The Oscars come in for a lot of criticism. Rightly, in my opinion!
There are always the awards that make you go “what the f*#+?” – the ones that someone wins because they were owed from a recent losing year; or they just should have won by now; or they are the only American in the category; or they are an industry favourite; or the favourite was too “challenging” for many voters; etc.
But some of those that people mention a lot aren’t so bad are they? A lot of people think Star Wars should have won in 1977, but isn’t that like thinking Avatar ought to win this year? Years of nostalgic rose-tinted watching of Star Wars makes people wonder why a film with revolutionary special effects but a sub-par paint-by-numbers script and a lot of lousy acting (not everyone, but a lot of them) didn’t win over the smartly scripted, superbly acted, incredibly inventive Annie Hall. Fact is, Annie Hall deserved its win.
I have to accept this about wins I don’t like. I often disagree (in fact almost always) with the foreign language winner. To me Amelie was far better then No Man’s Land and Pan’s Labyrinth was one of the best film’s of its year, not just foreign language so its loss was astounding to me. But I accept that No Man’s Land is a very good film and The Live Of Others is excellent. They did deserve to win, I just wish they hadn’t come up against something else that deserved to as well.
The last couple of years have brought up prime examples of where I can’t really fault a win over my preference even though personally I disagree.
I love the Coen Brothers and I love No Country For Old Men but for me the raw power and majesty of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood was far superior. Had either film come out in either of the very bland year’s since they’d have walked it easily. Shame they had to go head to head. Last year I loved Mickey Rourke’s performance in The Wrestler and think he deserved to win the Best Actor Oscar that for a while he seemed on course for. Sean Penn won. But I can’t fault that. Penn was superb in Milk. The film was overrated but Penn was stunning. He did deserve to win. So did Rourke but only one man can so…
And then there are those I don’t think deserved to win (the third Lord Of The Rings, The Departed, Rocky, Russell Crowe in Gladiator over Tom Hanks in Cast Away – the man made 2 hours of talking to a volleyball compelling viewing, what more could we possibly ask him to do?!?!?!) but which I can see, and accept, why :– the first one should have won so Jackson was owed; Scorsese was so owed it was ridiculous; it was American feel good (and to be fair decent) movie in a year when the 3 (yes, 3!) far superior nominees had a very negative view of things in American society (Taxi Driver, All The President’s Men, Network); Crowe was owed from The Insider the previous year.
However there are some winners that just make me go “WHAT!!!!!” (like Ordinary People beating Raging Bull – which is just plain nuts!) and so below is my top 12 bad Oscar choices of the past decade (in no order other than chronogical) with my POV:
1. 2000 Best Actress – Julia Roberts beats Ellen Burstyn – Roberts was popular, sure, and she was never better than in Erin Brockovich. Okay. But it was hardly a testing role. Essentially a John Grisham character with a push-up bra Erin Brockovich is the kind of Hollywood version of an everyman character that Hollywood loves to slap itself on the back for but simply doesn’t exist.
Then we have Ellen Burstyn’s phenomenal, raw, disturbingly real portrayal of obsession and addiction in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem For A Dream. There simply is no way Burstyn shouldn’t have won for this and we all know that had she not previous won (in the 70s for Alice Doesn’t Love Here Anymore) she’d have walked this one. Burstyn was plain robbed here.
2. 2001 Best Picture/Director/Adapted Screenplay – A Beautiful Mind beats Lord Of The Rings: Fellowship Of The Ring – Many people viewed Ron Howard as owed, especially after the slight in 1995 when he wasn’t even nominated for the excellent Apollo 13 (which did get a Best Picture nom). And he pretty much carried the solid, but hardly astonishing A Beautiful Mind and its assorted departments to Oscar glory. There were certainly awards it deserved bit these three are definitely nos when you put it up against the first of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy – and let’s not ignore the fact that this gave the writer of Batman & Robin and Lost In Space an Academy Award!
