OVP: Best Film Editing (2000)
The Nominees Were...
Joe Hutshing & Saar Klein, Almost Famous
Tim Squyres, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Pietro Scalia, Gladiator
Stephen Mirrione, Traffic
Dede Allen, Wonder Boys
My Thoughts: I think, at best, the ten-wide Best Picture field has been a double-edged sword. In theory, it's a good idea. There are tons of movies a year, and having ten nominees for Best Picture actually gives us a better sense of the year-it theoretically includes blockbusters alongside independent films, room for non-English language movies & animated fare. But in reality, it ended up just being boring, an overly predictable list of ten films that, even worse, take a lot of the charm out of the remaining categories. Take Film Editing, for example, where we have only three Best Picture nominees...that surely would've been five with the Best Picture race being ten-wide.
Almost Famous absolutely gets into the Best Picture race in a five-wide field. The movie was a cultural moment in 2000, bringing Kate Hudson into the lexicon as a proper movie star, and despite its tepid box office (it was a flop), the "Tiny Dancer" sequence would become iconic in the years that followed. In terms of its editing, it's fine. The movie doesn't have a lot of really inventive editing, and while it's very good, it leans a bit too much into the schmaltz as it goes. But scenes like the "Tiny Dancer" song really do work well in the movie, giving it a warm glow even if it's pretty standard for this particular aspect of the picture.
The same could be said for the other nominee for Best Film Editing, Wonder Boys, except that the film itself isn't as good. The construction here, with a ticking clock to see what happens to both Grady & James, isn't presented in a compelling way. Think of moments like Tobey Maguire reciting all of the famous Hollywood suicides, and there's nothing really growing in the list...it doesn't lead anywhere. The same with Maguire's relationship with Robert Downey, Jr. It's easy to see what Downey (all charisma & magnetism in this-he's the best part of the film) sees in Maguire (he's young, cute, and a prototypical twink), but Maguire's performance, and the way the film is cut, give us little indication as to what he sees in the reverse (he doesn't once read gay until he wakes up in bed with Downey). Honestly...this is one of those cases where a film's lead performance is so out of sync with the film itself that it's hard to judge a lot of the technical merits, because the right thing to do would be to cut Maguire's part down considerably.
Michael Douglas' other film in 2000 is much better, and started something of a revolution when it came to film structure in the 2000's. It's not Traffic's fault that it spawned movies like 21 Grams, Crash, and Babel, all inferior projects about multiple stories coming together into one tale (I'm aware Traffic wasn't the first...that doesn't mean it didn't start this select trend). What Traffic gets credit for is the way that it does it the best of the bunch, welding together different stories of drugs & addiction into a coherent overall narrative, while never abandoning (or boring) the audience by giving too much to one tale within the film. That's totally on the editors.
Crouching Tiger doesn't have that multiple-story structure, but it sometimes feels that way in how the editors present us two simultaneous love stories. Crouching Tiger's epic feel isn't just the dancing in the trees or the way it gives us gorgeous vistas across China. It's also about the similarities between the two, the way each generation makes the same mistakes when it comes to love, and how some of that is a choice and some of that is inevitable. But the editing here isn't just about storytelling-it's about the way that the fight scenes are constructed, always believable, specifically the fighting in trees, making the magic realism truly seamless to the tale at-hand.
Our final nominee is Gladiator. I'm about to watch another Ridley Scott epic starring Joaquin Phoenix tonight (if you don't which one guess correctly, I'll banish you to Elba), and I'm curious if he'll have the same mistakes in that one. There's something in Gladiator in the way it looks (everything is gorgeous, including Russell Crowe), but it's also terribly boring. The film's fight scenes, except those in the arena itself, are dull-they come too often, the pacing in the movie is all-wrong, and they become indistinguishable the further we go. This is on the editors-they needed to trim this overlong movie down, and maybe spare the audience from really lifeless violence at every turn.
Other Precursor Contenders: The ACE Eddie Awards separate their categories between Comedy/Musical and Drama, so we have ten nominations. For Drama, the victor was Gladiator against Billy Elliot, Cast Away, Crouching Tiger, and Traffic, while Comedy/Musical went with Almost Famous over Best in Show, Chocolat, O Brother, Where Art Thou, and Shanghai Noon. BAFTA also went with Gladiator, here against Billy Elliot, Crouching Tiger, Erin Brockovich, & Traffic. Sixth place was likely either Erin Brockovich (never count out a Best Picture nominee, and it was closer than Chocolat which really didn't factor in the tech categories even though it's a pretty movie) against Billy Elliot, which dominated the precursors and was a just-miss for Best Picture. I'm going to go with Billy, but not in a convincing way.
Films I Would Have Nominated: One movie that has aged very well since 2000 even though Oscar totally skipped it (it would've gotten nominations in 2023) is American Psycho, which does marvelous things with its editing, particularly as we try to understand Patrick Bateman psychologically. I definitely would've thrown that into this race.
Oscar's Choice: In something of an upset, Traffic's unique approach to its story was able to beat more traditional choices like Gladiator and Crouching Tiger.
My Choice: I am also going to go with Traffic, which I think does something really special with its editing & even if it's a little gimmicky, it's a gimmick that adds to the story (which is the whole point). Behind it, I'll go (in order) Crouching Tiger, Almost Famous, Gladiator, and then Wonder Boys.
Those are my thoughts-what are yours? Is everyone aligned with Oscar's somewhat refreshing choice of Traffic, or do you want to favor something else? Do you feel like the ten-wide Best Picture race has taken some of the mystery out of the behind-the-camera categories? And was Erin Brockovich or Billy Elliot the near miss in this category? Share your thoughts below!
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