Oscars rehash: ’02, Year of Hard Lessons

A lesson for aspiring directors who want to win an Oscar: Forget creativity and boldness, set aside grand visions. Bore us or tug relentlessly at our heartstrings or, even better, do a little of both.

While some tried and seemingly true formulas fell flat -- Julia Roberts in romantic comedy? Gold. Angelina Jolie running around in tight clothing and a bad British accent? Can't miss. Disney in a magical underwater world? Jackpot. David Spade in a mullet? Genius -- we learned some very important lessons in what turned out to be an educational year in audience taste and a very blah for year Best Picture. A few of those lessons:

Ocean's Eleven: Popcorn movies can be fun and fulfilling, as long as they are served with real butter.

The Lord of the Rings: Take the big-budget, adapted-from-much-loved-books fantasy movies and make them as far away from Hollywood as possible to keep them away from too many prying eyes, hands and editors and people with "helpful" notes until it's too late for them to do anything. If this had been made on the backlot at Warner Brothers it would have looked like something directed by Chris Columbus.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone: Speaking of . . . Never, ever let Chris Columbus near anything remotely inventive. He will drain ever ounce of wonder from the most wondrous thing.

Swordfish: John Travolta should have quit while he was ahead with Pulp Fiction and Get Shorty.

Pearl Harbor: As much as we can prepare to rip Michael Bay for making another awful movie with too many explosions, too many emotions and too many of everything, as giddy as we can get having such outstanding proof of his total ineptitude as a filmmaker right there on the screen with a big summer release date for all the world to see, we cannot prepare for Bay making a movie so bad we almost feel sorry for hm. Also, that there are times when the trailer should be released rather than the movie.

The Mummy Returns: Hollywood executives are simply running out of ideas for new movies. Does anybody have any fresh ideas?

Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles: Any little old fresh idea out there will do.

Dr. Doolittle 2: Hello?

Scary Movie 2, American Pie 2, Rush Hour 2, Planet of the Apes, Pokemon The Movie 3, Hannibal: Anyone? Jurassic Park III: No, seriously does anybody out there have anything original to say?

Shrek: Oh, wait, whew. Someone has made something new and fresh. Quick: get a sequel into production ready now.

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: Angelina Jolie really is built like a cartoon character, but even that barely qualifies as entertainment.

Shallow Hal: Gwynnie in a fat suit is still Gwynnie.

Sidewalks of New York: Someone should have stopped Ed Burns before he killed again.

The Affair of the Necklace: It really is possible for a movie to be as boring as it sounds.

Glitter: Watching an uber-celebrity's whole celebrityness begin to totally implode on the big screen isn't nearly as fun as we thought it would be.

Monster's Inc: Pixar, unlike Disney, can do no wrong.

The Shipping News: Miramax can do very, very wrong. Didn't we learn this lesson with The Cider House Rules? Just keep good books away from the Weinsteins and Lasse Hallstrom. Also, the Hallstrom who made My Life As a Dog and What's Eating Gilbert Grape must have died at some point in the mid-90s.

What should have won: A Beautiful Mind was so underwhelming, such a safe attempt at mid-brow drama from the safest of safe directors, so blah I am unable to even muster enough passion about it to call its win a travesty. It was simply what you would expect from Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, not bad, not brilliant, just sort of there, lurking, waiting to be watched and overpraised.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings was just a taste of what was to come in the series, and Hollywood seems reluctant to honor the early movies in a series just in case the rest of the series sucks. In any case, the first movie in LOTR series -- also the shortest -- was the least dramatic and least worthy of this award.

In The Bedroom looks at first like that Miramax movie that each year gets far more praise and comes closer to winning awards than it rightfully should (See: The Cider House Rules, Life is Beautiful, Chocolat, Il Postino); in other words the movie that is just happy to be nominated. But this one was the real deal, an acting showcase that Miramax's aggressive marketing helped uncover rather than create. That said, there were better movies that didn't get nominated.

Gosford Park is a beautifully mannered movie with a different tone that Robert Altman's work at the time like The Player, Short Cuts and Pret a Porter. Of those nominated, this would have been my choice, but it is still not Nashville or even Short Cuts.

Moulin Rouge! was just so happy to be nominated it decided to use an exclamation point. (So, for some this is more than a happy-to-be-nominated film; it is the better movie that got screwed. But the appeal of Baz Luhrmann eludes me to this day.)

Better movies that got screwed: Michael Mann's Ali remains my favorite of his films -- bio pics are difficult to do well, even more so when the subject is one of the most well-known, well-documented personalities in history. Will Smith does an admirable impression of Ali, but unlike lesser biopics like Ray and even The Aviator, Mann's movie isn't about how much like the real person the actor playing him or her sounds or looks. Smith captures the essence of Ali while Mann recreates a period in Ali's life that has been extensively documented but it is poorly understood, the repercussions of his transformation from Clay to Ali. Also, it's a bit of a shame that such a safe movie like A Beautiful Mind was honored in a year that produced some daring and really inventive, if not entirely perfect, movies like The Royal Tenenbaums, Ghost World, Memento, Waking Life, Donnie Darko, Mulholland Drive, Amores Perros, The Man Who Wasn't There, The Center of the World and The Deep End. Tilda Swinton's performance in The Deep End is the sort of role that almost never gets noticed come Oscar time, and, true to form, the Academy whiffed.

Worst award: Maybe it is just that every time I see Jennifer Connelly in a movie, I feel like she has added no range in the years since Career Opportunities. Her performance, like the whole movie, is just sort of blah and any of the other women nominated for Best Supporting Actress would have been better choices.