Fellowship Of The Ring was an incredible achievement. Jackson and his cohorts had taken a very very dull book (I’m sorry but the first one really is, nothing happens) about walking and fashioned a compelling, exciting and yet bizarrely pretty faithful movie. A faultless cast (he even got a solid turn out of Orlando Bloom) FOTR had all the magic and whimsy, thrills and drama you could want. It was a true epic that instantly became as impressive a feat of filmmaking as anything released in the preceding decade or more. But it was fantasy – not a popular Oscar genre – so it got all the technicals the genre films are always fobbed off with while some said, well, let’s see the trilogy and see if they’re all this good. The second one was. It didn’t win either (see #5) but that didn’t matter because by now everyone knew it was all being saved up to give Jackson the keys to the kingdom with part 3. And the Oscars trapped themselves in a corner. When Jackson delivered part 3 and it turned out to be a bloated, seemingly never ending, ego-trip that offered nothing new to the trilogy and was the first to fail to match the book, offering zero tension or drama where its predecessors had excelled, the Oscars had no choice, they had to give it the win. People expected it, after all that was why they hadn’t given it to either of the first two.
Fellowship deserved it. It was the best film of the trilogy; the best film of 2001; and it would have saved them face in 2003. Whoops!
3. 2001 Best Supporting Actor – Jim Broadbent over Ben Kingsley – Okay so I love Jim Broadbent, he’s always good and he was typically solid in Iris. It was also the same year that saw him play a very different role in Moulin Rouge! (and close behind his excellent turn in Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy) and it really seems his win here was a combination win for both roles unofficially.
On the other hand we have Sir Ben Kingsley, who frankly is a pretentious ass! But that doesn’t remove the fact that his Don Logan in Sexy Beast was one of the most memorable and exhilarating characters to appear on the big screen in the entire decade. Kingsley was phenomenal in Sexy Beast. If I had to pick the 10 best performances of the 2000s he’d be in the top few and, I’m sorry, but Broadbent wouldn’t feature. This one should have gone to Sir Ben even if he is a prick!
4. 2001 Original Screenplay – Gosford Park – I love Altman and Gosford Park rode to a good haul of Oscar nominations off the back of how much Altman was owed an Oscar. Of course he didn’t win and Gosford Park consolation prize was a screenplay win. Everyone knew it would win this category and it did. But did it deserve to? Gosford Park was a solid script no doubt but this category featured Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach’s masterpiece The Royal Tenenbaums, the Nolan brothers twisty brilliance Memento and Guillaume Laurent and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s incredibly original whimsical fancy Amelie. Did Gosford Park deserve to beat any let alone all of these?
Some controversy that year regarding Memento being in the Original Screenplay category after the film credited it as being adapted from a short story written by Chris Nolan’s brother Jonathan is probably the reason Memento didn’t win. It should have been Memento’s to lose, but if it did Gosford Park was not the one that should have stepped in.
5. 2002 Beat Picture – Chicago beats The Pianist – Chicago is a fun musical with a sensational performance by Catherine Zeta Jones and great male leads in Richard Gere and an undervalued John C Reilly but a Best Picture winner? Essentially feeling like Rob Marshall took a camera into a theatre and just flatly and with little sense of dynamism filmed what was going on on stage (the DGA should be ashamed they gave him a Best Director award for this) is starred a weak-voiced and out-of-her-depth Renee Zellweger as the least sexy Roxie Hart in history. CZJ, Gere, Reilly and a dynamite Queen Latifah couldn’t make up for the director’s and Zellweger’s short-comings. And let’s not forget whatever won this year had to be enough to justify beating the second of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy. Chicago wasn’t even close.
But then there was The Pianist. It won Best Picture and Director at the Baftas causing a shock and a stir that many credit with its Best Actor and Director wins at the Oscars. It saw Polanski get a deserved (and controversy) Best Director Oscar but they just didn’t have the guts to give the film the win. Shame on them! The Pianist was grueling but stunning cinema. Not just a return to form for Polanski after years of so-so thrillers but a powerful, personal, devastating look at a period that created the artist looking back on it. All the pain in the movie could be palpably felt and every moment rang disturbingly true. The Pianist is Polanski’s masterpiece, more so even than Chinatown. Chicago is forgettable fluff. This win was a travesty.
