Oscars rehash: ’01, Year of What Could Have Been

What we do in life echoes in eternity? We thought it was the tagline for Gladiator, but really it was Ridley Scott warning Michael Bay to stop making crap. One of the richest years of movies in recent history, the year some of my favorite filmmakers did some of their best work -- Cameron Crowe with Almost Famous, the Coen brothers with O, Brother, Where Art Thou?, Steven Soderbergh with Traffic, Curtis Hanson with Wonder Boys, David Mamet with State and Main, M. Night Shyamalan with Unbreakable (alas, it was also the year Woody Allen made Small Time Crooks, so not everyone was perfect) -- and the year when former stalwarts of the new independent film like Soderbergh and Ang Lee began to bring art to the mainstream, this is also the year of one of the most frustratingly illogical movie moments.

First off, I more or less enjoyed Fed Ex: The Movie, sometimes known as Cast Away. Tom Hanks was as good as he has been in anything; very few actors are watchable on screen alone for as long as Hanks was. Yes, Wilson, the volleyball with a heart of gold and a face of blood, was a needless contrivance placed in the movie by a director who didn't trust his audience to sit still while Hanks said nothing. (As Wall-E later proved, just watching a near-silent main character is enough if the movie is rich enough, and Cast Away's on-island sequences were that.) But, I am willing to forgive all of Wilson, even the overwrought parting scene between Hanks and his synthetic, product-placed friend, for the sake of watching Hanks' character dig deep into his Boy Scout youth to remember how to make fire without a match, learning with each mistake, Fed Ex Man taking his place alongside Cro Magnon Man, evolution in fast forward. I am even nearly willing to forgive the distracting product placement itself, Wilson and Jeep and Fed Ex, even Fed Ex Man's final act in the movie of delivering a package -- product placement is so common that it's easy to ignore (at least consciously). Until, that is, it gets in the way of the plot.

Fed Ex Man is willing to open every package that washes up on his deserted island except one. He finds conveniently helpful things in each package, netting and blades and things that make his life livable on this island, allowing him to catch fish, light his fires, extract teeth and even make rope to hang himself when he considers that route off the island. Yet he stops just short and leaves one package unopened. Why? It has a cool logo? He just had a feeling? He was a Fed Ex Man to the end and felt that if he had even one package to deliver he would stay motivated to leave the island? Given his luck with other packages -- ice skates? -- it would seem worth taking a chance on that last package just in case it's, you know, a satellite phone. How pissed would Fed Ex Man have been if he delivered that package, stuck around to see it opened (that's another problem: wouldn't you want to see what was in there if you had brought it all the way back from from a deserted fucking island?) and find out that if he had just opened it himself he might have gotten off the island a year earlier and avoided some do-it-yourself dentistry? Just saying.

What should have won: As summer blockbusters go, Gladiator was a significant step up from crap like Godzilla and Armageddon and stumbled dangerously close to actual filmmaking. But Best Picture? No.

Steven Soderbergh at least took home Best Director for Traffic. But he cost himself another award by making another Best Picture nominee,  Erin Brokovich, a movie nearly totally free of the complicated hopelessness as Traffic. Brokovich was much easier for people in Hollywood to understand. After all, Julie Roberts was in it, looking all indignant saving the day, making lawyers richer, some other rich people slightly less rich and some poor people into new rich people. Point is, Soderbergh's more mainstream movie stole votes from his opus and let Gladiator win.

Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, had the vast epicness with deserts and forests and love torn asunder that under normal circumstances the Academy loves. But it also had subtitles, and asking your average Oscar voter to not just watch a movie, but read it, too, is just too much. But it's notable that Lee, like Soderbergh one of the last filmmakers to emerge from independent film when independent film was still, more or less independent, emerged with box office and Oscar recognition around the same time.

Chocolat was just happy to be nominated.

Better movies that got screwed: Cameron Crowe was recognized for Almost Famous with a win for original screenplay but deserved more. Throw in You Can Count on Me, Best in Show, Wonder Boys, High Fidelity, O, Brother, Where Art Thou?, Pollock and State and Main and you have a group of smart, well-made movies sans pretentious French pronunciation.

Worst award: Both lead acting awards went to people for work that was less than their best. Russell Crowe could have reasonably won the year before for The Insider, so winning for Gladiator could have been a makeup award. Julia Roberts won not so much for acting but for being Julia Roberts going by someone else's name, in this case, Erin Brokovich. Oh, sure, she wore skimpier clothes as Erin, and was all sassy and smart-mouthy when she had to be, but it was still pretty much Julia up there on the screen. Ellen Burstyn (Requiem for a Dream), Laura Linney (You Can Count on Me) and Joan Allen (The Contender) were all more interesting.