Selecting a Best Picture pick is usually a highly mechanical procedure. Who won the Director's Guild award this year? Ron Howard. Thus, unless you want to buck against one of the most reliable Oscar barometers, you wanna back "A Beautiful Mind." Still, the reason why the elk and bison have spent the past 10,000 years just loafing around while we humans have been putting men on the moon and developing new forms of low-fat cookies, cakes and crackers is because Man is a thinking creature.
The first cuts from this list – pretty damned immediate ones, at that – are "Gosford Park" and "In The Bedroom." "Gosford Park"'s problem is that it's a Robert Altman film. The Academy likes him when he does a nice, linear story (like "The Player) and they like him when he does something nonlinear on a grand scale (like "Short Cuts") but when Altman boxes up his…well, let's refer to it as "Signature Storytelling" because I mean for it to sound positive…in the confines of a few floors of one house, it doesn't translate into Oscars. At least it's a period drama, for which the Academy tends to exhibit a sweet tooth. "In The Bedroom" is a modern film and on many levels a very challenging one. Some flicks are forgotten during the walk from the theater to the parking lot, some flicks are eagerly discussed with friends in a nearby coffeeshop after the screening, and then there are flicks like "Bedroom," where you want to be along for a couple of hours to digest what you've seen. I've seen it twice and I'm still not terribly sure what my attitudes towards the characters are. I suspect that nobody leaves the theater feeling good about anyone or anything.
So as Oscar contenders, both "Gosford Park" and "In The Bedroom" have problems. But they're not insurmountable ones and the degree to which the Academy is willing to turn a blind eye to a nominee's problems is directly proportional to the amount of money it makes above $100,000,000. Alas, neither of these films ever really graduated out of limited, boutique releases.
That's why "The Lord Of The Rings" is a Best Picture nominee. It really shouldn't be. It's a fantasy film; the Academy hates fantasy. It has no big-name stars, at least none whom the Academy typically acknowledges as such. It's designed to please the sort of person who has at least eleven different kinds of dice on the coffee table in their living room, but has to root through a basement closet for a Monopoly set to find one with only six sides. The target audience of a conventional Best Picture nominee, on the other hand, is the sort of person who not only buys the biggest luxury SUV on the market, but also loads up the back with cinderblocks to make sure he has the worst gas mileage of anyone in his company's parking garage.
Brutal sins. But sinners can be made welcome at the Oscar table, particularly when they arrive with $290,000,000. Still, "Rings" is just too different to challenge the front-runners, "A Beautiful Mind" and "Moulin Rouge."
Those two are right up Oscar's street: they're period films, they're love stories…and they made lots of money.
Again, bet against Ron Howard at your own peril. His nomination is buttressed by the fact that the last time he won the DGA award (for "Apollo 13") he was more or less cheated out of his Oscar when the Academy failed to nominate him. This might be interpreted as a snub, but it's more likely that this will translate as further motivation to honor Howard for this and his past work.
Robert Altman is the only dark horse here. Scott and Lynch are out, by virtue of the fact that theirs are the only major nominations their films got. Peter Jackson would be in there with a chance (300,000,000 chances) but even that box-office figure isn't enough to drown out the ethereal chorus chanting HE'S 77 YEARS OLD. HE'S NEVER WON AN OSCAR. HE'S A LEGENDARY DIRECTOR. HE MIGHT BE DEAD SOON. "Gosford Park" isn't even Altman's best film…but the Academy might just take what they can get while the man's still actively exchanging oxygen for CO2.
This is always a fun category to work on, particularly when most of the nominees are still in release somewhere. When you go into the theater intending to enjoy a film's cinematography you willfully turn off your ears and the annoying bits of your brain that are busy trying to guess at the story's ending based on the way the way the ingenue seems to be smoking. You willfully experience the picture as you would a photograph. How is the shot composed? How is it lit? Is this image telling its own story even devoid of dialogue and sound effects? If you just shut up and look, the answer will probably be obvious. Unless, of course, the Academy voters – many of which can't even spell the word "lens" much less appreciate how one might be helpful in the production of a motion picture – throw in a curve ball and vote for a film which they may have liked for other reasons entirely.
