Which is just fine with me. Let’s be honest, no one grows up dreaming of winning a Golden Globe. No one complains about being snubbed by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Throughout its history, the Globes have served one purpose: giving all of us movie-lovers something to talk about while we wait for the real award season to get rolling. And I, for one, am glad I don’t have to wait another month to start kvetching about the Oscar nominees. It’s cold outside. I need this.
So let’s get rolling. The big news, obviously, is that “Cold Mountain” got the cold shoulder, leaving Miramax out of the Best Picture hunt for the first time in 12 years. But I’ve spent literally the whole morning poring over all of the nominees and here are eight things about this year’s list that I think are far more interesting. To me, anyway.
(1) “Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” is the surest-thing Best Picture winner since “Titanic”
OK, maybe this isn’t so fascinating on its own, but give me a minute to explain my reasons. First of all, the obvious: Miramax is brilliant at engineering Oscar campaigns. Now New Line, which released Peter Jackson’s trilogy capper, doesn’t have to outmanuever Harvey Weinstein. Duh. No brainer. But here’s my second reason. In order to pull an upset win in the Best Picture category, the underdog has to be an uplifting movie. It has to fill people with hope and make them smile–in other words, it has to make Academy members abandon their critical faculty and vote with their hearts. It helps, of course, if the frontrunner for Best Picture is a real downer (or, at the very least, bloody). Classic example: “Shakespeare in Love” upsetting “Saving Private Ryan” in 1998. However, this year, the movie with the only real chance of knocking off “Return of the King” is Clint Eastwood’s ultra-bleak tragedy “Mystic River.” The shoe is on the wrong foot. A small, gut-wrenching drama isn’t going to come from behind against a big, crowd-pleasing adventure with a happy ending.
But here’s the third, and biggest reason of all, why “Return of the King” is such a sure thing: money. “Return of the King” is a product of New Line, which is owned by Time Warner. “Mystic River” is a product of Warner Brothers, which is owned by Time Warner. In order for “Mystic River” to have any chance of beating “Return of the King,” Warner Brothers will have to spend millions upon millions of dollars on an all-out, in-your-face, Miramax-style Oscar campaign. But is Time Warner really going to spend all that money just to beat itself? Is the company really going to take millions of dollars out of its own pocket? No way.
(2) Out with the old, in with the new.
In addition to shutting out Miramax from the Best Picture category at long last, the Academy chose not to nominate its two favorite actors in recent years–Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman–despite the fact that both gave award-caliber performances in movies that garnered plenty of other nominations. (“Master and Commander” for Crowe, “Cold Mountain” for Kidman.) Instead, the Academy rewarded people it had appeared to snub in the past. Bill Murray got in for “Lost in Translation” after being robbed on “Rushmore,” while Naomi Watts got in for “21 Grams” after being robbed on “Mulholland Drive.” Alec Baldwin, who’s become a splendid character actor after a failed career as a leading man, got his first nomination. The great Patricia Clarkson, whom many thought would get her first nomination last year for “Far From Heaven,” had to wait until this year for “Pieces of April.” The Academy even broke from its longstanding prejudice against comedic performances to nominate a pair of them this year: Murray, and Johnny Depp for “Pirates of the Caribbean.”
(3) Forget about Harvey Weinstein and Miramax–what about poor Anthony Minghella?
Lots of people attribute “Cold Mountain’s” failure to get a Best Picture nomination to a Hollywood backlash against Miramax’s ruthless co-founder, Harvey Weinstein. My Hollywood-based colleague here at NEWSWEEK, Sean Smith, insists that that’s not true, that while journalists love to play up people’s hatred for Weinstein, most actors, writers and directors like him–because he makes great movies. Regardless, even if the Best Picture washout is a jab at Weinstein, the punch caught him in the ear and nailed “Cold Mountain” writer and director Anthony Minghella square on the nose. After all, “Cold Mountain” still captured seven nominations. Minghella, meanwhile, a previous Oscar-winner for “The English Patient,” got nothing. No nomination for Best Picture, no directing nomination, no adapted screenplay nomination–even though most observers, including me, believe his contributions to “Cold Mountain” were the best thing about the movie.
