But enough ancient history. Kvetching springs eternal in the blood sport we know as the Academy Awards, and why should this year be any different? A number of oddities and outrages leapt out on Feb. 12, when the 2001 selections were announced. Let the grousing begin….
Ethan Hawke for Best Supporting Actor in “Training Day”? I don’t mean to knock Hawke’s talent. He gave a great performance this year–in “Tape.” And he’s perfectly good–if slightly miscast–in “Training Day.” But if this is a supporting role, so is Macbeth. Hawke is the movie’s protagonist: he’s in just about every scene and has far more screen time than Denzel Washington. Warner Bros. pushed him for supporting actor because they didn’t want to interfere with Washington’s almost sure-fire shot at a Best Actor nomination. But the actor’s branch of the Academy, which chooses the nominees, is under no obligation to follow the studios suggestion. And often they don’t. In 1981, for example, Paramount took out many ads in the Hollywood trade papers touting Susan Sarandon for Best Supporting Actress in “Atlantic City.” The actors, quite properly, nominated her for Best Actress. What were they thinking this year?
If “Moulin Rouge” deserves a nomination for Best Picture (and I’m happy it got one) then surely Baz Luhrmann should have been nominated for Best Director. Every inch of that movie is a reflection of his sensibility. Look at it this way: there are 10 or 20 filmmakers who could have taken the script of “A Beautiful Mind” and made a film of comparable quality to Ron Howard’s. No one but Luhrmann could have made this “Moulin Rouge.” But obviously, many directors in the academy didn’t cotton to the Aussie’s full-tilt-boogie aesthetic.
It’s also a tad peculiar that a film that gets nominated for best picture, screenplay, actor, actress and supporting actress–I’m referring to “In the Bedroom”–would not get a nomination for best director. Did the fact that Todd Field did not belong to the Director’s Guild when he made the movie have anything to do with his snub? (It was why he was not eligible for a DGA award.) Or was the fact that he was an actor, and a young one, making his first film, prove too much for his older colleagues to bear? We’ll never know. And to be fair to the directors, they had tough calls to make this year: it’s hard to argue with their choices of Peter Jackson, David Lynch, Ridley Scott and Robert Altman. Trivia note: should “Moulin Rouge” or “In the Bedroom” somehow win the Best Picture award, it would be the first time the director of a best movie wasn’t nominated since Bruce Beresford was neglected for “Driving Miss Daisy,” the 1989 winner.
How in the world did John Williams’s thunderously annoying score for “Harry Potter” get a Best Original Score nomination? It was, bar none, the most critically reviled piece of music in any movie this year–overbearing, pompous and one of the principal reasons the movie failed to capture the book’s nimble charm. Williams is obviously an Academy darling (he’s going to be in the pit on Oscar night) for he was nominated twice this year: he’s competing against himself with his far superior “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” score. Can’t they distinguish between his good work and his hack jobs? Maybe the category should be changed to “Loudest original score.” An unobtrusive, powerfully understated score such as Thomas Newman’s for “In the Bedroom” obviously doesn’t stand a chance.
While we’re on the subject of undeserved nominations, how about the Best Makeup nod for “A Beautiful Mind”? Yes, they did an excellent aging job on Russell Crowe, but at the end of the film the aged Jennifer Connelly looks like a birthday cake smeared with too much frosting. For that boo-boo alone (and everyone I’ve talked to has noticed it), makeup artists Greg Cannom and Colleen Callaghan should have been disqualified on the spot.
Since we’re picking on “A Beautiful Mind,” here’s a modest proposal. Akiva Goldsman’s screenplay should have been nominated for best original screenplay, not adaptation, so radically does it depart from the biography of John Nash by Sylvia Nasar or the known facts of Nash’s life. The movie is fiction, starting with the fact that his wife, quite sensibly, left him. Nor did Nash’s paranoid delusions focus on cold war espionage: he thought little guys from outer space were talking to him. Maybe they’ve been talking to Academy voters, too.
The documentary committee has been criticized so many times over the years (with damn good reason) that this year they’re battening down the hatches in anticipation of further brickbats by refusing to release the list of documentaries that were submitted. Thus, we can’t complain about what wasn’t nominated. But I’ll do it anyway. Once again, the folks who didn’t see the merits in “Hoop Dreams,” “Crumb” and most of Erroll Morris’s movies failed this year to nominate a masterpiece of the non-fiction form, Agnes Varda’s “The Gleaners and I.” Nor did they honor “The Fighter,” a complex, funny and moving meditation on history as conveyed in an unforgettable running argument between two Czech Jews who survived both the Nazis and the Communists. I haven’t seen all the nominated documentaries yet, so I’ll cut my rant short pending further study….
Whether you think Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” is a masterpiece or an overextended philosophical bull session, its bold new animation technique and original vision should have landed it the third slot in the newly formed Best Animated Feature category, alongside “Shrek” and “Monsters, Inc.” I refuse to believe that “Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius” was more worthy.
Wouldn’t it be nice if once, just once, a movie was nominated for Best Costumes that wasn’t a period piece–or set in some imaginary world. It’s not that the choices this year were bad ones–“Moulin Rouge,” “The Lord of the Rings,” “Harry Potter,” “Gosford Park” and “The Affair of the Necklace”–but it must be frustrating for designers working in a contemporary milieu, who know that no matter how subtle or dramatically apt their work is, it will never be honored by their colleagues.
Finally, condolences to the following neglected actors, who richly deserved to be biting their nails on Oscar night: Naomi Watts in “Mulholland Drive,” Billy Bob Thornton in “The Man who Wasn’t There,” Charlotte Rampling in “Under the Sand,” Gene Hackman in “The Royal Tenenbaums,” Brian Cox in “L.I.E.” and Jaimie Foxx in “Ali.” The list could be much longer, and include actors in movies most Academy members probably never saw, so I will cease and desist. I’ve picked on the poor Oscars enough–until next year.