"Amélie" and "Black Hawk Down" are early cuts from the list. "The Man Who Wasn't There" is just screaming out for a cinematography award. Lit and composed entirely (and lavishly) for black and white, the photography of this film is its most prominent star. But the flick won't be familiar to the majority of voters… so out it goes.
We're left with "The Lord Of The Rings" – which should win – and "Moulin Rouge," which might win anyway. Let's not put "Moulin Rouge" down. Actually, I do want to put it down, and then once it's down I want to jump on it a whole lot. But here, it's inappropriate. It took a lot of labor and inspiration to make director Baz Luhrmann's rather unique visual style actually work on film. But if "Moulin Rouge" wins here it won't be for the cinematography but for the art direction, a category which shouldn't be, but often is, mistaken for cinematography. (Art Direction is "There's a large and very fresh orange, with a Sunkist label, on an oak table covered by a purple tablecloth." Cinematography is "The orange is brilliantly lit from the left, casting a shadow that spills halfway across the table; the orange takes up the left third of the frame, leaving the remainder of the room visible but out of focus on the right."
From the top down, we've got:
1) Conventional but tricky storytelling, the epitome of "if you don't even notice it, it's good" style of excellence;
2) Really, really challenging action sequences in which there's a million ways to cut the scene wrong and only two ways to cut it right, and I'm actually not all that happy with one of them;
3) A complicated story requiring every conceivable kind of shot and every conceivable sort of pacing, a sort of one-film encyclopedia of how to tell a story through editing;
4) A movie whose entire mission statement is "Let's edit the film in a totally different way and see what happens to the storytelling";
5) A film that was so damned jittery that you wonder if the director didn't ask the editor "Well, look, can we cut from Zidler to the Count and then back again within the same frame of film?" at least once.
Translation: Who the hell knows. Running to the American Cinema Editors' Awards (they're the "A.C.E." that you see in so many credits) in desperation, we get little help. "Moulin Rouge" and "Black Hawk Down," running in two separate categories, both won.
I toss out "Black Hawk Down" because the Oscar is voted on by the Academy as a whole, not just editors, and I don't think enough voters have the right kind of awareness of this film to make it a likely prospect. I'm also going to axe "Rings" because the editing doesn't call much attention to itself.
So we're left with a three-way tossup. If "Memento" did any kind of serious numbers, it'd be the one to beat. It's an editing tour-de-force as the layman understands such things. "A Beautiful Mind" will get lots of votes by virtue of the fact that it's also a very likely Best Picture winner. "Moulin Rouge" will get a lot of votes from the movie's fans, plus from the people who just remembered all of the cutting, cutting, cutting. It was really crappy cutting, relentless cutting, cutting that didn't promote clear storytelling as much as it promoted epileptic siezures in the audience. But people know that Editing has something to do with cutting and assembling film.
Historical evidence is somewhat spotty, but this is one of those categories that floats freely. The probably Best Picture winner won't necessarily win Best Editing if (and here's the important bit) there's another nominee who (a) is a highly visible film and (b) has flashier editing. So I'll regretfully cut "A Beautiful Mind."
The Screenplay categories are largely second-tier Best Picture awards. The "real" Best Picture winner often wins, but just as often these two categories are used to reward films which (the Oscars being what they are) don't have a chance in hell of winning Best Picture.
"Ghost World" is out of the running, because the fact that you're reading a long analysis of the Oscar nominees means that you have a larger awareness and interest in films than a great many Oscar voters. And if you've never heard of "Ghost World" that means that none of the voters have, either. "Rings" is probably out. Moses didn't get any real kudos for the way he took the Word of God and turned it into something that could be clearly communicated in just two stone tablets. So Fran, Phil and Pete really shouldn't feel too bad about the snub.
Now here we've got a real Junior Oscar race. We allow "Amélie" to dry up and blow away (it's the foreign film that everyone's talking about but no one has ever heard of). Then we're left with four great, great films that would never stand a dingo's chance in Niffleheim of earning a Best Picture award.
Which means that we should turn our attentions to the most "writerly" nominees, the films where there's nothing to distract you from the stuff that the writer pulled off. So out go "Memento" (remembered as That Backwards Film) and "Monster's Ball" (which will be remembered for powerful performances), leaving us to choose between "Gosford Park" and "The Royal Tenenbaums."