BEST DIRECTOR
The Nominees Are:
- Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation)
- Clint Eastwood (Mystic River)
- Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King)
- Fernando Meirelles (City of God)
- Peter Weir (Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World)
Erin’s Pick: Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King)
Marisa’s Pick: Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King)
The Winner Last Year Was: Roman Polanski (The Pianist)
In any other year, I’d probably be rooting for Sofia Coppola, even though I don’t think Lost in Translation would really be my cup of tea (and then there’s the fact that the cinema purists love it, which automatically causes me to become hypercritical; they did the same thing with Adaptation last year), just because it would be cool to have a woman finally win Best Director. However, she had either the bad luck or bad judgment to release her movie in 2003, and I overwhelmingly give my kudos to Peter Jackson (and even though 99.9% of critics are predicting his win, I still feel a little nervous that he won’t; but that’s why awards shows are kept secret nowadays).
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Well, last night I went to the first concert of the Denison New Music Festival, because I had to go for two of my classes. Mandy was there, and she invited me to be on her radio show later that night, provided I bring my CDs. It was fun. I went on the air a little bit, and she let me play two Styx songs. I ended up bringing the vast majority of my CDs (not including “The Grand Illusion,” since I couldn’t find it, which sucks because I wanted to play “Castle Walls” for Liz), and we certainly had an interesting mix. At one point she played Evanescence’s “Haunted,” followed by a song by a certain 23-year-old that Mandy *really* likes (I am NOT kidding), followed by Evanescence’s “Hello.” Then later on I played “Renegade,” which was awesome. She says she’ll probably ask me to come on again sometime.
WARNING: The rest of this post is extremely long, probably the longest post I’ve ever done. If you’re not a movie buff, the rest of this post probably won’t interest you, so you may leave now if you wish (but you can still comment, obviously). The rest of you, prepare to devote some time to reading…
As a little bit of Day-Before-Oscars fun, I decided to give you some Oscar history, namely all the previous winners for Best Picture (in case you were wondering), along with my take on the ones I’ve seen. There are times where I want to comment on one or more, but I can never find the right way to segue it into my normal posts, so I’ll bunch them all together. If I don’t provide commentary for a movie, you can just assume I haven’t seen it (and feel free to weigh in with your own opinions). Actually, I may comment on some films I haven’t seen, if I have something to say about them (but I will note that I haven’t seen them).
1928: Wings
1929: The Broadway Melody
1930: All Quiet on the Western Front
1931: Cimarron
1932: Grand Hotel
1933: Cavalcade
1934: It Happened One Night
1935: Mutiny on the Bounty
1936: The Great Ziegfeld
1937: The Life of Emile Zola
1938: You Can’t Take It With You
1939: Gone With the Wind
This is the “earliest” Best Picture winner I’ve seen. I know that Gone With the Wind is a classic and all, but it gets tedious really fast to me. I just don’t have the patience to sit through a four-hour-long soap opera. I’m not passing judgment on anyone else, though.
1940: Rebecca
1941: How Green Was My Valley
1942: Mrs. Miniver
1943: Casablanca
1944: Going My Way
1945: The Lost Weekend
1946: The Best Years Of Our Lives
1947: Gentleman’s Agreement
1948: Hamlet
1949: All the King’s Men
1950: All About Eve
1951: An American in Paris
1952: The Greatest Show On Earth
1953: From Here to Eternity
1954: On the Waterfront
1955: Marty
1956: Around the World in 80 Days
1957: The Bridge on the River Kwai
1958: Gigi
1959: Ben-Hur
1960: The Apartment
1961: West Side Story
I’ve seen this movie, but it was a long time ago, so I don’t remember it that much, just that I wanted so badly to like the song “Somewhere,” but the woman’s voice drove me nuts. I said sometime last year that I finally found a decent version of it (different singers, of course), but I only have a video file of it and I can’t find an MP3. Oh well. Such is life.
1962: Lawrence of Arabia
1963: Tom Jones
1964: My Fair Lady
I didn’t see this movie until my senior year of high school. We watched it in class. I’ve found that it’s a fun movie to watch with a group of girls because it’s easy to get into that male-bashing frame of mind.
1965: The Sound of Music
Wow, it’s been soooo long since I’ve seen this movie. I used to watch it all the time when I was little. I remember the first time I watched it, actually. I was about three, and my grandma wanted to show it to me, but she kept calling it “Maria,” (after the main character). For some odd reason, I thought Maria was an evil Muppet (I might have been watching Sesame Street when she told me about it, and maybe I identified it with whatever was playing at that particular moment), and I wasn’t interested. She finally got me to watch it, and it became a staple of my childhood. As a sidenote, my grandparents have been to the real Von Trapp mansion in Austria, the place where the movie was made (in Switzerland), and the lodge in Vermont that the Von Trapp family runs or used to run (I think they even met some of the Von Trapps).
1966: A Man For All Seasons
1967: In the Heat of the Night
1968: Oliver!
I don’t remember a whole lot of the movie (though I did see it). What I do remember is being in our middle school production of it. I didn’t have a speaking role (except in the dress rehearsal, when I was filling in for someone else who had one line). I do remember that I had been given a singing part in one song, but at the next rehearsal, they seemed to forget this and auditioned other people, but they wouldn’t let me audition again. They ended up giving the thing to someone else. I wasn’t the only one they did this to, though. It did convince me that I preferred being in small plays instead of musicals, though. The reason I don’t act in Denison productions anymore is that the amount of control I had as an actor in high school doesn’t exist here. For instance, in high school I was able to pretty much choose my own costume. Here at Denison you don’t even see your costume until a few days before opening night, and if you even make so much as a friendly suggestion, you are putting your life in your hands. You will most likely get yelled at. I got to the point where that just wasn’t fun, and I decided to mostly stick to tech stuff.
