2005 Oscar Nominations
January 31, 2006
He was a king on his island, a force to be reckoned with, but when the great beast came to America, he was subjected to man’s cruelty and unforgiving nature, succumbing to love, planes, a pesky box office lion, and now, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Of course I’m talking about King Kong, and the mammoth movie of the same name, which was conspicuously absent from the top awards categories when the Oscar nominations were revealed on Tuesday, relegated to four technical categories like Sound Mixing and Visual Effects, where it once again will do battle with Aslan and ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’, the film that ultimately conquered hearts and religious minds during the holiday season. The nominations this year are filled with predictability and few surprises, but they are generally a respectable and worthy lot, though I was hoping enough voters would think Peter Jackson’s miraculous remake was good enough to eek into a top category, besting the struggling “Munich” for the final spot in either the Best Picture of Best Director categories, but Spielberg’s exhaustive, important terrorist saga made the grade, and poor Kong, last seen flattened at the foot of the Empire State Building, will get no resurrection this March 5th when the awards will be telecast around the world. If I was a voter, ‘Kong’ would have triumphed, but a less than spectacular box office run was apparently stronger than world class critical acclaim, and having given over to fanboy mentality two years ago, showing ‘Return of the King’ with eleven trophies, the Academy this year shied away from fantasy, and for that matter, big money pictures, nominating only one film (Spielberg’s, naturally), that cost over 25 million to produce, making this year’s awards one of the most independent film heavy years of all time. Not that that’s a bad thing, for everybody knows most of the good stuff these days is coming from the independent divisions of major studios, but still, in a year that saw so few really good, technically marvelous, and emotionally satisfying epics, “King Kong” should have had a sporting chance.
But enough about Kong, he’s toast for now, and it would be unfair to focus primarily on the biggest snub of the year, because this year’s batch of nominations is surprisingly short in the snub department, opting for a list of first time nominees (14 of the 20 acting nominations are first timers), instead of famous names in marginal performances. As expected, and entirely refreshing and deserving, Ang Lee’s instant masterpiece, “Brokeback Mountain”, led the way with eight nods, including a second for Lee (following 2000’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”), a second for screenwriter Larry McMurtry (after 1971’s “The Last Picture Show”), Best Picture, Original Score, Cinematography, and three first time acting nominations for star Heath Ledger, and supporting stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Williams. Of all the ‘Brokeback’ nominations, the most deserving is the one for the Taiwanese master Lee, who has fashioned a poignant, harsh, symbolic, and utterly gorgeous picture out of a forbidden love allegory that, despite the late night TV jokes and increasingly famous ‘gay cowboy’ vernacular, is first and foremost a supremely good motion picture, and if there is one lock in this year’s races, it’s that Lee’s name will be called for Best Director; I’d be shocked if it weren’t. His stiffest competition, and the film’s as well, will come from triple nominee George Clooney and his crisp black and white social studies lesson “Good Night and Good Luck”, which nabbed a second best (tied with “Crash”) six nominations, including Best Actor for David Strathairn’s brilliant performance as newsman Edward R. Murrow. It has been one of those films that is highly respected, and oft nominated, but is usually bested at the awards ceremonies by the obvious superior nominee, and this year Clooney may have to settle for either a screenplay award, or his nomination for Best Supporting Actor for “Syriana”, because in all likelihood, “Good Night and Good Luck” is going to lose to “Brokeback Mountain”, and Strathairn, as good as he is, will once again lose to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s off the charts turn as Truman Capote in “Capote”, a film that did surprisingly well in the nominations, bagging five nods, all in the major categories.
My favorite film of the year, Craig Brewer’s mesmerizing hip hop drama “Hustle & Flow” was shut out of the top categories, but star Terrence Howard was justly nominated as Best Actor for his star making performance as a Memphis pimp looking to expand his horizons and pull his middle aged life out of it’s rut. Howard may not win the award (Hoffman seems like a virtual lock, barring a Ledger upset), but he’ll have a triumph anyway singing the nominated song “It’s Hard Out Here For a Pimp”, a number that’ll surely bring the stuffy crowd to its feel, or at least to a louder than usual applause level. If anything, it’ll undoubtedly be the first song in Oscar history to rely so heavily on the word “pimp”, and in the anemic Best Song category, where the Academy could only muster up three nominees (possibly to shorten the length of the show), it should be the first to win as well. Howard’s nomination is the best of the bunch, but other much deserved nominations on this year’s list include previously snubbed Paul Giamatti, whose performance in the generally ignored “Cinderella Man” recently won a SAG award, “Junebug’s” pregnant sparkplug Amy Adams, “Transamerica’s” Felicity Huffman for playing a man wanting to be a woman, to a sublime perfection (she’ll probably lose to Reese Witherspoon as June Carter Cash in “Walk the Line”, but it’ll be close), the Best Documentary nominations of “March of the Penguins” and “Murderball” (go Zupan!), William Hurt’s return to the nominations list (his fourth, first in 18 years) with “A History of Violence”, a masterpiece by David Cronenberg that was all but forgotten by the Academy, Woody Allen’s 21st overall nomination, this time for Best Original Screenplay for the London set “Match Point” (which I’m yet to see, but hooray for Woody anyway), the non-inclusion for Best Picture and Director of the confusing, and slightly over praised political dramas “The Constant Gardener” and “Syriana”, which are respectable and well acted, but maddening just the same, and finally, a welcome nod to Noah Baumbach’s sharp script for the family drama “The Squid and the Whale”, a film that, in a lesser year, could have wielded multiple acting nods as well. The best category of the night will be, surprisingly, the Best Animated Feature category, where all three films, Miyazaki’s dazzling “Howl’s Moving Castle”, Tim Burton’s creepy ‘Corpse Bride’, and Aardman Studio’s hilarious “Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit”, are top notch entertainments that don’t need to rely on computer graphics as their primary mode of animation. In a year that celebrated old school filmmaking, and old fashioned storytelling, these nominations were entirely accurate and speak for the overall tone of the nominations list, for, with the omission of one CGI ape, there’s very little to complain about, and very much to enjoy.
by Adam Suraf