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If I Chose the Oscars

Every year a little thing called The Oscars happens, and like usual I didn't see a whole heck of a lot of films that were nominated for stuff. In fact I didn't see any films in the follwing categories at all:

  • SHORT FILM (LIVE ACTION)
  • DOCUMENTORY SHORT FILM
  • DOCUMENTORY FEATURE

This year instead of picking a top ten list, I thought to myself, "Self," I thought, "why don't you do what the pros do? Why don't you nominate films in a variety of categories, and then choose winners from those nominees?" I couldn't really think of a good reason not to. It seemed a little more interesting than just having a list of films in order of preference.

So I've nominated films in all of the main categories for which Oscars are given. Except those three I mentioned above. I didn't see any films in those categories, so I'll just say that Back to the Future won in each of those categories. Fair enough? Good. I'll give the list of nominees for each category, and then just click on And the Winner is... after the nominees and it will reveal who I thought was the best of 'em along with an explanation of why I chose them.

    SHORT FILM (ANIMATED)

    • Mike's New Car

      And the Winner is...

    • Mike's New Car
      Duh. It's the only frickin' one I saw. Of course it's a-gonna win. It was pretty cute. Nothing groundbreaking or roll-around-on-the-floor-and-s#@t-your-pants funny, but not bad at all.

    ART DIRECTION

    • Frida
    • Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    • Star Wars: Attack of the Clones
    • The Devil's Backbone
    • Austin Powers in Goldmember

      And the Winner is...

    • Star Wars: Attack of the Clones
      I've alwasy thought of this category as "Best Things that Look Cool." Part of a series that redefined the designing for an entire genre, AOTC doesn't disappoint. With some great new aliens and planets, Production Design by Gavin Bocquet and art direction by Ian Gracie, Phil Harvey, Fred Hole, Jonathan Lee, & Michelle McGahey, were nigh-impossible to top, even for The Two Towers, which I thought borrowed too heavily from Norse stuff this time around.

    CINEMATOGRAPHY

    • Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    • Insomnia
    • Panic Room
    • The Devil's Backbone

      And the Winner is...

    • The Devil's Backbone
      This film was just so pretty, even when it was horribly ugly. The grit and contrast and colors were all top, top notch. It impressed me this much even though I saw it on a crappy, second-run screen. Guillermo Navarro's spectacular cinematography just beats out Wally Pfister's work on Insomnia, with its excellent job of filming things and making them look cold and as if you're suffering from severe sleep deprivation. But that's not quite enough to beat out Navarro's filming of the bleak Spanish countryside.

    COSTUME DESIGN

    • Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    • Star Wars: Attack of the Clones
    • Austin Powers in Goldmember

      And the Winner is...

    • Star Wars: Attack of the Clones
      Trisha Biggar's costume designing wins out hands down. Like I said earlier, I thought The Two Towers borrowed too heavily from Norse designs this time around. AOTC's costumes were very nice this time around.

    FILM EDITING

    • Star Wars: Attack of the Clones
    • Panic Room
    • Insomnia

      And the Winner is...

    • Star Wars: Attack of the Clones
      Say what you want about the plot or acting in the film, you can't fault the action. Lucas has alwasy been a great filmer, and really knows how to put a sequence together so that it flows with pop and panache.

    MAKEUP

    • Star Wars: Attack of the Clones
    • Frida
    • Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

      And the Winner is...

    • Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
      Um, yeah. Gilmli. How can you not look at Gimli, knowing that it's John Rhys-Davies under there, and not give an oscar to the work done on this film? Insanity!

    MUSIC (SCORE)

    • Howard Shore, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    • John Williams, Catch Me if You Can
    • John Williams, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones

      And the Winner is...

    • John Williams, Catch Me If You Can
      A good year for Mr. Williams. After two recent attempts at collaboration with Speilburg gone horribly wrong (A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Minority Report), Speilburg makes a film that Williams can not only score correctly, but score spectaculalry. Characters have their own jazzy themes that mesh together to form a wonerful, peppy score that really makes this great film even better.

    SOUND

    • Star Wars: Attack of the Clones
    • Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    • The Ring

      And the Winner is...

    • The Ring
      Them creepy sound effects on the video, and subtle interweaving of them throughout the film, made me pick this for the Oscar.

