Speaking of jaw-droppers, the SAGs gave Best Actor to Johnny Depp, whose role as Captain Keith Richards in Pirates of the Caribbean thankfully attracted more voters than Bill Murray’s work as a low-wattage Tom Hanks and Sean Penn’s performance as an Actor playing A Suffering Man. I would love to see Depp win the Oscar—he’s one of those rare actors incapable of giving a bad performance—but my money’s still on Sean and his loyal following. Bill Murray is a comic genius, and he should’ve won ten years ago for Groundhog Day, or 21 years ago for Tootsie, but the fact that he couldn’t even get nominated until now is due to his notoriously bad reputation in awards circles; the pundits all talked about this when Murray missed the cut for his Rushmore role a few years ago. I wouldn’t mind if he won, but I wouldn’t much expect it.
Since you brought up how much you loved Kingsley, let’s commiserate: why can’t the Oscars be in the business of honoring quality and quality alone? This is an organization that never gave an Oscar to Richard Burton but gave two to Shelley Winters (zero would have been too many). It hasn’t gotten the Best Picture award right in over a decade. It’s seen fit to honor hacks and one-hit wonders galore, but has never gotten around to giving a nomination to Donald Sutherland. Ian Holm wasn’t nominated in for 1997’s The Sweet Hereafter, even though his performance may have been the best of the 1990s. I, too, feel that Kingsley hasn’t been sufficiently appreciated by the Academy; I thought Kingsley’s work in Sexy Beast was the best of its year, but he was snubbed at the Oscars in favor of Jim Broadbent for Iris, a film that was forgotten almost before it was released.
I’m guessing that Lost in Translation and Mystic River will win the Screenplay awards, and that Finding Nemo will easily win Best Animated Film; Best Documentary’s a head-scratcher for me, but I’m rooting for The Fog of War, political junkie that I am. As for the third-tier races, I plead guilty to not caring about them.
What did I think of Return of the King? Well, I’ve only seen two of the five Best Picture nominees this year, and Return of the King wasn’t one of them. If it was anything like The Two Towers, though—equal parts dumb intrigue, spectacular battling, tired corruption parable and bad Jim Henson movie—I’d expect that the Oscars will get it wrong once again. And don’t get me started on Gollum, who’s so annoying that if he went up against Shelley Winters in a “Celebrity Deathmatch,” I’d root for Shelley.
BEN B. CHUNG: For me, one of the defining scenes of cinema is in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, when a middle-aged Winters begins rabidly beating James Mason, her vacant, utterly expressionless face unambiguously channeling her fiery rage upon learning of her husband’s affair with her daughter. But I digress.
A general critique of the Academy Awards was not quite the discussion I anticipated having, and I will probably have to wait for another column. But I will sum up my estimation of the Oscars by stating that they’re probably the most consistently reliable artistic awards ceremony in existence, and for all their miscalculations, have made fewer mistakes than, say, the Nobel Peace Prize (even the headache-inducing buffoonery of Roberto Benigni was slightly less egregious than awarding Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger in the same year).
I especially don’t think the Academy is making a mistake this year in honoring The Return of the King. Admittedly, the trilogy capper was hardly the best film of the year. I can think of ten films off the top of my head that I enjoyed more, two of which are also nominated for Best Picture: Lost in Translation and Master and Commander, a pair of films that allowed us the privilege of peering into the workings of two complex, intimate friendships.
Complexity and intimacy were misplaced on the road to Mount Doom, but Jackson has enough cavalier filmmaking tricks and jaw-dropping special effects to compensate. The Return of the King was the most bloated and overwrought of the series; where the first two films maintained a carefully measured momentum that culminated in bravura war sequences, the final chapter is plagued with poor editing between its parallel story lines and a seemingly undying denouement. But for all the harsh words (no doubt prompted by unrealistically high expectations for the film), I loved the movie, and it fits beautifully in the context of the entire trilogy.
The incessant Star Wars comparisons are more than valid, as your own disparaging description of The Two Towers could easily apply to any of the first three films; The Lord of the Rings has officially replaced George Lucas’ space operas as the standard bearers for epic populist entertainment. These will remain important films 25 years from now, and to give the award to another film in 2003 will be forever remembered as one of the Academy’s biggest blunders. I agree that the Academy hasn’t properly identified the year’s best film since Schindler’s List, and nor will it this year (after all, City of God isn’t even nominated), but it will still be making the right decision.