And the Awards Should Go To...

The Best Supporting Actor field is almost as low-intensity; out of the five nominees, Mystic River’s Tim Robbins has had the lion’s share of awards momentum, and few think that he’ll be denied a statue.  Charlize Theron has a lock on Best Actress: she played against type six ways to Sunday, and Roger Ebert has led the same “Best...acting...ever” critical charge that helped propel Halle Berry to her Monster’s Ball Oscar two years ago. And if Return of the King doesn’t win Best Picture (and director Peter Jackson doesn’t win Best Director), it’ll be the biggest upset since Miramax bought the 1999 Best Picture Oscar for Shakespeare in Love.

The Academy loves to shake things up by handing awards off to unexpected choices, but I just can’t see it happening in any category this year. Do you think that any of the dark horses have a chance? Or will the show’s only suspense be the question of how Billy Crystal spoofs last year’s Brody/Berry kiss? (Jack Palance, get out your breath spray.)

BEN B. CHUNG: Of course you can’t “see it happening this year,” Ben. Isn’t that the point of why we watch the Oscars in the first place? Nobody went into last year’s awards thinking Roman Polanski or Adrien Brody had a chance at winning their awards; both were nominated in categories that became two-way races (Rob Marshall and Martin Scorcese for Director, Jack Nicholson and Daniel Day-Lewis for Best Actor) of which neither was considered a viable contender. Their richly deserved triumphs for their work in 2002’s best film not only made the show’s third act immediately exciting (could The Pianist actually ride its momentum to defeat long-standing favorite Chicago?), it offered enough shockers, open-mouthed and otherwise, to renew many viewers’ faith in the Academy for years to come.

This year is no different, and I can’t accept your contention that the big awards are predictable, because I disagree with two of your choices and foresee possible upsets in two others. Peter Jackson and his trilogy have pulled so far ahead in the Director and Picture races that their competitors can barely see them, even if they happen to be blind in one eye.

On the other hand, Best Actor seems like it will end in a photo finish, with Lost in Translation’s Bill Murray a nose ahead of Sean Penn. I personally felt Ben Kingsley had the performance of the year, and his visceral anguish in House of Sand and Fog was a masterfully controlled performance, especially when contrasted with Penn’s rather blunt stabs at the agony of child loss (slam table here, deliver choked up yelp there).

Kingsley won’t win the Oscar, but will likely siphon enough tragedy-embracing voters from Penn, whose chances aren’t improved by the fact that he has stopped campaigning for the award, to give Murray the win. You speak of Penn’s four nominations; well, Murray hasn’t been nominated once despite the often remarkable work he’s done in the past, and all of the Lost in Translation fans that pushed it to a Best Picture nod will vote for his nuanced work. I think there’s even room here for a Johnny Depp upset; Academy voters love hookers with hearts of gold, and in Pirates of the Caribbean, he’s certainly dressed for the part.

As for Supporting Actress, I think most analysts recognize by now that Renee peaked too big, too early. I may be partially biased in that I thought she horribly misjudged her Cold Mountain role and delivered it with such intolerable garishness that by film’s end, I almost wished Jack White would mistake her for a Von Bondie. But even Miramax seems to admit that she’s lost her momentum, opening room for a victory by a member of your so-called “weak field.” That reference surely comes from someone who has not yet seen House of Sand and Fog, because Shohreh Aghdashloo’s achievement as an Irani expatriate with a fragile command of the English language is about as compelling as acting can get. It’s usually difficult to predict this category, but not when it includes a performance this complete.

I agree that Charlize Theron and Tim Robbins will probably follow up their various critics circles victories with Oscars, but I wouldn’t fully count out the return of early favorite Diane Keaton or a late-minute surge for Djimon Honsou.

I also think it’s rather careless that you’ve defined the Oscars by the Big Six; admittedly those are the only categories that most viewers really care about, but that hardly diminishes the relevance the rest of the awards. There are some exciting races lower on the ballot, and our role as critics is to draw attention to the artistry beneath the household name-recognition.

Best Adapted Screenplay could logically go to any one of its nominees except, perhaps, to the most deserving, the Portuguese-language gangster epic City of God. Capturing the Friedmans and Fog of War seemed locked in a taut two-man battle for Documentary Feature until My Architect quietly reaped enough attention to bestow it front-runner status. The Return of the King will likely sweep up most of the technical awards as Best Picture forerunners are prone to do, but the vivid restoration of 19th century Japan in The Last Samurai will give it a run for its money in Art Direction and Costume.

An unfortunate side note on this discussion is that people don’t necessarily watch the Oscars because they want to see surprises. The highest-rated broadcasts often feature races that are the easiest to predict; the most-watched show to date was the year Titanic was guaranteed to cast all of its competitors to sea. The audience seems primarily concerned with seeing their favorite movies get big shiny statues, and by that logic, this year’s show will likely garner huge ratings.

So do you think The Return of the King deserves that bald gold man? I’ll hold off on my own opinion until you respond…

BEN J. SOSKIN: Yep, The Pianist’s Oscar wins were stunners. They weren’t entirely unexpected, though—the normally off-the-wall National Society of Film Critics predicted all three of its big wins (Director, Actor and Screenplay) two months before the Oscars.

Besides, The Pianist’s Academy trifecta was the biggest dark-horse Oscar upset in our lifetimes; what was the last year that a film won in at least three of the top eight categories when it wasn’t the odds-on favorite in any of them? The only year in the last twenty that I could make a case for was 1992, when The Silence of the Lambs swept the Oscars in a year when most were predicting victories for Bugsy, JFK, or The Prince of Tides. We shouldn’t expect numerous Oscar shockers in a single ceremony; 2003’s Oscars were something of a fluke.

Since I last wrote, the Screen Actors Guild Awards—considered the best bellwether for the Oscars’ Acting categories—have come and gone, and they’ve pretty much confirmed my predictions; Theron, Robbins and Zellweger all won in their respective categories. I don’t think Zellweger can act, but I do think that she’s due for an Oscar, and unless Shohreh Aghdashloo has starred in Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby and Repulsion, I don’t see much chance that Renee will be upset. Aghdashloo wasn’t even nominated for a SAG; this doesn’t make an Oscar win for her impossible—Marcia Gay Harden got no SAG nomination for Pollock and walked off with the Oscar—but it does make a victory for her further unlikely. If Aghdashloo wins, it’ll be a jaw-dropper.

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.