    SOUND EDITING

    • The Ring
    • Spider-Man
    • Star Wars: Attack of the Clones
      And the Winner is...
    • Star Wars: Attack of the Clones
      Does anyone know what Sound Editing means? I sure as hell don't, so I've pretty much randomly chosen AOTC because I watched the special feature on the DVD that shows how they collected sounds and edited them together. So at least I know this film HAS sound editing in it...

    VISUAL EFFECTS

    • The Devil's Backbone
    • Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    • Minority Report
    • Star Wars: Attack of the Clones

      And the Winner is...

    • Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
      This was a really tough decision between TTT and AOTC. They both have CGI sets, CGI stuntmen, and spectacular battle sequences that are almost completely CGI. But I'm giving TTT just barely the nod because of Gollum, the single best CGI-in-a-live-action-film character yet. Can't wait to see what he looks like in the next film when technology is even better still.

    ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

    • Chris Cooper, Adaptation
    • J.K. Simmons, Spider-Man
    • Christopher Walken, Catch Me if You Can
    • Jared Leto, Panic Room
    • Tom Hanks, Catch Me If You Can

      And the Winner is...

    • Chris Cooper, Adaptation
      How the f@%k do you bastards expect me to choose between Chris Cooper and Chris Walken in this category? Christopher Walken's Frank Abignale, Sr., is just so damnably compelling. Watch the way his eyes mist up in the scene at the restaurant when he asks his son, "Where are you going today?" Watch the way he moves when his son comes to him, begging him to tell him to stop his con-artist ways, and he tells him that he can't stop now because he has the government on the run. Brilliant. But Chris Cooper's spectacular performance just edges it out.

      Cooper has created what should go down in history as one of the best movie characters period. His ability to evoke disdain, fascination, humor, and horrifying sympathy in practically the span of a couple of seconds (or even sometimes simultaneously) is UNBELIEVABLE. It's all the better if you've seen Cooper in other movies and watched the kinds of people he normally plays. Cripes!

    ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

    • Nathalie Baye, Catch Me If You Can
    • Halle Berry, Die Another Day
    • Rosemary Harris, Spider-Man
    • Hillary Swank, Insomnia
    • Meryl Streep, Adaptation

      And the Winner is...

    • Meryl Streep, Adaptation
      Her performance isn't as spectacular as Cooper's, but she appears on screen and you instantly know what her character is like. Just glances and shifts of posture tell volumes of emotion. It's a quiet performance (except of course at the end) of quiet disappointment and yearning and a kind of desparation that is beautiful and sad and funny all at the same time. Fan-freakin'-tastic.

    ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE

    • Nicolas Cage, Adaptation
    • Tobey Maguire, Spider-Man
    • Al Pacino, Insomnia
    • Forest Whitaker, Panic Room
    • Robin Williams, One Hour Photo

      And the Winner is...

    • Nicolas Cage, Adaptation
      I don't know anybody else who could have pulled off this role—both roles I should say. Cage manages to make the Kaufman twins into two different characters but still make them seem like brothers; mannerisms one uses are used in a slightly different way by the other. You could have these two characters standing side by side in exactly the same clothes and exactly the same posture and expression, and I bet you could still tell them apart.

      But even more important than all that is the sheer unbridled exuberance Cage brings to the part. Charlie Kaufman could have been an horrible, unpleasant, unsympathetic, grating presence, and yet Cage is so clearly having so much FUN playing this role that his enthusiasm bleeds out of the screen and infests you. You're willing to go along with these characters because Cage fills them—even at their lowest moments— with a kind of pure, unadulterated joy that is impossible to resist.

    ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE

    • Kirsten Dunst, Spider-Man
    • Jodi Foster, Panic Room
    • Salma Hayek, Frida
    • Catherine Keener, Death to Smoochy
    • Naomi Watts, The Ring

      And the Winner is...

    • Jodi Foster, Panic Room
      Barely beating out the gorgeous Salma is Jodi Foster, the glue that holds together this complex and psychological film. Her performance is grounding and believable and so it makes the events seem grounded and believable. She's likable and believably intelligent but not some tough action hero. She's a real person who has been put in some very extreme circumstances and has to think her way out. And the real gift of Foster's performance is that you can see her character think.

    ANIMATED FEATURE FILM

    • Lilo & Stitch
    • The Powerpuff Girls
    • Spirited Away

      And the Winner is...

