In my humble opinion, one of the most average Oscar winners in history is 2001’s winner, A Beautiful Mind. It has some wonderful acting performances by Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly (who won Best Supporting Actress for her performance), Ed Harris, and Christopher Plummer. It has a well-written and Oscar-winning script, and Ron Howard (who won Best Director for his work on this film) did a fine job of manipulating the story so that for long stretches, we’re uncertain if this is all real or just playing out in the mind of John Nash (Crowe). There are some very dramatic and very intense scenes in this film that are riveting and entertaining. Unfortunately there are even longer stretches where nothing happens and the film becomes boring.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not a bad film. In fact, there is a lot to like about it. One of my favorite aspects of this film is the fact that the main character is significantly flawed, and each half of the film is about him trying to overcome his two main character flaws. The film has an interesting structure. While it simultaneously has a strong 3-Act structure and a compelling Hero’s Journey, it’s basically a story told in two parts. The first part is Nash prior to his diagnosis of schizophrenia and the second part is Nash’s story post-diagnosis. The film opens with Nash arriving at Princeton, and although it isn’t officially diagnosed, he certainly seems to be either somewhere on the Autism spectrum or already schizophrenic, but neither condition is diagnosed. He has a hard time making friends and the other students who are his peers love to belittle him every chance they get because he carries himself with a rather pompous attitude and they misinterpret his reluctance to be social as aloofness. The only person who shows him any kindness or respect is his roommate Charles, and he actually becomes a close confidant.

Nash doesn’t see the value in going to class. He’s trying to come up with a completely original mathematical theory, but he’s having a hard time coming up with one to the point where the faculty is reluctant to recommend him for any top assignments post grad. Then one night when his classmates are trying to determine which girl to hit on in a bar, it inspires him to come up with a completely new theory on governing dynamics, a cornerstone of mathematical economics.

This impresses the faculty and he is offered a prestigious job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he’s later brought to the Pentagon to decipher a Russian code, and he cracks the entire code completely in his head. Meanwhile, the mysterious Agent Parcher (Harris) watches from above. Back at MIT Nash reluctantly teaches calculus to his students, and offers them an unsolvable problem. One of the students, Alicia (Connelly) comes to his office to ask for extra help, and she sort of manipulates him into asking her out on a date, and the two eventually fall in love and get married.

Meanwhile, Parcher approaches Nash and tells him that Russian Agents are sending messages using codes in magazines, and are threatening to detonate a bomb somewhere on US soil. He has Nash injected with a transponder that gives him necessary codes, and Nash spends hours cracking the code and drops a sealed envelope off at a local well-to-do mansion in their mailbox, using the code that the transponder flashes on his arm to gain access to the property. After a close call where Parcher picks Nash up in his car and they barely escape Russian Agents in a hail of gunfire, Nash starts to become paranoid.

Nash then gets invited to speak at Harvard and he happens to bump into Charles, who is now caring for his niece, Marcee due to the fact that his sister was killed in a car accident. His paranoia is setting in fully now, and men who look like government agents start entering the room in which he’s speaking. In a panic he runs away, but is eventually tackled and sedated as Charles and Marcee look on. He is then brought to a mental institution where Dr. Rosen (Plummer) advises him that there is no such person as Parcher, there was no record of him ever having a roommate at Princeton, so that means Charles and Marcee don’t exist either. He refuses to believe it and when Alicia comes to visit him he spouts out his delusions to her as well. Only when he cuts open his own arm and can’t find the transponder does Nash ultimately realize he’s been hallucinating.

He then accepts the fact that he’s schizophrenic and starts on the drug therapy, however he can no longer work, and he has difficulty taking care of his infant son. Not only that, but the drugs he has to take have eliminated his sexual desires, so he can’t perform on that level for Alicia. It’s that issue that tempts him to stop taking the drugs, and when he does, his hallucinations come back again, and he nearly allows his son to drown in the bathtub. Alicia threatens to leave him, and he vows to get control of his hallucinations without getting back on the medication.

He gets an old classmate to allow him to work at Princeton, and even though he has occasional bouts with Parcher or Marcee or Charles reappearing, he eventually gains control. They continue to appear, but he gets used to them and is able to ignore them. Earlier in the film he was hesitant to teach students, and going back even farther he never wanted to go to class when we was a student. Ironically now being in the academic setting allows Nash to re-enter his work and start coming up with new mathematical theories, resulting in him receiving a Nobel Prize for economics, and allowing him to teach again.