1969: Midnight Cowboy
1970: Patton
1971: The French Connection
1972: The Godfather
1973: The Sting
This is the “earliest” Oscar winner that I own on DVD (or video, for that matter). It probably has one of the tightest scripts ever. There is almost not a single second wasted, and everything is important to some degree. This movie’s win was also the first time a female producer won Best Picture (Julia Phillips, who co-produced with her husband and someone else).
1974: The Godfather Part II
1975: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
1976: Rocky
1977: Annie Hall
I haven’t seen this one, but how could any Woody Allen possibly be better than Star Wars? Sorry, I just don’t find him funny.
1978: The Deer Hunter
1979: Kramer vs. Kramer
1980: Ordinary People
1981: Chariots of Fire
1982: Gandhi
1983: Terms of Endearment
1984: Amadeus
1985: Out of Africa
1986: Platoon
1987: The Last Emperor
1988: Rain Man
1989: Driving Miss Daisy
I haven’t seen this movie, but I would just like to say that this was the first Academy Awards I watched. All I remember is the big dance number for “Under the Sea” and that The Little Mermaid won something. We taped part of it, but I think it got taped over. Strangely enough, I didn’t watch the Oscars again for two years.
1990: Dances with Wolves
I’ve seen this, but it was a long time ago and I don’t remember much of it.
1991: The Silence of the Lambs
When this first won Best Picture, I was extremely pissed off that Beauty and the Beast lost to it (it was the only animated film nominated for Best Picture). I was also eight years old. Now I think it’s a great movie. However, I think this is what started my tendency to become antagonistic toward the front-runner simply for being the front-runner (unless the front-runner is my top pick, but that rarely happens; in that case I get antagonistic towards the movie that has the best chance at upsetting the front-runner). But I digress.
1992: Unforgiven
1993: Schindler’s List
1994: Forrest Gump
This is one of the few movies that managed to eventually shake off my “front-runner antagonization” tendency (but not until way after it won), and now I think it’s a wonderful movie. I later found out that The Shawshank Redemption was also nominated that year, and I like Shawshank better, but I don’t really feel bad about it. If your pick’s gotta lose, the winner should be a good movie.
1995: Braveheart
1996: The English Patient
1997: Titanic
Until this year, this was the only time my pick was the front-runner. I still think people are being unfair to James Cameron for the “I’m the king of the world” line (if you’re interested, he was quoting the movie). It’s also kind of unfair that it’s become so popular to hate this movie (mostly because it was popular). Apparently you can only like this movie and remain credible if you were not a teenage girl when you saw it. Unfortunately, it happened to come out when I was fifteen, which puts me in that category even though I did not have the same motive as most of the other teenage girls. I saw it because I was interested in the Titanic itself (I had seen a movie from the fifties called A Night to Remember many times beforehand). I also saw the day after it came out, before all the box office and Oscar buzz started, so maybe that had something to do with it. I still like it, although not nearly as much as I used to and I haven’t seen it in at least three years. Then again, I’m sensing some cinema purist action behind this hate campaign.
1998: Shakespeare in Love
This is one of the few purely romantic movies I like (probably because it’s so intelligently written). I was as happy about this Academy Awards as the previous year’s, but for the exact opposite reason. This time my pick was not the front-runner, but it pulled the upset and won. I remember everyone predicting Saving Private Ryan, but Shakespeare in Love pulled through and won. Awesome.
1999: American Beauty
This one is kind of strange. I saw it on the recommendation of a friend of mine, and I had a weird reaction to it. I can see why it was so heavily praised, and I totally agree with it winning Best Picture. By critical standards, it is a good movie. However, I personally do not like it. Does that make any sense at all? It makes perfect sense to me, but I’m not sure I’m phrasing it really well.
2000: Gladiator
Unlike American Beauty, which I didn’t like but could see why it deserved to win Best Picture, I don’t get Gladiator at all. My pick that year had been Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which is a beautiful and well-choreographed movie. I didn’t see Gladiator until a couple months after it won Best Picture, but I wasn’t impressed. I could see Russell Crowe as Best Actor, but I don’t understand Best Picture because it wasn’t. It didn’t even come close. People kept talking about how character-driven it was, but I couldn’t care less about the characters. I didn’t have any interest in any of them. I just don’t get why it would ever win Best Picture. Crouching Tiger got robbed.
2001: A Beautiful Mind
This was one of those times that I tried desperately to fight off the “antagonize” tendency before the ceremony, even though I hadn’t seen the movie, because I got the feeling that I might like it. My pick was for Fellowship of the Ring, of course, but I didn’t mind so much when A Beautiful Mind won. I didn’t get to see the movie for several months, but my urge to fight off the “antagonize” was justified, as it’s a very good movie, very touching and yet very interestingly portrayed (although there is starting to be a backlash to this as well).
2002: Chicago
My pick last year was for Two Towers, but it was clear that Chicago would win in almost every realistic scenario. As such, I started to antagonize it, but this time I tried to head it off by seeing it before the Oscars. It didn’t get rid of it completely, but I wasn’t pissed when it won, which is good enough for me. I still don’t quite understand what about it makes it Best Picture, but I’m sure there’s something (unlike Gladiator). I mean, it’s fun and I like it, but I’m not sure what it was that got it the award.
Oh my God, that was long. You’re probably really bored by now (if you haven’t already fallen asleep), so I’ll see you tomorrow when I reveal my pick for Best Picture (although you probably already know what it is).
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