6. 2002 Best Actress – Nicole Kidman and a plastic nose beat Julianne Moore – One of my deepest disappointments with this year’s Oscar nominations was that the brilliant, memorable supporting turn from the frequently overlooked Julianne Moore in A Single Man was ignored. But the fact remains Moore should have won years ago for her heartbreaking portrayal of the stoic housewife trying to keep everything in her outwardly-seeming-perfect life together as her world changes and collapses. Moore’s turn in Todd Haynes’ beautiful and tragic Far From Heaven is glorious.
What makes her loss worse was she lost to a plastic nose. Nicole Kidman’s bland delivery of Virginia Woolf in The Hours was not even the best female performance in The Hours. Both Meryl Streep and Moore herself were far more compelling and believable but Kidman had the showier role and the “transformative” plastic nose. If anyone was in doubt Kidman’s utterly false acceptance speech proved how overrated she is as an actress. I’ve despised Kidman ever since.
7. 2003 Best Actor – Sean Penn beats Bill Murray – Ah, the old “he’s owed and he’s overacting” thing the Oscars do so well. Like Al Pacino in Scent Of A Woman, Sean Penn’s hugely overacted shouty role in Mystic River was an attention grabber but hardly a great performance. Penn has given thoroughly deserving performances in his career (Dead Man Walking and Milk come most immediately to mind) just as Pacino (Godfather, Serpico) had prior to Scent Of A Woman, but Mystic River wasn’t one of them. The irony is in a typical compelling Clint Eastwood movie he was the weakest of the three leads. Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon’s more subtle, nuanced roles as the other two corners of the disparate friend triangle at the centre of the movie were utterly compelling and felt totally real. As did Laura Linney and Marsha Gay Harden’s supporting female leads. But then right in the middle of it was the over-the-top “look at me I’m ACTING!!!” of Penn. Why Oscar voters frequently seem to buy Acting (with the capital A) over a more subtle and realistic inhabiting of a character (like Bacon’s here) is beyond me. It’s like they’ve never seen films before. It’s like asking a punter down the multiplex who was the best actor – they’ll only remember the big shouty roles too. But as industry insiders – many of whom are actors! – shouldn’t they see the difference?
Well apparently they don’t and Penn’s win here over the desperately sad, painfully real, incredibly subdued, warmly funny and poignant Bill Murray in a career best (career redefining) Lost In Translation is appalling. Murray was never so good. Penn was rarely less deserving. This too is a criminal decision.
8. 2003 Best Supporting Actress – Renee Zellweger over Patricia Clarkson – Patricia Clarkson is like the female Stanley Tucci. She is always brilliant. She steals scenes and entire films over and over again. Yet she remains largely ignored by the academy – probably largely because she makes a lot of independent films which don’t have a studio behind them doing multi-million dollar Oscar campaigns.
In Piece Of April she gives a brutal, real portrayal of a woman fighting, and losing, a battle with cancer. She is mean, funny, irascible, frustrated and altogether human. It’s a slight film but there is nothing slight about Clarkson’s performance. Still (amazingly) her only nomination this should have been Clarkson’s to lose.
However she came up against the utterly miscast and totally ridiculous Renee Zellweger creation Ruby in Cold Mountain. Cold Mountain had Harvey Weinstein and the might of Miramax behind it. Plus Zellweger had lost Best Actress twice is the previous 2 years (for Bridget Jones’s Diary and Chicago). Cold Mountain has the smack of an “owed” Oscar all over it. But why was Zellweger owed? She didn’t deserve to win for Bridget Jones and she didn’t even deserve to be nominated for Chicago, she was the film’s weakest link (see #5 above). This could all be explained if she were extraordinary in Cold Mountain but she isn’t, she’s the most unconvincing farm-hand (or whatever she is, I forget exactly) in modern film.
Her win here is bizarre and inexplicable while Clarkson’s loss is equally so.
9. 2005 Best Picture – Crash wins – I don’t hate Crash but it is an incredibly obvious exercise in “worthy” filmmaking, drafting in an all-star ensemble to grab attention. There’s nothing subtle about Crash and for all it has “to say” on the surface when you look underneath that surface there’s really nothing all that deep to what is has to say. Nothing original. Nothing particularly interesting or surprising. It’s a solidly made, pretty entertaining film.
