The Envelope, Please

Before I start my highly opinionated post on the recent announcement of the Academy Award nominations, I must must share a bit of off-topic current events.

My neighborhood is currently being terrorized by an escaped cow. Yes, that's right. I said cow. It seems there's a slaughterhouse in an adjacent neighborhood (which was news to me), and one of the cattle in the death march escaped and headed off towards Central Parkway. It disappeared into the wooded area behind the White Castle, and has been the subject of numerous 911 calls from confused Clifton residents. The last sighting was in Mt. Storm Park, but the only thing that police and the SPCA and whoever else is involved in this man... I mean, cowhunt have managed to find is a lot of cowpies.

Sometimes Cincinnati is just a weird place to live.

OK, onto the nominations. Now I haven't seen a lot of movies over the past year, so my opinions may be a bit shortsighted. But I still consider my thimbleful of film history and knowledge to be somewhat valid, and feel like I have a few things to say.

(I'm not going to reprint the full list of nominees. If you want to see it and judge for yourself, check out the list at the official Oscars site.

First off, yay for the 13 nominations for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Damn, did this movie rock. After rereading (OK, reading for the first time since I gave up halfway through the book when I was 11 or 12) the book, I'm impressed that they managed to pull off such an exciting film adaptation. Tolkien was a good writer, but he had a tendency to get bogged down in wordy descriptions of every last blade of grass in Middle Earth and four page poems and songs that didn't exactly move the plot along at a blinding pace. It did, however, make it incredibly easy to recreate settings and characters for the big screen. There was an incredible feeling of familiarity for fans that saw the movie; it was exactly the way I had visualized it in my head. It was a beautiful, beautiful movie.

And Orlando Bloom was awful purty too. (Sorry, got a bit distracted there.)

In the Best Picture category, I am completely at a loss as to which movie I should root for. LOTR got nominated, but so did Moulin Rouge. Moulin Rouge was one of those love it or hate it movies, and I fell into the former category. It was weird and wild, the mixture of well-known music and original compositions was fun, and I was profoundly shocked the first time Ewan McGregor sang. Where has that voice been hiding all these years? (Yes, he sang in Velvet Goldmine, but he was channeling Iggy Pop.) The whole movie was a crackpipe-induced revival of the Hollywood musical, and the Academy isn't known for embracing weirdness. I have yet to see the other nominees, but I can't get on the Gosford Park bandwagon simply because there is no way that it could have been as good as The Player, Robert Altman's masterpiece. If The Player wasn't good enough to take home the little gold guy, how could this one be? And where the hell is Memento?

As for Best Actor, I'm wondering how the recent murmurs that the Academy is racist affected the results. Look! Two African-American actors got nominations! (And one woman, and this year's host as well!) Now, I'm not gonna knock Denzel Washington. He's a fine actor, and I heard his turn in Training Day was an amazing piece of work. Will Smith, despite his status of being a popcorn actor, has proved he can handle drama (in Six Degrees of Separation) and almost had me convinced of the fact that I wanted to see Ali. I just don't see the Fresh Prince taking home the award. And while Russell Crowe is a good actor, I have issues with him as a person.

What puzzles me the most are the names that I expected to see on the list, but got left behind in the dust. Where's Gene Hackman's nomination for The Royal Tenenbaums? Guy Pearce in Memento? Billy Bob Thornton in The Man Who Wasn't There? (What an unfortunate and ironic title.) Steve Buscemi in Ghost World?

Best Actress... Renée Zellweger? Yes, Bridget Jones's Diary was a charming little movie, but not Oscar-worthy. Judi Dench got her annual nomination for being alive and making a movie (one that I've never even heard of). I'm pulling for Halle Berry, if only for redeeming herself for making Swordfish by appearing in Monster's Ball. But if she makes another Pepsi Twist commercial, I'm backing Nicole Kidman (she gets bonus points for not being married to Tiny Tom anymore).

If the Best Supporting Actor award doesn't go to Ian McKellan, I am going to be hopping mad. He didn't just play Gandalf, he was Gandalf. (Which was more than I could say for poor Hugo Weaving in the same film. While he was wonderful as Elrond, I kept expecting him to launch into his Agent Smith role from The Matrix. Must be the accent he used for both of them.) And who nominated Ethan Hawke?

I had to check the date on the list when I saw Marisa Tomei listed as a nominee for Best Supporting Actress. I'm still sore about the whole My Cousin Vinnie debacle. Maggie Smith and Helen Mirren will probably split the Gosford Park vote, so let's just give it to Jennifer Connelly and call it a day, shall we?

Best Animated Feature makes its debut appearance as a category this year, and I'm really torn. (Oh, and bad news for JohnnyB... Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within didn't make the cut.) Monsters, Inc. was yet another home run from Disney/Pixar, but I loved Shrek with an obsessive passion. Give the award to the cranky green Scottish ogre, please.

Costume design... let's see, two costume dramas, two fantasy movies, and a flashy musical. I'll take John Leguizamo dressed as a sitar over a movie that puts Hilary Swank in a dress with lots of décolletage. (Call it The Crying Game prejudice. It's hard to get out of that niche when you're that convincing in drag.)

Part of me really wants to see David Lynch win for Best Director, because I would love to hear his acceptance speech. But it just ain't gonna happen. Go Peter Jackson!

The Editing award should be renamed "The Pity Award for Memento." But then again, Moulin Rouge proved that editing and acid apparently do mix. Who knew?

Foreign Language film is going to go to Amélie, this year's "subtitled movie that people actually saw." Happened to Life is Beautiful, happened to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Makeup... let's see. LOTR had dwarves and orcs and hairy footed hobbits. Moulin Rouge had French courtesans. A Beautiful Mind had mathematical geniuses. Where is Rick Baker's nomination for Planet of the Apes? The makeup was the only reason why I even considered seeing this movie. Advantage: Middle Earth.

John Williams needs a vacation. The score for A.I. was not memorable, and the music for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was good, but a bit derivative. Howard Shore got it right with LOTR; exciting in all the right places, and unobtrusive when it needed to be.

This must be the worst year ever for song nominations ever. I've not heard a single one of them. It's sad that "Come What May" from Moulin Rouge was ineligible (it was a leftover from William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet and not written specifically for Moulin Rouge), because I would have loved to see Ewan and Nicole sing together. Oh well.

Pixar has a nominee for animated short, so the other nominees might as well save themselves the tux rental fee.

Sound and sound editing... oh crap. Pearl Harbor got nominated for both. It frightens me that after the awards, Buena Vista will try to market this damn movie again, this time focusing on the "Award Winning Movie" angle. Call it what you want guys, it's still a bloated love story with Ben Affleck with an action scene thrown in to keep the guys from nodding off.

Visual effects will probably (and deservedly) go to LOTR. I know how tall Elijah Wood is, but it never once caused me to doubt the effects that made the hobbits so much shorter than the other characters. Go away, Pearl Harbor. And take Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer with you. Please.

And I'm none too happy with the selection of Whoopi Goldberg as the host of the awards ceremony, either. Steve Martin made me laugh last year more than I had in years. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Part of me really wants to have a good old-fashioned Oscar party and invite folks over for cheap champagne and hors d'oeuvres. Part of me wants to just tape the whole fiasco and make other plans. I'll give it a little thought before I start sending invitations. At the moment I’m just happy that I didn’t manage to suffer through a single movie nominated for a Razzie.