    • Lilo & Stitch
      It oh-so-barely edges out The Powerpuff Girls. Lilo & Stitch, not based on a book or legend or play or anything, is an entirely new creation. Chris Sanders fills his creation with such fun and honesty and unbridled energy, and at the same time with real, honest, and at times very dark emotions. This film has one of the best portrayals of a broken family I've seen in any film—animated or not. And it is somehow able to blend realism with cartoonish buffoonery and make it all better than its individual parts. It is a real work of art, but even more importantly that that (to me) is that it felt like I was somehow privileged to be watching it. It made me happy in a very good way.

    FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

    • The Devil's Backbone
    • Spirited Away

      And the Winner is...

    • Spirited Away
      This one was really hard. I only saw two foreign-language films in 2002, and they were both really excellent. I'm giving the not do Miyazaki's creation over del Toro's because of the sheer volume of imagination found within the world of Spirited Away. While not as good as many of his other films, it is quite a testament that even a lesser Miyazaki film beat out 90% of other films I saw in 2002.

    WRITING (ADAPTED SCREENPLAY)

    • Peter Jackson & Fran Walsh, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    • Charlie & Donald Kaufman, Adaptation
    • David Koepp, Spider-Man
    • Jeff Nathanson, Catch Me if You Can
    • Hillary Seitz, Insomnia

      And the Winner is...

    • Charlie & Donald Kaufman, Adaptation
      The freakin' movie is called ADAPTATION. It is ABOUT adapting a screenplay from previously existing material. And yet it moves so far beyond its source. This is perhaps the best screenplay I have seen on the screen. Period. It is the end-all and be-all of screenplays about "writing screenplays/making movies." It reinvents the genre and seals it up in a genius package that will probably never be topped. It is about itself and it contains itself within itself and it is all a lie and true and it's just the f@#kin' best screenplay.

    WRITING (ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY)

    • David Koepp, Panic Room
    • Hayao Miyazaki, Spirited Away
    • Chris Sanders & Dean DeBlois, Lilo & Stitch
    • M. Night Shyamalan, Signs
    • Guillermo del Toro, Antonio Trashorras, & David Muņoz, The Devil's Backbone

      And the Winner is...

    • David Koepp, Panic Room
      This film is a puzzle in which all pieces fit. There is nothign extraneous, nothing brought out from left field. Like a chess game, all pieces (characters, sets, and props) are brought out early, and once the game starts you have to figure out what you can do with what you have. The script is tight, it's ingenious, it's interesting, it's exciting, and except for a little bit of weirdness with the denoument, it's flawless.

    DIRECTING

    • Guillermo del Toro, The Devil's Backbone
    • David Fincher, Panic Room
    • Spike Jonze, Adaptation
    • M. Night Shyamalan, Signs
    • Steven Spielburg, Catch Me if You Can

      And the Winner is...

    • David Fincher, Panic Room
      Boy, howdy, at this rate Fincher is setting himself up to be the next Hitchcock. He took a script that had one location and five characters and infused it with style and substance and made the whole thing flow. It has great camerawork, compelling compositions, good use of sound and music, lots of great character work. It looks fantastic. It's fantastically directed. Hence winning the Oscar.

    BEST PICTURE

    • Adaptation
    • Catch Me if You Can
    • The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    • Panic Room
    • Star Wars: Attack of the Clones

      And the Winner is...

    • Back to the Future!
      Just Kidding! Click HERE.
    • Adaptation
      This may very well be my favorite film of the New Millenium so far. Like 2001's best film, The Royal Tenenbaums, it is everything I have ever wanted a film to be. It's uproariously funny. It's brilliantly smart. It's dark but at the same time invigorating. It makes me want to make movies. It practically had me in tears, if not with laughter than with sheer joy of seeing a genius film. Full of such wonderful performances and such unbridled intelligence, the filmmakers loved this film, and it shows. I don't know when I've never enjoyed WATCHING A MOVIE quite this much. I know I probably have, but it escapes me at the moment.

And there you have it. Let's look at the totals of what films won how many Oscars:

  1. Adaptation: 5
  2. Panic Room: 3
  3. Star Wars: Attack of the Clones: 4
  4. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: 2

I'm not sure what that means if anything. But there you have it.

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