But then there’s Brokeback Mountain and Good Night, And Good Luck. Both films with incredible depth that didn’t try too hard to impress but simply did by their measured approaches. Films that equally had phenomenal ensemble casts but made up of performances that blended into the whole smoothly without drawing “ooh, look it’s…” comments. Both had deep routed and important messages, ones that are sadly seldom addressed, and certainly not so well. Both were everything Crash was not.
Most people think Brokeback Mountain should have won. Personally I think Good Night, And Good Luck is the best of the three (and indeed one of the best film’s of the decade). But either way Crash should not have won.
10. 2006 Original Screenplay – Little Miss Sunshine beats Pan’s Labyrinth – I enjoyed Little Miss Sunshine. It was fun, slight, but fun. It had a faultless ensemble cast, and no doubt they made the script seem better. The script however strung a few good and a few running gags together before petering out with a “that’s what they came up with” ending.
Pan’s Labyrinth had arguably the most original screenplay of the decade. Now I know “original” screenplay refers to not based on previous material as opposed to original in the ‘unlike anything you’ve read before’ sense but Pan’s Labyrinth thought out every strand, balanced the fantasy and real worlds on a knife-edge with expert skill. It was capable of bringing out emotions and opinions in one viewer that were entirely different from another while allowing both to be right. Some people find the ending heart-rending and tragic, others beautiful and heart-lifting. The skill of the screenplay of Pan’s Labyrinth is really something special. Perhaps rivaled only by the Coen Brothers and There Will Be Blood during the decade there is simply no way Pan’s Labyrinth should have lost out to the entertaining but hardly outstanding whimsy of Little Miss Sunshine.
Unfortunately Oscar has a habit of giving the “little US indie hit made good” the Original Screenplay award as a consolation prize. It’s a habit they need to break, never so clearly proven as here.
11. 2007 Best Visual Effects – The Golden Compass beats Transformers – say what you will about Michael Bay’s bombastic Transformers but ILM’s groundbreaking VFX were astounding. It all got a bit confused in the second film (not nominated this year) but the robot-human interaction in the first film was utterly seemless, the transformations believable. There hadn’t been as convincing an effects movie since LOTR and perhaps even since Jurassic Park, but rumours abound that general bad feeling towards ego-maniac Michael Bay kept Transformers from scoring any wins, even in these technical awards which would have given the hard work of behind the scenes maestros (not Bay) the little gold man.
And so instead they awarded The Golden Compass! Yes, the same Golden Compass with the cartoonish polar bears and Narnia-standard FX. It was one thing not to award a Bay film an Oscar but to give it to such a sub-standard effort as Golden Compass must have been a huge slap in the face. Perhaps that’s why. It probably is. But it’s childish and the fact remains that Transformers not winning this category is perverse.
12. 2008 Best Foreign Language – Departures beats Waltz With Bashir – As I said at the start the foreign language pick often galls me but never more so than last year. Since the Academy insist on foreign language films being seen on a big screen in order to vote in the early stages it tends to lead to older, retired voters who lean toward “Sunday afternoon TV movies your Mum would like” over edgier, darker, tougher fare, dominating this category and leads to the exclusion of films like City Of God and last year’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days from even the nominations. Very original foreign language films (such as Amelie and Pan’s Labyrinth) have a tendency to lose out to more straight-forward dramas that the older voters are more comfortable with.
Last year was such a case. Departures from Japan is a lovely film. There’s nothing very special about it but it does warm your heart and makes for a nice viewing experience for 2 hours. You can sit back and, apart from reading the subtitles, do no work – just letting it wash over you.
Waltz With Bashir is not that. It is an animated documentary-style account of brutal historic events told with a worrying impartiality (worrying to Hollywood and the US which tend to be anything but impartial), while dealing with post-traumatic stress induced hallucinations and nightmares. It is compelling filmmaking and quite simply not just the best foreign language film of 2008 but the best film (full stop) of 2008.
So that’s it. Sure there are other things I disagree with (Alan Arkin winning supporting actor instead of Jackie Earle Haley in 2006; The Fog Of War besting Capturing The Friedmans for Best Documentary Feature for 2003) but these are the 12 I really wish I could go back and correct.
