ten minutes into the first episode that Lynch wasn’t going anywhere with it and never intended to go anywhere with it, and as usual, I was right). There’s nothing wrong with a director developing a characteristic style, but you can’t just reheat all your old quirks and expect people to tell you how creative and original you are. You can’t expect it from me, anyway.

Who Will Win: Ron Howard, A Beautiful Mind

Ron Howard gets accused of making too much mainstream schmaltz, but he’s a very competent director who rarely fails to make an entertaining movie, and his films tend to get above-average reviews, so I can see the Academy rewarding him for what is probably his finest movie yet, especially considering the competition.

Missing: Terry Zwigoff, Ghost World; Christopher Nolan, Memento; Marc Forster, Monster’s Ball

Christopher Nolan was nominated for his screenplay, and rightfully so, but I thought he also did a very good job directing it through its various twists and turns.

Nominees:
Guillaume Laurant, Amélie
Julian Fellowes, Gosford Park
Christopher Nolan, Memento
Milo Addica and Will Rokos, Monster’s Ball
Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson, The Royal Tenenbaums

Who Should Win: Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson, The Royal Tenenbaums

No one should be surprised at my choice here. Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson’s screenplays are sometimes derided as being precious, but that’s only a valid criticism if they don’t work on their own terms. I’m a fan of all three of their collaborations, which use a certain sweetness to leaven the quirkiness so as not to make it insufferable.

Who Will Win: Guillaume Laurant, Amélie

This one is really hard to call. Of the five nominees, only Gosford Park was nominated for Best Picture, and I really don’t see the Academy working up the enthusiasm to vote for it. If it were 1976, perhaps, but Altman doesn’t have the same pull in Hollywood as he once did. Meanwhile, Miramax’ legendary PR department has to be smarting over Amélie’s failure to pull in a Best Picture nomination, so rather than content themselves with the Best Foreign Language Picture award I predict they’ll pull out all the stops to bring this one home. Plus, to be fair, Amélie was uncommonly well written, though I consider it more of a “directed” picture, so the Academy’s screenwriters will be able to vote for it without feeling unclean.

Nominees:
Akiva Goldsman, A Beautiful Mind
Daniel Clowes, Terry Zwigoff, Ghost World
Todd Field, Robert Festinger, In the Bedroom
Frances Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Joe Stillman, and Roger S.H. Schulman, Shrek

Who Should Win: Daniel Clowes, Terry Zwigoff, Ghost World

This is why I always like the screenplay categories. Unlike Best Picture, the screenplay categories are only voted on by screenwriters, who seem to appreciate the same kind of things I look for in films. This year I’ve seen and, to some degree, liked all ten of the nominated pictures, and my favorite film actually received a nomination here. I’ve already said my piece on Ghost World, so I’ll just say: bravo, screenwriters. Bravo.

Who Will Win: Akiva Goldsman, A Beautiful Mind

You know, it’s really not right that Akiva Goldsman (Batman & Robin, Lost in Space) should be nominated for a screenwriting Oscar, not right at all. Really, the most charitable thing we can assume about Goldsman is that he’s the perfect hack, able to churn out a screenplay to your specifications in 30 minutes or less or your next one’s free. But of course the best thing about the perfect hack is that, if you ask him for a good screenplay, he’ll probably be able to give you one. A Beautiful Mind came from quality source material and Goldsman didn’t disgrace it, which is commendable.

Nominees:
Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius
Monsters, Inc.
Shrek

Who Should Win: Shrek

All eyes will be on the Kodak Theatre this March 24th as the Academy hands out the inaugural Oscar for Best Animated Feature. In a sense it’s long overdue, but in another it’s arrived just in time. As recently as five years ago this award would have been conceded to the Disney factory year after year, as the latest product from the Rodent rolled over whatever second-rate effort the likes of Don Bluth had to offer. Since then, of course, we’ve experienced a renaissance in computer animation, which has allowed the art form to break free of the doe-eyed heroine/deep-voiced hero/let’s have another song by Alan Mencken formula that has enslaved Disney’s yearly animated effort for aeons. Indeed, the freedom and creativity enjoyed by the nascent CGI-animation movement has so transformed the discipline that, in a rather surprising development, all three of this year’s nominees are computer-animated movies.

