2004 Oscar Nominations
January 27, 2005
Recently, a British poll stated that Alfred Hitchcock was the greatest director never to win a Best Director Oscar, followed by Martin Scorsese and Stanley Kubrick. I don’t take much stock in fan polls, and this one, which had the top actor never to win an Oscar as Samuel L. Jackson, and the actress as Demi Moore, is particularly strange, but the Hitchcock-Scorsese-Kubrick suggestion is appropriate, and shows how maddening the Academy can be in its omissions. God knows Hitchcock and Kubrick’s time has passed, but Scorsese is still at the top of his game, and by all indications from the Oscar nominations announced earlier this week, this may finally be his year. “The Aviator”, Scorsese’s grand epic about the early life of billionaire Howard Hughes, as he shoots “Hell’s Angels”, courts Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, and aviation landmarks, and slowly looses his mind to unseen phobias, tops the nominations list with 11 citations, the only film this year to crack double digits. Aside from Best Director (Scorsese’s 5th), the epic Hollywood recreation is also nominated for Best Picture, Actor (Leonardo DiCaprio), Supporting Actor (Alan Alda), Supporting Actress (Cate Blanchett), Cinematography, Original Screenplay, and a slew of other technical awards. Though the film isn’t likely to sweep all eleven categories, like ‘Return of the King’ did last year, it should fare better than “Gangs of New York” did in ’01, which went 0-10 against “Chicago”. “The Aviator” is a much better film though, and it seems to be getting the recognition it deserves.
The list of nominations this year was pretty standard. From the countless critics awards, as well as the highly publicized Golden Globe awards, we’d expect to see “The Aviator” top the list, and the other four films in the Best Picture category were hardly a surprise. 74-year-old Clint Eastwood is on a roll, following up last years multiple nominations for “Mystic River” with two nods for the seven-time nominated “Million Dollar Baby”, his much acclaimed boxing drama, which is finally seeing the light of day in Western New York. Besides Best Director, Eastwood landed his second career Best Actor nomination, and the film is also nominated for Best Actress (previous winner Hilary Swank), Supporting Actor (Morgan Freeman), and Adapted Screenplay. Unfortunately, as of this writing, I’m yet to see “Million Dollar Baby”, so I can’t say if the seven nominations are warranted, but based on the critical praise, and Eastwood’s talent as a director (he won Best Picture, and Director for the 1992 masterpiece “Unforgiven”), it’s probably safe to say that of the other four nominated films with a chance to knock out “The Aviator”, it’s this film. That’s not to say the other three have no shot, but realistically, the past few weeks have felt like a two-horse race.
That being said, I’m still hoping for an outside win for the best of the five nominees, Alexander Payne’s lovely, slightly melancholy “Sideways”, a film that received an under whelming five nominations. The film is up for Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actor (Thomas Hayden Church), and Supporting Actress (front runner Virginia Madsen), but somehow the star of the film, Paul Giamatti, whose performance as Miles, the failed novelist/wine enthusiast, is the backbone of “Sideways”, was snubbed, in favor of Eastwood. I don’t know what Giamatti (also snubbed last year for “American Splendor”) has to do to get Academy recognition. Aside from hosting the years funniest “Saturday Night Live” last weekend, he was also the feature of a big recent Rolling Stone article calling him America’s greatest living actor. He may have the critical and proletariat vote, but the stingy Academy is yet to recognize his brilliance; one can only hope they can redeem themselves with awarding his film the Best Picture it richly deserves.
“The Aviator”, “Million Dollar Baby”, and “Sideways” were easy to predict, but the final two slots were a bit of a toss up. Personally, I would have loved to see “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, or “Kill Bill: Vol. 2” slip in, but ‘Bill’ was entirely shut out (even David Carradine was ignored), and ‘Sunshine’ only showed in Best Actress (Kate Winslet), and Original Screenplay (Charlie Kaufman), so the more conventional “Finding Neverland” garnered seven nominations and “Ray” bowed with six, both including Best Picture. Taylor Hackford received his first Best Director nod for bringing Ray Charles’ turbulent career to the big screen, but the film is the weakest of the bunch (the “Seabiscuit” of ’04), and will only likely win for Jamie Foxx’s great performance as the blind piano genius. “Finding Neverland” is a sweet film, and it’s nice to see Johnny Depp recognized in the Best Actor category, but any film that fails to land its director a Best Directing nod (Marc Forster was passed in favor of British auteur Mike Leigh’s “Vera Drake”, opening this weekend in Buffalo) is generally ignored for the major awards. Seven nominations is a good consolation prize though.
The rest of the nominations outside of Best Picture featured a few good surprises, and as usual, a few terrible omissions. This was a big year for male leads in biographies, as evidenced with DiCaprio, Foxx, Depp, and the nomination for Don Cheadle in “Hotel Rwanda”, a film I’m yet to see, but I thought Liam Neeson’s performance in “Kinsey” was more than Oscar worthy. Guess not. “Kinsey” faired poorly all around, except for Laura Linney’s Supporting Actress nomination, and the other big sex film of the year, “Closer”, was generally ignored, save for the supporting categories (Clive Owen and Natalie Portman). It’s nice to see “The Incredibles” noticed for Original Screenplay, as well as Best Animated Feature, a lock if there ever was one, and the Best Actress nod to Catalina Sandino Moreno for her breakthrough performance in “Maria Full of Grace” was the best big category surprise of the year. Moreno is a beautiful woman, and it’ll be good to see her all dolled up on the red carpet, as opposed to the grungy cocaine mule garb she had to sport in ‘Maria’. Her nomination is reminiscent of the surprise nomination of Keisha Castle-Hughes last year for “Whale Rider”, and with a lineup that also includes two black actors, and “Hotel Rwanda’s” Sophie Okonedo for Supporting Actress, shows a refreshing pull towards minorities usually lacking in Oscar nominations of the past.
In the foreign film category, popular, acclaimed fare like “House of Flying Daggers”, “The Motorcycle Diaries”, and “A Very Long Engagement” were ineligible for nominations because of a stupid rule that states a foreign country can only be represented by one film, so that leaves Alejandro Amenabar’s “The Sea Inside” as the only conceivable choice, besides France’s “The Chorus”, that anybody stateside has even heard of. ‘Daggers’, ‘Diaries’, and ‘Engagement’ each received one technical nomination apiece, which suggests that they probably would have duked it out for the Foreign film award, if not for that unfair rule. Morgan Spurlock’s “Super Size Me” should have a lock on the Best Documentary Oscar, though not nominating “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster”, and “Touching the Void” is a major oversight, and in my eyes, the strangest technical snub belongs to the Best Original Score category, where the likes of “The Village”, “The Passion of the Christ”, and ‘Lemony Snicket’ somehow edged out Howard Shore’s radiant ‘Aviator’ score, and Rolfe Kent’s jazzy score for “Sideways”. We know the Academy has good sight, but apparently they have a tin ear.
Since January and February are generally bad months for newer releases, I suggest catching up on the nominated films you may have missed, so when the show rolls around on Sunday, February 27th, your ballot can be filled in earnest. We’ve got about four weeks to do our homework, but given the strength of the nominated films, it’s likely to be the best assignment you’ve had since, well, last February’s Oscar push. Despite some flaws, the years crop of nominees should make the telecast exciting and, hopefully, unpredictable.
by Adam Suraf