There are always the awards that make you go “what the f*#+?” – the ones that someone wins because they were owed from a recent losing year; or they just should have won by now; or they are the only American in the category; or they are an industry favourite; or the favourite was too “challenging” for many voters; etc.
But some of those that people mention a lot aren’t so bad are they? A lot of people think Star Wars should have won in 1977, but isn’t that like thinking Avatar ought to win this year? Years of nostalgic rose-tinted watching of Star Wars makes people wonder why a film with revolutionary special effects but a sub-par paint-by-numbers script and a lot of lousy acting (not everyone, but a lot of them) didn’t win over the smartly scripted, superbly acted, incredibly inventive Annie Hall. Fact is, Annie Hall deserved its win.
I have to accept this about wins I don’t like. I often disagree (in fact almost always) with the foreign language winner. To me Amelie was far better then No Man’s Land and Pan’s Labyrinth was one of the best film’s of its year, not just foreign language so its loss was astounding to me. But I accept that No Man’s Land is a very good film and The Live Of Others is excellent. They did deserve to win, I just wish they hadn’t come up against something else that deserved to as well.
The last couple of years have brought up prime examples of where I can’t really fault a win over my preference even though personally I disagree.
I love the Coen Brothers and I love No Country For Old Men but for me the raw power and majesty of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood was far superior. Had either film come out in either of the very bland year’s since they’d have walked it easily. Shame they had to go head to head. Last year I loved Mickey Rourke’s performance in The Wrestler and think he deserved to win the Best Actor Oscar that for a while he seemed on course for. Sean Penn won. But I can’t fault that. Penn was superb in Milk. The film was overrated but Penn was stunning. He did deserve to win. So did Rourke but only one man can so…
And then there are those I don’t think deserved to win (the third Lord Of The Rings, The Departed, Rocky, Russell Crowe in Gladiator over Tom Hanks in Cast Away – the man made 2 hours of talking to a volleyball compelling viewing, what more could we possibly ask him to do?!?!?!) but which I can see, and accept, why :– the first one should have won so Jackson was owed; Scorsese was so owed it was ridiculous; it was American feel good (and to be fair decent) movie in a year when the 3 (yes, 3!) far superior nominees had a very negative view of things in American society (Taxi Driver, All The President’s Men, Network); Crowe was owed from The Insider the previous year.
However there are some winners that just make me go “WHAT!!!!!” (like Ordinary People beating Raging Bull – which is just plain nuts!) and so below is my top 12 bad Oscar choices of the past decade (in no order other than chronogical) with my POV:
1. 2000 Best Actress – Julia Roberts beats Ellen Burstyn – Roberts was popular, sure, and she was never better than in Erin Brockovich. Okay. But it was hardly a testing role. Essentially a John Grisham character with a push-up bra Erin Brockovich is the kind of Hollywood version of an everyman character that Hollywood loves to slap itself on the back for but simply doesn’t exist.
Then we have Ellen Burstyn’s phenomenal, raw, disturbingly real portrayal of obsession and addiction in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem For A Dream. There simply is no way Burstyn shouldn’t have won for this and we all know that had she not previous won (in the 70s for Alice Doesn’t Love Here Anymore) she’d have walked this one. Burstyn was plain robbed here.
2. 2001 Best Picture/Director/Adapted Screenplay – A Beautiful Mind beats Lord Of The Rings: Fellowship Of The Ring – Many people viewed Ron Howard as owed, especially after the slight in 1995 when he wasn’t even nominated for the excellent Apollo 13 (which did get a Best Picture nom). And he pretty much carried the solid, but hardly astonishing A Beautiful Mind and its assorted departments to Oscar glory. There were certainly awards it deserved bit these three are definitely nos when you put it up against the first of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy – and let’s not ignore the fact that this gave the writer of Batman & Robin and Lost In Space an Academy Award!
