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Chris's Best Picture Oscar Predictions 2001

Written: 10 February 2002

Oscar nominees to be announced: 12 February 2002

 
My eyes bleary from weeks of sitting in darkened theaters, I humbly offer you my predictions on the Academy Awards' Best Picture race for 2001. The nominees will be announced, as usual, on the second Tuesday of February – this year, it's Lincoln's birthday.

I've been doing these Best Picture predictions for about a half-decade now. To me, it's more fun than trying to predict the ultimate winners at the Oscar telecast. For a real movie fan, tallying the horse race before the starting gate – trying to divine the strange mix of art and sell that puts movies into the winners' circle – is the best part of the awards season. You get to watch a lot of interesting flicks in the otherwise dismal months of January and February, and you get to root for movies that stand little chance of winning, before the inevitable letdown of the ceremony.

I stick to the Best Picture contest because the stakes are highest – it's been said a nomination in this category can boost a film's grosses by 30 to 100 percent – and because there are fewer stupid X-factors than there are in the acting categories. That's not to say the Best Picture race is absent of politics; actually, it's all politics, which – like trying to call the Presidential race – is what makes it interesting. In fact, this year's Oscar race may be a little too interesting.


A Wide Open Race

Despite expectations that the recession, a narrowly averted actors' strike, and September 11 would change Hollywood's release schedule or affect moviegoers' habits, in the end, 2001 looked like most movie years – dark horses in the first third of the year, brain-dead entertainment over the summer, and prestige films after Labor Day. What was different last year was the lack of a galvanizing mainstream film – a Titanic, a Saving Private Ryan, even an English Patient. Basically, as the newspapers have been reporting for weeks, no clear Oscar favorite ever emerged in 2001, and the pre-Oscar awards handed out in December and January by critics and Hollywood factions have been all over the map.

As a result, this year's Oscar race is the widest-open heat anyone has seen in years, at least since 1996 (when Braveheart won over a seemingly random grouping of nominees like Babe and Il Postino), or possibly since 1992 (when Silence of the Lambs – a rare acclaimed thriller – triumphed over a wide array of films including the animated Beauty and the Beast). Studios are spending record sums on Oscar campaigns this year, convinced that anything, anything stands a chance of getting a nomination. (I'll get to Shrek in a minute.)

So the best way for a handicapper like me to make Oscar predictions this year can actually be summed up in a simple, Woodward-like phrase: Follow the money. The early buzz has Academy members rewarding films by big studios that took big risks – and that means financial as well as creative risks. Fox gives Baz Luhrmann tens of millions to resuscitate the musical genre (Moulin Rouge)? That's a risk. Miramax lets Lasse Hallstrom direct another safe, squishy literary adaptation (The Shipping News)? That's not. The lack of a front-runner also means the five Best Picture nominees might emerge from any period of the year – not just the fall, as is typical – or from any genre. Finally, unlike in previous years, there is virtually no film that is guaranteed a nomination. The worst I've ever done in my predictions is 3-for-5; I stand a chance to tie or do even worse than that this year.

Before I go into my picks, a reminder that these are predictions for Oscars, not a top-five list of my favorites. For the record, if it were up to me, the five Best Picture nominees would be Ghost World, Memento, Gosford Park, Amelie and Mulholland Drive. Now let's talk about (sigh) some other movies.



The Safest Bet

 
1. A BEAUTIFUL MIND — As close to a sure thing as we're going to get this year, Ron Howard's fanciful biopic of mathematician John Nash is the easiest bet to get a nomination. First, there are those damned Golden Globes – Mind cleaned up in January, and however meaningless the Globes are as awards, people still regard them as an Oscar predictor. It's got Russell Crowe, emerging as Hollywood's most bankable star – a recent Oscar winner attempting another podium-worthy performance – and the luminous Jennifer Connelly, who's paid her dues in a decade of small or just bad movies, finally in a money-maker. Speaking of which, Mind has been raking it in since New Year's and is still in the box-office top five after all these weeks – the Academy likes to back dramas with commercial clout. But the stealth weapon in Mind's Oscar campaign is Opie. On those silly "power" lists Premiere and Entertainment Weekly run annually, Ron Howard is always cited as Hollywood's only nice guy, the sole person in town about whom no one will say a bad word. After years of sowing goodwill – and, let's not forget, money, for his actors and his studio, Universal – Howard is owed: Many Oscar-watchers felt he was robbed when 1995's Apollo 13 (still, in my opinion, his only artistic success) got a Best Picture nod but he didn't make that year's Best Director list. In fact, Howard has a chance to do what Steven Spielberg did in 1993 when he pumped out both Jurassic Park and Schindler's List – follow his biggest hit (in Howard's case, The Grinch) with his most acclaimed picture. The truth? A Beautiful Mind is schlock, a dead-obvious tearjerker with a sub-Rain Man performance by Crowe and some of the most insulting incidental music I've ever heard in a movie. I'm not the only one complaining – rival studios and critics have been trying to pull a Hurricane on the movie, pointing out the howling inaccuracies in its depiction of the often unlikable Nash, the same kinds of inaccuracies that sunk the Oscar chances of the Hurricane Carter biopic two years ago. But it probably won't work: Mind is too big a hit, Crowe is too hot, Opie is too owed, and the movie has a patina of respectability (it's about smart people! who win Nobel Prizes!) that makes it bulletproof.

