Next topic: OSCARS

The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring leads all nominees with 13, while A Beautiful Mind and Moulin Rouge took 8 nods each. (In a nod to my predicting streak, I said Mind would get 8 nods, though I thought Ed Harris would squeak one out).

While I've not perused all the nominations carefully, I will say that I'm pleased that Rings got so many nominations. It's an epic movie the likes of which isn't seen much anymore (unless you count neopseudoepics like Titanic). That Peter Jackson was able to cut the first 100 pages of the book, make a movie that's over 3 hours long, and come up with something on a monumental scale is damn impressive.

The downside to the nominations is that many of them are technical in nature. The only acting nomination is a supporting actor nod for Ian McKellen, who plays Gandalf. It may help that he's the odds-on favorite to win, though Jon Voight's depiction of Howard Cosell in Ali is a real contender, too.

Supporting actor may be my favorite category, as the other two nominations went to Jim Broadbent for playing Iris Murdoch's husband in Iris (which I don't think played within 20 miles of my apartment), and to Ben Kingsley for his role in a film called Sexy Beast (which I saw trailers for, but also don't think was shown anywhere around here, at least for any period of time).

And then there's Ethan Hawke getting a nomination for Training Day. Huh?

Even with the leading number of nominations, I fear that Rings will get overshadowed by Mind, a decent film whose critical success I'm at odds to explain. Ron Howard dodged some thorny issues to make a film whose depiction of mental illness is at times great (such as the way we are eased in to the knowledge that there's a problem) and at times hard to take (a lot of the post-hospital, back at home in Princeton stuff strikes me as being a Markie Post away from Lifetime). As I've noted before, Ron Howard doesn't exactly make challenging films (you'd never mistake The Paper for All the President's Men), but he is an excellent craftsman, and has a Hollywood pedigree that makes him a good Oscar candidate.

I've not seen Moulin Rouge, but I'm confused at its awards success based on all the reviews I read when thinking about seeing it. Most saw it as daring yet flawed, an attempt at merging the musical with post-modern movie making that didn't quite work. I suppose we should try to reward such attempts. I still think Nicole Kidman should have gotten a nod for her work in The Others, but I'll have to take it on faith that her Rouge work is better.

Also, lots of nominations for Godsford Park, a Robert Altman ensemble film that is odd for him in that (a) it's not 4 hours long, and (b) it's full of British people. Some consider him a genius, other a senile crank. Doesn't matter, probably, as even if this movie is celluloid genius from start to finish it's got to fight not only big-studio films but the Mirimax machine behind In the Bedroom.

The lack of nominations for Black Hawk Down surprised me in these U!S!A! times, but there were a few apparent snubs:

* Gene Hackman didn't get a nomination for The Royal Tenenbaums, Billy Bob Thornton didn't get a nod for any of his work in Bandits, The Man Who Wasn't There, or Monster's Ball

* Baz Luhrmann made a film- Rouge- that was good enough to get 8 nods, but didn't get a director's nod. Ridley Scott and David Lynch got nods but their films (Black Hawk and the TV pilot turned feature Mullholland Drive) didn't for best picture.

* The Harry hype is officially over, as Harry Potter and the Sorceror's/Philosopher's Stone only got 3 nods, all technical/artistic.

I'll be writing more on this as we get closer to the awards, of course. In related news, Freddie Got Fingered picked up 8 Razzie nominations, impressive given that there's only like a dozen categories.