Fellowship Of The Ring was an incredible achievement. Jackson and his cohorts had taken a very very dull book (I’m sorry but the first one really is, nothing happens) about walking and fashioned a compelling, exciting and yet bizarrely pretty faithful movie. A faultless cast (he even got a solid turn out of Orlando Bloom) FOTR had all the magic and whimsy, thrills and drama you could want. It was a true epic that instantly became as impressive a feat of filmmaking as anything released in the preceding decade or more. But it was fantasy – not a popular Oscar genre – so it got all the technicals the genre films are always fobbed off with while some said, well, let’s see the trilogy and see if they’re all this good. The second one was. It didn’t win either (see #5) but that didn’t matter because by now everyone knew it was all being saved up to give Jackson the keys to the kingdom with part 3. And the Oscars trapped themselves in a corner. When Jackson delivered part 3 and it turned out to be a bloated, seemingly never ending, ego-trip that offered nothing new to the trilogy and was the first to fail to match the book, offering zero tension or drama where its predecessors had excelled, the Oscars had no choice, they had to give it the win. People expected it, after all that was why they hadn’t given it to either of the first two.
Fellowship deserved it. It was the best film of the trilogy; the best film of 2001; and it would have saved them face in 2003. Whoops!
3. 2001 Best Supporting Actor – Jim Broadbent over Ben Kingsley – Okay so I love Jim Broadbent, he’s always good and he was typically solid in Iris. It was also the same year that saw him play a very different role in Moulin Rouge! (and close behind his excellent turn in Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy) and it really seems his win here was a combination win for both roles unofficially.
On the other hand we have Sir Ben Kingsley, who frankly is a pretentious ass! But that doesn’t remove the fact that his Don Logan in Sexy Beast was one of the most memorable and exhilarating characters to appear on the big screen in the entire decade. Kingsley was phenomenal in Sexy Beast. If I had to pick the 10 best performances of the 2000s he’d be in the top few and, I’m sorry, but Broadbent wouldn’t feature. This one should have gone to Sir Ben even if he is a prick!
4. 2001 Original Screenplay – Gosford Park – I love Altman and Gosford Park rode to a good haul of Oscar nominations off the back of how much Altman was owed an Oscar. Of course he didn’t win and Gosford Park consolation prize was a screenplay win. Everyone knew it would win this category and it did. But did it deserve to? Gosford Park was a solid script no doubt but this category featured Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach’s masterpiece The Royal Tenenbaums, the Nolan brothers twisty brilliance Memento and Guillaume Laurent and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s incredibly original whimsical fancy Amelie. Did Gosford Park deserve to beat any let alone all of these?
Some controversy that year regarding Memento being in the Original Screenplay category after the film credited it as being adapted from a short story written by Chris Nolan’s brother Jonathan is probably the reason Memento didn’t win. It should have been Memento’s to lose, but if it did Gosford Park was not the one that should have stepped in.
5. 2002 Beat Picture – Chicago beats The Pianist – Chicago is a fun musical with a sensational performance by Catherine Zeta Jones and great male leads in Richard Gere and an undervalued John C Reilly but a Best Picture winner? Essentially feeling like Rob Marshall took a camera into a theatre and just flatly and with little sense of dynamism filmed what was going on on stage (the DGA should be ashamed they gave him a Best Director award for this) is starred a weak-voiced and out-of-her-depth Renee Zellweger as the least sexy Roxie Hart in history. CZJ, Gere, Reilly and a dynamite Queen Latifah couldn’t make up for the director’s and Zellweger’s short-comings. And let’s not forget whatever won this year had to be enough to justify beating the second of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy. Chicago wasn’t even close.
But then there was The Pianist. It won Best Picture and Director at the Baftas causing a shock and a stir that many credit with its Best Actor and Director wins at the Oscars. It saw Polanski get a deserved (and controversy) Best Director Oscar but they just didn’t have the guts to give the film the win. Shame on them! The Pianist was grueling but stunning cinema. Not just a return to form for Polanski after years of so-so thrillers but a powerful, personal, devastating look at a period that created the artist looking back on it. All the pain in the movie could be palpably felt and every moment rang disturbingly true. The Pianist is Polanski’s masterpiece, more so even than Chinatown. Chicago is forgettable fluff. This win was a travesty.