The Risk-Takers

2. MOULIN ROUGE — I didn't care for it; you might have loved it. If you did, you're in good enough company that the movie might go all the way. The film that most divided audiences last year, Moulin Rouge attempted something brave: reviving and modernizing a movie form long dormant, at least in America. And Australian director Baz Luhrmann didn't go halfway – his first musical is hyper-slick, mega-sappy, ultra-modern. It's also ultra-expensive – not Titanic-expensive, but pricey for a film with such apparently limited appeal. In its run last summer, the movie didn't really earn back the tens of millions Twentieth Century Fox spent on it. Now they're trying to close the gap. More than half a year after its release, Moulin Rouge has been the subject of an extraordinarily intense Oscar campaign. It's got one big element in its favor, Nicole Kidman, who had a banner year, delivering her three best performances ever: in Rouge, in the surprise hit The Others, and in the P.R. battle against a certain ex-husband of hers. A big hit soundtrack doesn't hurt. But as a pop singer might say, "It's all about you, the fans." The people who loved Moulin Rouge really, really loved it, and in a year when so few movies provoked passionate reactions from audiences, that's got to count for something. Even those who didn't "get it" are applauding Fox and Luhrmann for having the balls to resuscitate a genre that's so spectacularly flopped in recent years. (Newsies, anyone?) One last thing: The guy who green-lighted the movie a couple of years ago, former Fox Pictures president Bill Mechanic, was fired by Rupert Murdoch last year over one too many flops, but among studio heads, he was reportedly very well-liked. Giving a win to the movie that should have been his triumph would be sweet revenge – and Hollywood loves that story.

 

3. THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING — You want to talk about risks? How about the movie that nearly demolished an entire studio? By now, you've probably heard about New Line Cinema's huge gamble on The Lord of the Rings: a beloved series of books that had resisted screen adaptation for 30 years; the $300 million it took to bring them to life; the hit-or-miss director (New Zealander Peter Jackson) whose only previous hits were small art movies; the bet-the-farm approach of shooting three expensive movies at once, meaning two instant flops if the first one failed; and the fate of a formerly independent studio that could be swallowed up by parent AOL Time Warner if its gamble didn't pay off. So far, the story has been a series of happy endings – the first film's a hit, the books' fans are happy, the critics love it, the parent company will let New Line live. What more validation could the studio heads and Jackson need? How about a pat on the back from their peers? I really enjoyed The Fellowship of the Ring, but as a Tolkien neophyte, I must confess that I needed two viewings – one to devour the movie, one to digest it – before I could fully appreciate it as more than mere spectacle. That may be the biggest obstacle to New Line's Oscar hopes. The Lord of the Rings demands a lot from viewers, particularly from non-converts, who may watch all three hours (including its unresolved, Empire Strikes Back–like ending) and conclude with a rousing, "Um…okaaaaaay…" But as with Moulin Rouge, the film's fans are passionate, and non-fans admire the studio's chutzpah. After winning some of the early critics' prizes and the American Film Institute's first ever Best Picture award, Rings will probably get its nomination, so long as cynical voters don't look forward to those two prefabricated, and possibly better, sequels that are on the way.

The Classy Long Shots

 

4. IN THE BEDROOM — Every year, the bloodthirsty Oscar-hunting team at Miramax puts all of its firepower behind one or two movies. Most years, they've got at least one crowd-pleaser (Shakespeare in Love, Good Will Hunting, the saccharine Chocolat). This year, they've got their work cut out for them – their best Oscar hope got some of 2001's best reviews but is no crowd-pleaser. A tough-minded, superbly acted drama that harks back to the days when Miramax was a truly independent studio, In The Bedroom is the kind of film that may get respect but not a lot of love. Telling the story of a young man killed under avoidable circumstances and the effects on his family and an entire community, it is the antidote to A Beautiful Mind, avoiding one-dimensional characters and challenging viewers to confront unpleasant realities. Sounds like a day at the beach, doesn't it? What saves In The Bedroom from being as dour as, say, the dead-child drama The Sweet Hereafter is its gripping plot, including a third-act twist that feels amazingly uncontrived. At the very least, its lead actors, Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson, are locks for acting nominations – in Spacek's case, possibly a win. So does the movie follow its actors into the nominees' pool? As critically acclaimed downers go, does it follow in the footsteps of Traffic or Leaving Las Vegas? By a hair, I'm betting that Bedroom will get the nod, mostly because of that third act – Best Picture nominations are rarely conferred on films that are just acting showcases and not plot-driven, but the ending of Bedroom leaves you feeling like you just watched a kind of cerebral mystery, not just one long wake.

