OVP: Picture (2002)

OVP: Best Picture (2002)

The Nominees Were...

Martin Richards, Chicago

Alberto Grimaldi & Harvey Weinstein, Gangs of New York

Scott Rudin & Robert Fox, The Hours

Barrie M. Osborne, Fran Walsh, & Peter Jackson, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Roman Polanski, Robert Benmussa, & Alain Sarde, The Pianist

My Thoughts: We are officially at the end point here!  After possibly our longest Oscar Viewing Project season, we've cruised through the past month for most of these articles, and will continue on that pace, starting our next set of nominees as early as next week.  If you're new to the blog, or to the series, welcome, and check out the links below for past Best Picture races, as well as past 2002 contests.  Tomorrow, we'll conclude with which films I would've nominated and awarded in 2002, but let's not hold you in suspense any longer-here are my thoughts on the five films nominated for Best Picture by Oscar, and my pick for who should've won.

Chicago is a film that's hard to dislike.  It's a winning score (one of the best in the history of musical theater), and has some splendid performances, particularly from Catherine Zeta-Jones.  It's also a film that kind of jump-started the musical trend.  While Moulin Rouge! was the catalyst, this mammoth hit & the awards that came after honestly were the real reason we ended up with Dreamgirls, Les Miserables, and La La Land in the years that followed.  It's not a perfect film (the direction is sloppy, I don't think Gere is a good choice for Billy Flynn), but it's the top of the heap of the Broadway transfers that would follow, and it's a lot of fun.  A nomination that ages well.

The same can be said for The Pianist, which is the film on this list that is most in Oscar's wheelhouse.  Polanski's film opus (despite steadily working in the twenty years since, this is his last "great" movie) shows us a jarring, horrifying look at what it was like in the Warsaw Ghetto's first hand (something that Polanski, who grew up in Poland during the Holocaust, lived through).  Aided by a spectacular performance from Adrien Brody, this is a truly mesmerizing, large piece of film, and one of the best films ever made about World War II.

The Hours is also jaw-dropping in the way it handles three separate but interwoven narratives.  The thing that I always come back to with this film is that the filmmakers do a marvelous job of making it feel necessary.  Like every conversation could be the last one we have with a character, the last time they'll interact with each other.  There's a giant ticking clock over a movie where we announce that a major character will die within the film's opening minutes, and must wait to find out who will have the Sword of Damocles falling on their shoulders.  It's also gorgeously shot, costumed, and acted, and I'll admit it, one of my all-time favorite movies.

The Two Towers also numbers among my favorite movies, and is to me the best part of Peter Jackson's miraculous six-part look at the world of JRR Tolkien.  In the same way that Zeta-Jones makes Chicago and Adrien Brody is the heart of The Pianist, here we have an unlikely magnet in our film, keeping us at the edge of our seats: a spindly creature named Gollum, perfectly played by Andy Serkis.  Everything about this movie works-the confidence it starts out with, and maintains the whole film, and a gorgeous cast, set design, & cinematography.  But if you think about The Two Towers, you cannot help but focus on Serkis, finding humanity in pixels in a way that no other actor, before or since, has been able to achieve.

Which brings us back to Gangs of New York.  Every season, there's at least one film that Oscar loved that I didn't, and it becomes something of a punching bag.  There are elements of Gangs that I enjoyed-I think Daniel Day-Lewis is stupendous in this movie, and I think the set design is really incredible.  But overall, it left me cold.  The central tension between the two leads feels underwhelming with DiCaprio over his head, and the romance with Cameron Diaz...it doesn't work.  This isn't a bad movie in the traditional sense, but it is by any metric you'd use to measure "Best" Picture, or the filmography of Martin Scorsese.

Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes separate their categories into Drama and Musical/Comedy, so you have The Hours beating the Drama list that included About Schmidt, Gangs of New York, The Two Towers, and The Pianist, while Comedy/Musical gave it to Chicago against About a Boy, Adaptation, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and Nicholas Nickleby.  BAFTA gave their Best Picture to The Pianist, atop the entire Oscar lineup, and Chicago won the PGA, with Adaptation, Gangs of New York, The Two Towers, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and Road to Perdition as the nominees.  In terms of sixth place, I honestly think these five were very set, and so it's hard to guess who was closest as I don't think they were very close.  People will say "it's Talk to Her" simply because of the directing/writing nominations, but there was very little buzz for this film for the top prize, and I think that's a stretch.  I'm guessing it's between Road to Perdition and Far from Heaven, both of which had a lot of support in the tech & acting branches...though if you told me it was My Big Fat Greek Wedding, I wouldn't have totally been blind sided (pun intended).