6. 2002 Best Actress – Nicole Kidman and a plastic nose beat Julianne Moore – One of my deepest disappointments with this year’s Oscar nominations was that the brilliant, memorable supporting turn from the frequently overlooked Julianne Moore in A Single Man was ignored. But the fact remains Moore should have won years ago for her heartbreaking portrayal of the stoic housewife trying to keep everything in her outwardly-seeming-perfect life together as her world changes and collapses. Moore’s turn in Todd Haynes’ beautiful and tragic Far From Heaven is glorious.
What makes her loss worse was she lost to a plastic nose. Nicole Kidman’s bland delivery of Virginia Woolf in The Hours was not even the best female performance in The Hours. Both Meryl Streep and Moore herself were far more compelling and believable but Kidman had the showier role and the “transformative” plastic nose. If anyone was in doubt Kidman’s utterly false acceptance speech proved how overrated she is as an actress. I’ve despised Kidman ever since.
7. 2003 Best Actor – Sean Penn beats Bill Murray – Ah, the old “he’s owed and he’s overacting” thing the Oscars do so well. Like Al Pacino in Scent Of A Woman, Sean Penn’s hugely overacted shouty role in Mystic River was an attention grabber but hardly a great performance. Penn has given thoroughly deserving performances in his career (Dead Man Walking and Milk come most immediately to mind) just as Pacino (Godfather, Serpico) had prior to Scent Of A Woman, but Mystic River wasn’t one of them. The irony is in a typical compelling Clint Eastwood movie he was the weakest of the three leads. Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon’s more subtle, nuanced roles as the other two corners of the disparate friend triangle at the centre of the movie were utterly compelling and felt totally real. As did Laura Linney and Marsha Gay Harden’s supporting female leads. But then right in the middle of it was the over-the-top “look at me I’m ACTING!!!” of Penn. Why Oscar voters frequently seem to buy Acting (with the capital A) over a more subtle and realistic inhabiting of a character (like Bacon’s here) is beyond me. It’s like they’ve never seen films before. It’s like asking a punter down the multiplex who was the best actor – they’ll only remember the big shouty roles too. But as industry insiders – many of whom are actors! – shouldn’t they see the difference?
Well apparently they don’t and Penn’s win here over the desperately sad, painfully real, incredibly subdued, warmly funny and poignant Bill Murray in a career best (career redefining) Lost In Translation is appalling. Murray was never so good. Penn was rarely less deserving. This too is a criminal decision.
8. 2003 Best Supporting Actress – Renee Zellweger over Patricia Clarkson – Patricia Clarkson is like the female Stanley Tucci. She is always brilliant. She steals scenes and entire films over and over again. Yet she remains largely ignored by the academy – probably largely because she makes a lot of independent films which don’t have a studio behind them doing multi-million dollar Oscar campaigns.
In Piece Of April she gives a brutal, real portrayal of a woman fighting, and losing, a battle with cancer. She is mean, funny, irascible, frustrated and altogether human. It’s a slight film but there is nothing slight about Clarkson’s performance. Still (amazingly) her only nomination this should have been Clarkson’s to lose.
However she came up against the utterly miscast and totally ridiculous Renee Zellweger creation Ruby in Cold Mountain. Cold Mountain had Harvey Weinstein and the might of Miramax behind it. Plus Zellweger had lost Best Actress twice is the previous 2 years (for Bridget Jones’s Diary and Chicago). Cold Mountain has the smack of an “owed” Oscar all over it. But why was Zellweger owed? She didn’t deserve to win for Bridget Jones and she didn’t even deserve to be nominated for Chicago, she was the film’s weakest link (see #5 above). This could all be explained if she were extraordinary in Cold Mountain but she isn’t, she’s the most unconvincing farm-hand (or whatever she is, I forget exactly) in modern film.
Her win here is bizarre and inexplicable while Clarkson’s loss is equally so.
9. 2005 Best Picture – Crash wins – I don’t hate Crash but it is an incredibly obvious exercise in “worthy” filmmaking, drafting in an all-star ensemble to grab attention. There’s nothing subtle about Crash and for all it has “to say” on the surface when you look underneath that surface there’s really nothing all that deep to what is has to say. Nothing original. Nothing particularly interesting or surprising. It’s a solidly made, pretty entertaining film.