 

5. GOSFORD PARK – The odds against Robert Altman's Brit-accented comedy of manners scoring a nomination from the Academy are fairly high: Altman is an outsider's outsider in Hollywood; droll, British drawing-room comedy hasn't been a big Oscar category in decades, and the never-assured studio USA Films is handling the campaign (although the super-indie did strike gold with Traffic last year ). But Altman's ingenious upstairs/downstairs whodunit is the year's top acting showcase, and it has something his other multi-character fables haven't had since M*A*S*H: an obvious sense of humor. The fussiness and fustiness of Godford Park's milieu is offset by a very funny script that never talks down to the audience and makes them feel like co-conspirators. As for Altman's long love-hate (sometimes hate-hate) relationship with Hollywood, I think the town is eager to welcome back the prodigal auteur, even if he himself is not ready to be embraced. Call it the Terrence Malick effect – no one loved 1998's The Thin Red Line, but a generation of Academy members who'd been waiting 20 years for the reclusive director's return were so grateful to have a new film from him that they showered it with (mostly undeserved) Oscar nominations. Altman's no recluse, and he has no more friends than Malick did, but he does have more admirers, and his film deserves all the praise that can be heaped on it.

The Near Misses

 

SHREK — Throughout the Oscars' history, there have been no clear precedents when it comes to animated films – Beauty and the Beast got a Best Picture nomination, but it wasn't even the most beloved Disney film of its era (that would be the overrated, unnominated Lion King). So how do you guess the fate of an animated film that was more well-loved than most movies last year, period? It's even tougher than usual to call this year, when the Academy is set to launch its new Best Animated Feature prize. Won't Shrek just get nominated (and win) there? Probably. One big point in Shrek's favor is the fact that it's DreamWorks' only real contender for the big prize, after two straight wins by the studio (American Beauty, Gladiator). But after scoring the year's highest box-office gross B.H.P. (Before Harry Potter) and an even more massive home-video gross, does anyone think this needs Oscars, too? Probably not. Animation mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg will just have to content himself at having beaten his old studio, Disney, at its own game.

 

 

BLACK HAWK DOWN — In production long before September 11, this story of the United States' botched Somalia mission was rushed out by Columbia in late December because of its obvious resonance. Commercially, it worked: After Lord of the Rings, Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down has been the winter's steadiest hit. But critics' reactions have been tepid at best, and I have a hard time believing that the Academy – which has rewarded plenty of war movies in the past – feels passionately enough about this square-jawed, faceless tract to put it in the winners' circle. Plus, does anybody really think Hollywood is ready to reward megaschlock producer Jerry Bruckheimer with little gold men?

 

 

MEMENTO — Teeny-tiny distributor Newmarket made Memento 2001's biggest indie hit all by itself, an impressive feat. But the only thing harder and more expensive than getting a box office hit is impressing Academy voters, and Newmarket decided against spending the big bucks on an Oscar campaign. It's too bad – this is why the Academy needs campaign-finance reform as badly as Washington does.

 

 

AMELIE — This wonderful, F/X-laden French romance needed to make more people fall in love with it for it to be a serious contender for Best Picture. The film has its very devoted fans – I am one – but there's just not enough of them. Too quirky and probably too visually bold a film for the Academy to digest, Amelie stands a very good chance of taking the foreign-film prize, but even there it has tough competition (Lantana, No Man's Land).

 

 

ALI — Acclaimed by some but a financial flop, Ali should get Will Smith his hard-earned nomination. (Can't wait for this summer's ad campaign for Men In Black II with "Academy Award Nominee Will Smith.") There may even be nominations for supporting actors Jon Voight or Jamie Foxx, but that's it.

 

 

THE OTHERS — This is my dark-horse pick this year, the ace Miramax may be holding up their sleeve. The Others was already a box-office surprise, but there hasn't been that much buzz on it as an Oscar hopeful, partly because Miramax is distracted by In the Bedroom, and partly because Nicole Kidman fans are distracted by Moulin Rouge. And there is the little matter of it being a pulpy thriller, not really an awards magnet. But it's a classy, Brit-accented pulpy thriller (albeit one with a silly ending). This is such a wide-open year that even something like this could make the final five.

Other films that are too flawed or underhyped to take seriously but shouldn't be ruled out:

Thanks for reading. As always, I welcome your own predictions – write me at chris@molanphy.com with your thoughts. This year, I can use all the help I can get.

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