And while I’m on the subject, as happy as I am to see Miramax’s stranglehold over the Best Picture category come to an end, this was the wrong year to break the streak. I defy anyone who’s seen “Seabiscuit” to make a legitimate case that Gary Ross’s inert, artless horse movie is a more worthy nominee than the inconsistent, but often staggering “Cold Mountain.”
(4) While we’re on the subject, Miramax had a great year. Sort of.
OK, OK, Miramax didn’t get a Best Picture nomination, and I’m sure that’s all Harvey cared about when he heard the news this morning. But reports of Miramax’s demise on the Oscar front are greatly exaggerated. I haven’t done a thorough count just yet, but between “Cold Mountain’s” seven nominations, “City of God’s” four surprise nominations and two for Denys Arcand’s “The Barbarian Invasions,” I have a hunch that Miramax was still the year’s most nominated studio. And let’s back up and talk about “City of God” for a moment. This is a tiny Brazilian movie about violent street gangs in Rio de Janeiro that came out in 2002, but was up for this year’s awards because it didn’t play in America until 2003. And it didn’t just get piddly technical nominations. In a pair of shockers, Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund were nominated for Best Director and Braulio Mantovani was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay–the two categories, incidentally, that Anthony Minghella was shut out of. Not bad for a consolation prize.
(5) And the winner is … Salvador Dali?
On Oscar night, look for the famous surrealist painter to win his first, and obviously posthumous, Academy Award. Dali’s six-minute, 1946 animated movie “Destino” was rediscovered and released this year by Disney–which had bankrolled and then shelved the film more than half a century ago. It’s nominated in the Short Film (Animated) category and it’s, ahem, destined to win. I haven’t seen the film, and it probably deserves the Oscar. But even if it doesn’t, can you imagine anyone voting against Salvador Dali?
(6) What is the Matrix? An Oscar wipeout, that’s what.
The surest sign of how much Hollywood disliked the two “Matrix” sequels: no nominations in any of the technical categories, which the original movie swept in 1999. In fact, neither movie even made the seven-film short list for the Visual Effects Oscar, from which three nominees were chosen: “Lord of the Rings,” “Master and Commander” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.” Now, I’m on record for loving “Reloaded” and being somewhat disappointed by “Revolutions,” but even accounting for my bias, this is a joke. Whatever one thinks of the movies overall, the visual effects in both films were stunning. I can understand giving the award to “Lord of the Rings” or even to “Pirates of the Caribbean” (although I thought the skeletons-to-pirates-and-back-again transformations were goofy), but “Master and Commander”? The chief visual effects in that film were CGI ocean waves! The “Matrix” shutout is purely an example of Hollywood sneering at an overhyped franchise; it’s not a reflection of the actual work. Sniff, sniff.
(7) The most overlooked director in Oscar history finally gets his due.
No, not Martin Scorsese, who’s surely Oscar’s most famous non-winner. But at least he’s been nominated a raft of times. (As were Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock, history’s other famous non-winners.) My vote for the most egregious Academy oversight is Errol Morris. Morris, who is the best documentary filmmaker on the planet, has not only never won an Oscar in his category–until this year, he’d never even been nominated. The selecting body for the Academy’s documentary award is notoriously, shall we say, curious, but this year it finally came through for Morris, nominating his mesmerizing film about Robert McNamara and American warfare, “The Fog of War.” Unfortunately, Morris’s long-awaited first nomination comes in the year the selecting body finally seemed to get the entire field right. Morris’s film is part of an incredible group, and he may not win. Three of the other nominees–“Balseros,” “Capturing the Friedmans” or “My Architect,” all of which are wonderful achievements–could beat Morris, and few people would bat an eye.
(8) An animated film will never again be nominated for Best Picture.
The last time it happened was in 1992, when “Beauty and the Beast” was nominated. It was almost unheard of even before the Academy created a special category ghettoizing animated features two years ago, and now that it has, well, forget about it ever happening again. If “Finding Nemo,” a critical and commercial home run, couldn’t do it, then nothing can.