One of the challenges that even veteran screenwriters have is creating flawed characters that are still likable. Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, along with Director Ron Howard were able to create in A Beautiful Mind a character that was deeply flawed and had many different flaws afflicting him, and they were still able to create a likable and sympathetic character. Of course, Nash’s flaws stemmed from mental illness, but just because a character deserves our sympathy, that doesn’t mean they’ll be likable. The filmmakers were able to do both in this film by giving Nash a subtle wit to go along with his brutal honesty, and they made sure that his arrogance stemmed from insecurity.

However none of that would have come off if not for the performance of Russell Crowe. A few weeks ago I criticized the Academy for not awarding Best Actor to Ralph Feinnes the year that The English Patient won Best Picture because it couldn’t have possibly won if Feinnes hadn’t given the great performance that he did. I believe that the same holds true for A Beautiful Mind. I now that Denzel Washington was great in Training Day, and even though Washington had previously won Best Supporting Actor for Glory, he had never won Best Actor before, and he is a fine actor and I don’t begrudge him for winning it. However, A Beautiful Mind wouldn’t have even been in the running for Best Picture had Crowe given any less of a performance than he did. His performance carried this film and nothing that Howard or Goldsman or any of the other filmmakers did added nearly as much to this film as Russell Crowe’s performance.

I need to digress for a moment as well. Having starred in the previous year’s Best Picture winner in Gladiator, Russell Crowe joined Clark Gable, Walter Pidgeon and Meryl Streep as the only actors to star in leading roles in Best Picture winners in back-to-back years. Gable did it with It Happened One Night (1934) and Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) before starring in a third Best Picture winner four years later in Gone With the Wind.  Pidgeon did it with the less spectacular How Green Was My Valley (1941) and Mrs. Miniver (1942). Streep had supporting roles in The Deer Hunter (1978) and Kramer vs. Kramer (1979). Russell Crowe’s run might be even better and more impressive given that between 1997 and 2003 he starred in five films that were nominated for Best Picture. Along with the two winners Russell Crowe starred in L.A. Confidential (1997), The Insider (1999) and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003). That is quite a seven year run that I don’t believe has been matched by any actor in the Academy’s history other than John Cazale who was in five Best Picture nominees (and three winners) between 1972 and 1978. And not to take anything away from John Cazale, but he was in supporting roles for all of those pictures, and Russell Crowe was the lead or co-lead in all of his.

The other thing to consider with Crowe in regards to these films is the variety in the style of role. He starts out the run as a detective weeding out corruption, then moves to a scientist who works for big tobacco companies before blowing the whistle on their corruption. He then played a Roman general turned gladiator, which was followed by the schizophrenic mathematician, and then the run was rounded out with a 19^th-Century sea captain trying to balance between his military needs and the scientific curiosity of his friend. This is a wide variety and displays the range that Crowe has as an actor. Yes, he was terribly miscast a few years later in his sixth Best Picture nominee Les Miserables, but I think we can all agree that Russell Crowe is one of the great actors of this era.

Jennifer Connelly was also very good in this film, and her performance garnered her the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Goldsman and Howard also won individual awards for their work on the film, and overall it is a very fine film in stretches, but to me it is an incomplete film. The sequences that are tense and dramatic are very tense and very dramatic and quite often had me on the edge of my seat. However there were long stretches of time in this film where little to nothing was happening and he had a hard time remaining interested. I enjoyed the film but felt like I should have enjoyed it more.

Did the Academy get it right?

No they did not, but they were close. I enjoyed A Beautiful Mind more than Gosford Park, which was a murder mystery/who-done-it, but the problem with it was that the murder didn’t happen until an hour and a half into the film. The last 45 minutes of the film were great, but that first hour and a half was very slow sailing, indeed. In the Bedroom was an indie film about a murder in a small town in Maine and the parents of the victim (Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkenson) trying to put their lives back together after the tragedy. It was a good film, and I could understand why it would do well at a festival like Sundance or South by Southwest, but I’m not sure why it was nominated for Best Picture, especially over a film like Training Day or Blackhawk Down. Moulin Rouge is a film that I love from the production design and art direction to the music and choreography to the actors and their performances. It was an over the top spectacle that was entertaining and beautiful, but it wasn’t deserving of taking home the statue for Best Picture. That honor should have gone to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Peter Jackson’s first installment in the Lord of the Rings series was an action-packed dramatic film with magnificent acting, splendid writing, marvelous direction, and cutting edge visual effects. It was the most complete story and the most complete film released that year, and in my opinion it was the Best Picture of the year.