Thursday, March 20, 2003

best picture

CHICAGO (Miramax)
Chicago has 13 nominations. Lord Of The Rings: Fellowship Of The Ring was the first and only picture ever to have 13 nominations and not win best picture. Remember, the film with the most nominations wins Best Picture a lot more often than not, which is why Shakespeare In Love was not the upset a lot of people thought it was at the time.

Musicals don't often win Best Picture, aside from that weird little burst between 1958 and 1965, when Gigi, West Side Story, My Fair Lady and The Sound Of Music all grabbed the top prize. The last musical to win best picture was Oliver! in 1968. (Not Cabaret, which won eight Oscars, leaving it with the dubious distinction of being the film to win the most Oscars without actually winning Best Picture. Best picture that year, 1972, was The Godfather)

That said, it's hard to see what picture can derail the Miramax juggernaut this year, unless it's...

THE PIANIST (Focus Features)
A bit of a dark horse, but if the acid frivolity of Chicago - a movie about the amoral seduction of celebrity - slips, The Pianist - its mirror opposite, a dark fable about a man saving himself by rejecting his identity in the midst of the Holocaust - seems the most likely. It's a very serious subject, which the Academy has honoured before, by an identifiably great director, anchored by a stellar central performance.

And if anyone hates Miramax, this is the place to go, especially given that Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers suffers from even more genre prejudice in Hollywood than the musical.

THE HOURS (Paramount and Miramax)
The logical choice for the literary and the small-is-beautiful crowd. It's the only Best Picture nominee that is neither filmed on massive sets nor loaded with digital technology. It's got an impeccable literary source and a jaw-dropping cast, but it may be too neurotically feminine to be perceived as Best Picture material. It's relatively unusual for a movie with a female protagonist (in this case, three of them) to win Best Picture - Titanic (only the top grossing film of all time) and Silence Of The Lambs are the only two that qualify since 1990.

GANGS OF NEW YORK (Miramax)
A magnificent mess with a climax that seems to have been run through a trash compactor, Gangs seems likely to pick up awards for Daniel Day Lewis and several technical categories. Like The Pianist, it is a movie constructed on amazing sets. Otherwise, it's got a level of violence that will back off older Academy members, and the "big" political themes ("America was born in the streets" - tell that to Thomas Jefferson or Lincoln) seem grafted on to justify Martin Scorsese's fondness for baroque revenge plots.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS (New Line)
Seeing it as a second-act slump is an almost guaranteed reaction, especially as director Peter Jackson took the opening of the book - Boromir's death - and used it as the climax of Fellowship Of The Ring, and took the book's climax - the confrontation between Frodo and Sam with Shelob in the caves of Mordor - and saved it to open Return Of The King. There's the genre prejudice of the Academy to consider, plus it picked up a ton of technical awards last year. This is the least likely nominee.