Oscars rehash: ’03, Year of Big Cities

Clearly, Chicago had a better year than New York.

In a few days, for the first time since before my parents were born, the Academy will choose its Best Picture from 10 movies rather than five. The move was made to try to include more movies the average moviegoer might have actually seen, but the end result -- other than the inclusion of The Blind Side -- was more movies like the original five. It's a solid group, certainly varied in its subject matter, scale and intended audience, but it's not the best collection of 10 movies one could imagine. If the Academy had been picking from 10 movies in 2003, the list would have been much more substantive and could have looked something like this:
 

Chicago: The eventual winner from the original five.

Gangs of New York: Not even remotely Martin Scorsese's best work and unworthy of being among the 10 movies, let alone the original five as it was. But with the Weinsteins stumping for it, there's no removing it from the list and it stands even then as a convincing argument for expanding the pool of movies. Any time an unworthy movie (See: Cider House Rules, Chocolat, Life is Beautiful) is nominated, a good movie misses a chance at finding a wider audience.

The Hours: Another of the original five. Small movie with big stars and a prosthetic nose.

Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: Epic in scale, epic in length.

The Pianist: The best of the original five and winner of two big awards -- Best Actor and Best Director -- but not the biggest.

The Quiet American: The first runner-up and first addition to an expanded list. It was far more worthy of the Best Picture slot than Gangs, but was screwed and nearly buried in in the aftermath of 9/11.

Minority Report: Steven Spielberg had a couple options to choose from this year, and at the time, this was considered the better movie. Maybe it still is. In any case, Hollywood can't expand a list of Best Picture nominees and not include Spielberg if he has something remotely worthy.

Talk to Her: The token foreign entry for which Pedro Almodovar received a Best Director nomination and Best Original Screenplay win. Worthy of its spot, but not the best option for a token foreign entry on this list. But given its success in other categories, it's a no-brainer that it would have been nominated.

About Schmidt: Jack Nicholson's first major attempt at playing someone other than himself after a few years. Alexander Payne made a movie that is sad and rich, and with Nicholson it sneaks onto the list in place of a couple movies that did better at the box office.

Far From Heaven: The push for The Pianist pushed this movie aside, but an expanded list would like have found room for it.

This expanded list of 10 still would leave out Catch Me If You Can, Spielberg's other, more entertaining entry of the year; The Bourne Identity, a movie that, while not as good as its two sequels, changed the nature of action movies and forced the James Bond series to get serious; Y Tu Mama Tambien, which could easily have been the token foreign entry in any other year; and the Spike Lee's The 25th Hour, a much better movie about violence and crime in New York than Gangs of New York. It was a good year for movies.

What should have won: Chicago was fine. I avoid musicals at all nearly all costs -- unless it involves Cartman, of course -- but when I finally saw Chicago, I enjoyed it. It was lavish, it was funny, it was fine. Not remotely my favorite movie of the year, but as far as Best Picture goes it's a lot easier to understand and accept in retrospect than, say, Shakespeare in Love, which seems like a fluke of marketing.

Watching The Hours, I felt at times like I had returned to Contemporary American Lit class in college, but it's a quality movie with good acting. Had it won, it might have seemed like another of those marketing flukes, but it's a good movie.

The second Lord of the Rings movie was much longer and much broader than the first, its scale was greater and we begin to see the vastness of the world Tolkien created realized on the screen. But with another movie still to come, it was too early to do anything more than nominate this movie. But it did help cement the next year's winner -- the final Rings movie only had to not suck in order to win.

The Pianist was a stunning reminder that Roman Polanski was more than fugitive, he was still an active and brilliant filmmaker. The best of those nominated, it was duly award for its acting and directing.

Gangs of New York was just happy to be nominated.

Better movies that got screwed: The Quiet American was a beautiful, sad and haunting movie that was nearly buried by post-9/11 kneejerk patriotism that nearly made it treason to admit that America hasn't always been the shining city on the hill. Michael Caine, so cloying and obvious in The Cider House Rules, was dark and restrained, and the movie captured the spirit of one of Graham Greene's more prescient works. About Schmidt was such an unexpected departure for Nicholson, who had grown comfortable playing himself in movies. Almodovar's Talk to Her was devastating. Solaris was hated by so many people, which was more a reaction to the difference between what people expected the movie to be and what it was. Produced by James Cameron, starring George Clooney and directed by Steven Soderbergh, some people were expecting a visionary sci-fi movie, something along the lines of The Abyss, only better. But it was really a meditation on sadness, suicide and love, a haunting movie that just happened to be set in deep space. Y Tu Mama Tambien, The Good Girl, Lovely & Amazing, Roger Dodger, About a Boy, Kissing Jessica Stein, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Insomnia, One Hour Photo and Gerry proved it was still possible to make small, entertaining or interesting films that weren't obvious Oscar bait like The Hours.

Worst award: Martin Scorsese didn't win, but the fact that he was nominated for Best Picture and Best Director for a movie that was a mess is the best example of how Miramax manipulated the Oscars with marketing. Scorsese should have won for Raging Bull and Goodfellas. His other work -- Taxi Driver, After Hours, King of Comedy, Mean Streets, Age of Innocence -- should not have led to him sitting in the audience, looking like an expectant sixth-grader waiting his turn in the spelling bee, when Roman Polanski won the director award. It was not becoming of Scorsese and it was Miramax's fault. Marty would eventually win his award for a movie that was just fun to watch and not -- like Gangs and The Aviator -- put into production for the primary purpose of winning Scorsese and Oscar.