What this means, in practice, is that instead of the award going to Disney by default, it’s a competition between Disney/Pixar (Monsters, Inc.) and DreamWorks/Pacific Data Images (Shrek) and probably will be for some time. For now that’s all to the good, as both studios produced quality films this year. While not up the high standard Pixar set with Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc. is funny and intelligent, and appeals to both children and adults while staying largely irony-free. Shrek hews closer to the recent trend in animation of snarkily turning the genre’s conventions upon itself, and the fact that it doesn’t feel like a retread of the Toy Story movies is a testament to the creativity that went into just about every facet of its production. Shrek very nearly made it onto my top ten list this year; it is smart, funny, and accessible to children and adults not only on different levels but, perhaps more significantly, on a lot of the same levels. The fact that it feels more “adult” than just about any other animated movie that has been released over the past few years does not detract from its appeal to children. If it wins this year, as I believe it will, it’ll get this new category off to a great start, and I only hope that future winners exhibit the same level of quality.

Who Will Win: Shrek

Is it too much to ask that, after Shrek inevitably wins the award, Mike Myers officially retire his “funny” Scottish accent? With a sequel to Shrek and yet another Austin Powers on the way, we can only hope that Myers decides that he’s wrung all the available humor out of that particular schtick.

Not Missing: Waking Life

I actually am pretty satisfied with the nominees here, so I think I’ll use this space to pick on Waking Life a little. A truly groundbreaking animated picture, Waking Life was shot by director Richard Linklater on digital video and was then transferred to computer, where every frame was painstakingly animated. The process of animating over live footage is called rotoscoping and is almost as old as film itself—it was invented by Max and Dave Fleischer in 1915 for their “Ko-Ko the Clown” short films—but here it gives the film all the depth and intrigue of an impressionist painting; the animation style varies from scene to scene, presenting a tableau of simple line drawings and following it with one in which the “strokes” are as heavy and vivid as in a work by Van Gogh. Waking Life is truly a feast for the eyes.

Unfortunately, the movie itself sucks. We follow a hipster fellow (Wiley Wiggins, under all the animation) around as he dreams. Occasionally he wakes up, but only into another dream, and eventually he wants to wake up for real, but can’t. This is a setup for what could potentially be a good movie. Unfortunately, Wiley’s dreams aren’t the kind where you walk along a deserted beach and come across a long line of toaster ovens, and one of them opens and for some reason Nancy Reagan climbs out and starts singing, and then that hot teacher you had for high school English shows up and she’s naked, but before you can react to that you find yourself in a police car in one of those San Francisco chase movies where the cars are always taking air coming out of intersections, and the car is being driven by a chimpanzee. No, Wiley has dreams where people walk up to him and recite long ruminations on the nature of self, God, and reality, the kind that college freshmen trade back and forth in their dorm rooms late at night just before the really good shit kicks in. If your friends started talking to you like that you’d begin to invent excuses not to spend time with them anymore. If Linklater does the viewer any sort of favor at all, it’s that most of these speeches are boring enough that you can easily ignore them and concentrate on the visuals.

I’ve read that Linklater introduced the film at Sundance by asking how many people in the audience were on drugs; when several hands went up, he continued, “Good. This is for you. The rest of you, please bear with me.” As it happens, I almost didn’t bear with him—I nearly walked out several times—but I think that little anecdote goes a long way towards explaining how intolerably self-indulgent this picture is, an interminable exercise in pseudo-profundity that always seems to be just seconds away from asking you if you’ve ever really looked, I mean really looked, at your hand. Du-uude.

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That’s about it. Don’t forget to watch the telecast on Sunday, March 24 at 5:30 pm Pacific time on ABC, and report back here soon after for my wrap-up.

—Paul
March 18, 2002