Films I Would Have Nominated: You'll find out tomorrow!

Oscar’s Choice: Chicago went into the night the frontrunner, and though it lost key contests for Director & Actress before the night was over, it did end up winning, likely over The Pianist.

My Choice: The Hours beats The Return of the King, but against The Two Towers, my favorite installment in the Tolkien sextet...I just can't do it.  Jackson beats Daldry, with The Pianist, Chicago, and Gangs of New York following them.

And there you have it-another OVP in the books.  Is everyone siding with the flappers of Chicago, or do you want to focus on the ents & orks of The Two Towers?  In a very established field, what do you think was the sixth place contender?  And overall-what is your favorite movie of 2002?  Share your comments below!

Also in 2002: Director, Actress, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Original Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score, Original Song, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Previously in 2002

Past Best Picture Contests: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

OVP: Director (2002)

OVP: Best Director (2002)

The Nominees Were...

Pedro Almodovar, Talk to Her

Stephen Daldry, The Hours

Rob Marshall, Chicago

Roman Polanski, The Pianist

Martin Scorsese, Gangs of New York

My Thoughts: My goal is for us to finish up 2002 this weekend (that will depend on how tired I am tomorrow after doing some winter recreation that is a bit outside of my wheelhouse so I'm hoping it doesn't knock me out), but for sure we're going to do Best Director today, because, well, you're reading it today.  The Best Director field of 2002 is fascinating partially because of who is not there.  In 2002, it was stunning that Peter Jackson, who had nearly won the Oscar the year before and was cited for Best Picture, was missing from the Best Director lineup, as he was assumed to be safe (and this nomination was a down payment on a win the following year that did materialize).  Instead, two directors, both with incredible filmographies (though wildly different public personas) got the nominations instead.

The first of those was Pedro Almodovar, who got his only (to date) nomination here for Best Director.  Almodovar's Talk to Her is a marvelously taut mystery, and similar to Original Screenplay, this is a worthy nomination & a great way for Oscar to have gotten creative.  I love the way that he frames this movie as a sort of expanding Rubik's Cube, where you don't entirely know where you'll go next and where the ground is ever-shifting.  Almodovar is also one of the truest "auteurs" working in movies today, giving his own flare to pretty much every inch of his movies, and this is no exception.

Roman Polanski, despite the fact that he won the Oscar for The Pianist, wasn't really expected to even get nominated headed into the ceremony.  Polanski's criminal history (which is well-documented online, and too long of a story to get into fully here) was something that many expected would keep him off of the Best Director list, which he hadn't been on since 1980's Tess.  I try really hard to keep an artist's personal biography out of these write-ups (it's hard not to, but I want to ultimately decide the wins here based on the work at hand), and it has to be noted that Polanski's direction here is superb. He keeps the story & film tightly focused on Brody's character, giving us an unflinching look at the Holocaust from someone who actually lived through it (Polanski, whose family were Polish Jews, lived in the Warsaw Ghetto as a child during World War II).  It's a mesmerizing one-man act that's really a two-man one, as this level of performance is only possible with a director helping Brody along every step.

Stephen Daldry's The Hours nomination was also somewhat in question in 2002, though not to the same degree.  Films with female leads sometimes get missed in the top categories, and obviously this is the story of three women, but I'm so glad he made it.  Daldry's work here is splendid, the way that he intersperses these women's lives, and I love the quickness of his direction...we never spend more than a scene or two with characters, and frequently leave people behind (think how Toni Collette makes this amazing impression, and then we are deprived of her for the rest of the film).  There's something so assured in his storytelling.

Our last two names weren't remotely in question in 2002-everyone knew they'd get nominated.  Rob Marshall was making his big-screen debut after years in theater & television (primarily focusing on musicals).  I'm going to own something here-I think the direction is the weakest element in Chicago.  The film just sort of sits there, and there's not enough flow from scene-to-scene, not enough connection to the musical numbers that are knocking it out of the park, and suddenly we return back to Roxie's world.  Marshall was criticized for this approach in later movies that didn't really call for it (this is not unusual for staged versions of Chicago), but I think here it doesn't work either-it's just flat, and it's the one thing holding Chicago back for me.

The final nomination is also one that I don't love, and it's from one of my favorite directors of all-time.  This was when we had officially entered the "Marty wants an Oscar" stage of Scorsese's career, where he was worried about becoming Kubrick & Hitchcock & Lumet, men who couldn't get competitive Oscars.  Gangs of New York, though, doesn't have the tightness that his other films do, and the sub-romances in the movie don't work at all.  This is a long, bloated epic that has the benefit of an incredible performance at its center, but in Scorsese's long filmography, this is the only celebrated title that I totally check out from, and I'm personally glad this isn't where he won his statue.

Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes went with Scorsese, and they did so over a six-wide field (atypical for the HFPA) as they had him beating Daldry, Marshall, Peter Jackson (The Two Towers), Spike Jonze (Adaptation), & Alexander Payne (About Schmidt).  The BAFTA Awards gave their statue to Polanski, and they had the same lineup as Oscar with Almodovar getting skipped for Jackson.  DGA had the same lineup as BAFTA (no Pedro, Jackson's there), but they went with Marshall for their winner.  And the sixth place is so clearly Peter Jackson, I won't entertain discussions about it being someone else.

Directors I Would Have Nominated: I already have the My Ballot ready, so I won't telegraph too much here other than I consider Jackson's miss to be a proper snub, and I will be correcting it on my end.  For the rest, tune in on Sunday!
Oscar's Choice: Heading into Oscar night, it was considered a truly tight race between Scorsese & Marshall, both of which felt like compromise wins (Marshall was brand new, Scorsese was winning for a film that no one agreed was one of his best), which is likely how Roman Polanski pulled off an upset and a standing ovation that featured Scorsese, Diane Lane, Meryl Streep, and (shudder) Harvey Weinstein that would be unthinkable today.

My Choice: Daldry, and not because I'm uncomfortable voting for Polanski (though truth-be-told, I would've struggled to vote for him if the Academy hadn't given me an out with a better directorial achievement).  Behind those two I'd go Pedro, followed by Marshall & then Scorsese.

Those were my thoughts-how about yours?  Are you more with the Academy honoring the controversial Polanski, or do you want to join me on less tempestuous ground surrounding Daldry?  Am I alone in thinking that Scorsese's nomination here is the one big miss in an otherwise grand Oscar history?  And where the hell is Peter Jackson?!?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

Also in 2002: Actress, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Original Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score, Original Song, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Previously in 2002

Past Best Director Contests: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

Top 9 Countries Without an Oscar Win

Earlier this week we tackled the countries with the highest number of submissions to the Oscars without a single, solitary Oscar nomination-today, we’re going after those countries that were lucky enough to get a nomination, but are still waiting for that first taste of the gold.  Here are the Top 9 (well, eight plus a former country) still looking for a gold man to call their own:

9. India

Number of Nominations: 3

Most Recent Nomination: Lagaan, in 2001

Most Submitted Director: The legendary Satyajit Ray (who went on to eventually win an Honorary Oscar) received three submissions but none of his films were nominated.

Did They Submit This Year?: Yes-they have submitted Liar’s Dice, a motion picture that won a pair of National Film Awards in India.

A Wee Bit of Trivia: Kamal Haasan has been in seven submitted films from India, the most of any performer, but has never had one of his films nominated.

Fernanda Montenegro

8. Brazil

Number of Nominations: 4

Most Recent Nomination: Central Station, in 1998

Most Submitted Director: Caca Diegues, who has been chosen six times, but never received an Oscar nomination.

Did They Submit This Year?: The Way He Looks, a gay coming of age drama which looks like something I am seriously hoping is at least shortlisted because I really want to see it.

A Wee Bit of Trivia: Walter Salles’ Central Station lost to Life is Beautiful (one of those rare situations that in “any other year” he would have won), but he did gain a major coup with the film: Fernanda Montenegro became the first (and so far only) Brazilian actress to be nominated for an Oscar.

6. Greece (tie)

Number of Nominations: 5

Most Recent Nomination: Dogtooth, the absolutely bizarre film nominated in 2010 for the Oscar.

Most Submitted Director: Theo Angelopoulos, who has been submitted four times but has never won a nomination.

Did They Submit This Year?: Yes-they submitted Little England, a steamy looking period drama about two sisters in love with the same man.

A Wee Bit of Trivia: Michael Cacoyannis, twice nominated for his work in Electra and Iphigenia, had a far more impressive Oscar haul when he directed 1964’s Zorba the Greek, which won him a trio of nominations, including for Best Picture.

Liv Ullmann

6. Norway (tie)

Number of Nominations: 5

Most Recent Nomination: Kon-Tiki, in 2012 (if you’ll recall, it came very close to winning the OVP from me).

Most Submitted Director: Peter Vennerod and Svend Wam were submitted three years in a row in the early 1980’s, but continuing our odd streak here, never were nominated for an Oscar (so far this is clearly a “if at first you don’t succeed, skip them in the future” situation).

Did They Submit This Year?: Yes, 1001 Grams.