But then there’s Brokeback Mountain and Good Night, And Good Luck. Both films with incredible depth that didn’t try too hard to impress but simply did by their measured approaches. Films that equally had phenomenal ensemble casts but made up of performances that blended into the whole smoothly without drawing “ooh, look it’s…” comments. Both had deep routed and important messages, ones that are sadly seldom addressed, and certainly not so well. Both were everything Crash was not.
Most people think Brokeback Mountain should have won. Personally I think Good Night, And Good Luck is the best of the three (and indeed one of the best film’s of the decade). But either way Crash should not have won.
10. 2006 Original Screenplay – Little Miss Sunshine beats Pan’s Labyrinth – I enjoyed Little Miss Sunshine. It was fun, slight, but fun. It had a faultless ensemble cast, and no doubt they made the script seem better. The script however strung a few good and a few running gags together before petering out with a “that’s what they came up with” ending.
Pan’s Labyrinth had arguably the most original screenplay of the decade. Now I know “original” screenplay refers to not based on previous material as opposed to original in the ‘unlike anything you’ve read before’ sense but Pan’s Labyrinth thought out every strand, balanced the fantasy and real worlds on a knife-edge with expert skill. It was capable of bringing out emotions and opinions in one viewer that were entirely different from another while allowing both to be right. Some people find the ending heart-rending and tragic, others beautiful and heart-lifting. The skill of the screenplay of Pan’s Labyrinth is really something special. Perhaps rivaled only by the Coen Brothers and There Will Be Blood during the decade there is simply no way Pan’s Labyrinth should have lost out to the entertaining but hardly outstanding whimsy of Little Miss Sunshine.
Unfortunately Oscar has a habit of giving the “little US indie hit made good” the Original Screenplay award as a consolation prize. It’s a habit they need to break, never so clearly proven as here.
11. 2007 Best Visual Effects – The Golden Compass beats Transformers – say what you will about Michael Bay’s bombastic Transformers but ILM’s groundbreaking VFX were astounding. It all got a bit confused in the second film (not nominated this year) but the robot-human interaction in the first film was utterly seemless, the transformations believable. There hadn’t been as convincing an effects movie since LOTR and perhaps even since Jurassic Park, but rumours abound that general bad feeling towards ego-maniac Michael Bay kept Transformers from scoring any wins, even in these technical awards which would have given the hard work of behind the scenes maestros (not Bay) the little gold man.
And so instead they awarded The Golden Compass! Yes, the same Golden Compass with the cartoonish polar bears and Narnia-standard FX. It was one thing not to award a Bay film an Oscar but to give it to such a sub-standard effort as Golden Compass must have been a huge slap in the face. Perhaps that’s why. It probably is. But it’s childish and the fact remains that Transformers not winning this category is perverse.
12. 2008 Best Foreign Language – Departures beats Waltz With Bashir – As I said at the start the foreign language pick often galls me but never more so than last year. Since the Academy insist on foreign language films being seen on a big screen in order to vote in the early stages it tends to lead to older, retired voters who lean toward “Sunday afternoon TV movies your Mum would like” over edgier, darker, tougher fare, dominating this category and leads to the exclusion of films like City Of God and last year’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days from even the nominations. Very original foreign language films (such as Amelie and Pan’s Labyrinth) have a tendency to lose out to more straight-forward dramas that the older voters are more comfortable with.
Last year was such a case. Departures from Japan is a lovely film. There’s nothing very special about it but it does warm your heart and makes for a nice viewing experience for 2 hours. You can sit back and, apart from reading the subtitles, do no work – just letting it wash over you.
Waltz With Bashir is not that. It is an animated documentary-style account of brutal historic events told with a worrying impartiality (worrying to Hollywood and the US which tend to be anything but impartial), while dealing with post-traumatic stress induced hallucinations and nightmares. It is compelling filmmaking and quite simply not just the best foreign language film of 2008 but the best film (full stop) of 2008.
So that’s it. Sure there are other things I disagree with (Alan Arkin winning supporting actor instead of Jackie Earle Haley in 2006; The Fog Of War besting Capturing The Friedmans for Best Documentary Feature for 2003) but these are the 12 I really wish I could go back and correct.
