Oscars rehash: ’05, Year of Second Efforts

Maybe Million Dollar baby wasn't good enough for Best Picture, but it could have been worse. It could have been directed by Christopher Columbus.A few quick lessons on how to make a sequel better than the original:

Before Sunset: Stick to what people love about your movie. Before Sunrise didn't resonate because it was a great love story, but because people enjoyed two smart people flirt the way people flirt. So fewer moments of consequence, more meandering, thoughtful dialogue which still builds to a final, moment of consequence.

Spider-man 2: Ask the experts. How much Michael Chabon really had to do with the second movie in this series is debatable, but the effort to include him in the story's creation -- and his subsequent screen story credit -- emphasizes a basic rule of comic book movies: When you need help, turn to someone who has read comic books, which is almost no one in Hollywood.

The Bourne Supremacy: Keep an audience on its toes. For instance, try killing off your primary, lovely, well-liked female character in the first few minutes just to remind people that anything goes.

Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban: Do not let Christopher Columbus direct the movie. Alfonso Cuaron opens up a wondrous world, and the scope of Potter's existence broadens to include misty days and wooden bridges and lakes and sunlight through trees on a fall afternoon. Cuaron directs a movie with colors and moods reminiscent of what childhood actually looks and feels like.

What should have won: Million Dollar Baby was a lean, mean, movie machine, but its winning was a makeup for Mystic River getting rolled over by Lord of the Rings the previous year.

Ray, like Walk the Line a couple years later, was a pure formula biopic. Compared to something really inventive like Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould or something that doesn't try to tell the whole story but focuses grandly on one part of a life like Ali, Ray was pretty blah and uninspiring movie with good music.

As a biopic, The Aviator was more complex and ambitious than Ray. If not for Gangs of New York, Martin Scorsese might have won the Oscar for this movie, but after that disaster and its shameful nomination, Hollywood was on the lookout for holes in anything he did. The Aviator was a little too obvious Oscar bait and Leo wasn't quite up to the weight of the movie, but it is a much better film in the long run than Million Dollar Baby and probably should have won.

Sideways. Such a sweet, sad movie that understands its characters so well. Alexander Payne's strength is to create interesting and complex characters, put them in an impossible situation and see what happens. Was it Best Picture? Probably not. It's too intimate for such accolades. It doesn't resonate in film history, just with the people who see it. It is the movie that most feels like a book among these five, something can be read/watched and studied over and over not for its technique but to better understand why people do the things people do.

Finding Neverland, was a fine movie, but really, it was just happy to be nominated.

Better movies that got screwed: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was one of the most inventive and educational movies about romance ever made, at once depressing as a relationship is deconstructed to its essence and reassuring because it reminds us that it is the essence that matters, not all the other crap that happens on the way. The Incredibles is very nearly a perfect animated movie that only becomes a little familiar in the last third. Dash discovering that he is running across water and saying nothing, only giggling is a lesson for modern animators in how not to clutter up a movie with too much dialogue. Also: The Sea Inside, A Very Long Engagement, Hotel Rwanda, Maria Full of Grace, Closer, Shaun of the Dead and Enduring Love (which suffered from the totally nondescript name of its great source material). Garden State was the best argument since Pulp Fiction for adding a Best Soundtrack Oscar.

Worst award: Two awards were given to actors doing impressions of more famous people. Jamie Foxx was fine in Ray, but really, was he better than Don Cheadle in Hotel Rwanda or Paul Giamatti, who wasn't even nominated for Sideways? Cate Blanchett's Supporting Actress award for The Aviator was really for Elizabeth, Veronica Guerin, The Shipping News, Pushing Tin and every other role in which she had to create a character mostly from scratch instead of mimicking the speech patterns of another famous actress. She was fine in The Aviator, but so much better in so many other movies. Take your pick of the other nominees: a grown-up Natalie Portman who stole Closer, Sophie Okendo, Laura Linney or Virginia Madsen.