A Wee Bit of Trivia: Actress Liv Ullmann, who directed Kristin Lavransdatter, 1995’s submission, was a two-time Oscar-nominated actress in the 1970’s, receiving citations for The Emigrants and Face to Face, and is generally regarded as one of the greatest actors of her generation.

5. Yugoslavia

Number of Nominations: 6

Most Recent Nomination: 1985’s When Father Was Away on Business

Most Submitted Director: Velijko Bulajic, who was submitted seven times by the country and in a first in our countdown did in fact gain a nomination, for 1969’s The Battle of Neretva.

Did They Submit This Year?: Obviously not, as Yugoslavia is no longer a country.

A Wee Bit of Trivia: Yugoslavia joins the Soviet Union, East Germany, West Germany, and Czechoslavakia on the list of countries that no longer exist but were at one point nominated for an Academy Award in this category.

Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night

4. Belgium

Number of Nominations: 7

Most Recent Nomination: Last year’s The Broken Circle Breakdown (we’ll be getting to this race tomorrow in the OVP)

Most Submitted Director: The legendary Dardenne Brothers, who have been submitted four times, including both of their Palme d’Or winners (they have never bee nominated, however).

Did They Submit This Year?: Yes, they once again submitted a film from the Dardenne Brothers entitled Two Days, One Night, which is getting raves and stars Marion Cotillard.  This could be a legitimate shot at their eighth nomination.

A Wee Bit of Trivia: As French and Dutch are both spoken in Belgium, there is a solid mix between the two.  Oddly enough, there is an even split with AMPAS, with them preferring three French-language films, three in Dutch, and one (1992’s Daens) which was in both.

3. Mexico

Number of Nominations: 8

Most Recent Nomination: 2010’s Biutiful (which had to have come close to winning considering Javier Bardem got a Best Actor ciation for the film)

Most Submitted Director: Arturo Ripstein, and proving what a fluke Yugoslavia is, he has gone 0 for 5 in terms of getting a nomination.

Did They Submit This Year?: Yes, they did, submitting a biopic of Cantinflas, who is an extremely well-known Mexican comedian who won a Golden Globe Award for the Best Picture-winning Around the World in 80 Days.  Though reviews are tough, biopics are usually gold at the Oscars-I suspect this will be a surprise on the shortlist, though ultimately miss for a nomination.

A Wee Bit of Trivia: While Spanish is the dominant language in Mexico, not all of their submissions have been in Spanish: 2007’s Silent Light was in Plautdietsch, which is the language of the low-German Mennonites (the film didn’t get a nomination at the Oscars, but won the Jury Prize at Cannes).

Andrzej Wajda

2. Poland

Number of Nominations: 9

Most Recent Nomination: The brilliant In Darkness, which was nominated three years ago.

Most Submitted Director: Andrzej Wadja, who throws my entire theory about constantly being submitted out of the water.  With eight submissions, he has scored nominations on half of them.  Wajda is one of the most famous Polish directors of all-time, however, and in fact has won an Honorary Academy Award, so clearly he’s someone that’s safe to bet on.

Did They Submit This Year?: Yes, and what a doozy: Ida, one of the most discussed foreign films of the year, is not only a likely contender for a nomination (allowing Poland to tie for the top spot), but also may knock Poland off this list entirely-it’s the early frontrunner for the win.

A Wee Bit of Trivia: The very first submission from Poland was nominated for Best Foreign Film, and was directed by arguably the most famous director of any Polish film to eventually get nominated: Roman Polanski.  His later films like Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, Tess, and The Pianist would go on to dominate the Oscars, the latter winning him the Best Director trophy.

1. Israel

Number of Nominations: 10

Most Recent Nomination: 2011’s Footnote

Most Submitted Director: Joseph Cedar, who has been submitted four times, twice winning a nomination for Beaufort and Footnote (clearly he’s on a role).

Did They Submit This Year?: Yes-they have Gett: The Trial of Viviane Ansalem, yet another film that screened at Cannes (which is slowly but steadily become the best indicator of what films are going to be submitted for the Oscars).

A Wee Bit of Trivia: Moshe Mizrahi is one of those rare directors who has been submitted from two different countries.  In addition to his two Israeli submissions I Love You Rosa and The House on Chelouche Street (both nominated), he was also the director of Madame Rosa, which won France the trophy in 1977 (and also starred Oscar-winner Simone Signoret).

And there you have it-the most snubbed countries for the Oscar.  Which of these do you think will be the first to get off the list (the obvious answer to me is Poland)?  Which will continue to wrack up nominations without actually taking a trophy?  Share your predictions in the comments!