In what was likely a coronation (no pun intended) as well as an acknowledgement to the entire series, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King tied a record by winning eleven Oscars, including Best Picture, and joining Titanic and Ben-Hur as the only 11-time Oscar winners. The previous films in the series had fairly limited Oscar success with The Fellowship of the Ring winning only four Oscars (Cinematography, Makeup, Original Score, Visual Effects) out of thirteen nominations and The Two Towers only receiving two wins (Sound Editing and Visual Effects) on a paltry six nominations. It certainly seems like the Academy was trying to correct those errors by bestowing on The Return of the King one of the most dominant nights in Oscar history. History was also made when it became the second sequel to win Best Picture (The Godfather Part II) but the first to win when its predecessor(s) did not. It also marked the third time in ten years that an action film won Best Picture, joining Braveheart (1995) and Gladiator (2000), which is unprecedented in Oscar history.

Ironically, I feel like The Return of the King was the least worthy winner of the trilogy. My personal favorite in the series is The Two Towers followed closely by The Fellowship of the Ring with The Return of the King a distant third. I remember being disappointed in the third film when it came out because you could practically see them looking at their watches. They’d been working on this project for several years, and The Return of the King just feels rushed, like they’re just trying to get through with it and be done with it. I felt doubly disappointed because The Return of the King is actually my favorite of the books, and on its own is one of my favorite books of all time.

I understand that they were rushed in the film because they followed a more linear timeline in the films that J.R.R. Tolkien did in the books. For example, in the books the sequence with Shelob the spider takes place at the end of The Two Towers. In fact, the book ends with a bit of a cliffhanger after Sam has killed Shelob, but is unable to prevent Frodo from being taken by orcs. The last line of the book is, “Frodo was alive but taken by the enemy.” In the films that sequence actually happens about halfway through The Return of the King. I must say also that it’s one of the most riveting and most tense sequences in the entire series. Director Peter Jackson had prior experience in the horror genre and used those tools to great effect in this sequence. As Frodo is being simultaneously pursued by Shelob as well as Gollum, the tension mounts to almost unbearable levels, even on subsequent viewings. The payoff is also fabulous, as we think that Frodo has escaped them both only to see Shelob creep out of a cave and sneak up behind him. The cinematography in this scene is amazing as we see the giant spider creep up behind Frodo getting ready to pounce, and Frodo turning suddenly, but the spider is gone. Then Frodo turns right into Shelob and she stings him and wraps him in her web. The editing is spectacular here as well as the cuts do a marvelous job of deceiving the audience into thinking the spider is one place and then startling us when we see the spider is somewhere else. In fact, Best Editing was one of the eleven Oscars Return of the King would win that night. This particular sequence is textbook film making when it comes to building tension and then paying that tension off within the scene.

In the theatrical version, that was the one scene that Jackson seemed to really take the time to make right, and didn’t feel rushed. Well, that scene and the scene where Frodo cannot throw the ring into the fire. That scene is also filled with tension, although it’s a tension of a different kind, and it’s also wonderful storytelling. Frodo has spent nearly the entire story trying to get to Mount Doom so that he can destroy the ring. For its part, the ring has been trying to destroy Frodo because it wants to be returned to its master. Now at the end, Frodo has overcome every obstacle in his path. With the help of Sam, he’s made it to his destination despite the danger and despite odds that seemed insurmountable.

Now at the end all he has to do is throw the ring in the fire, but he can’t do it. Jackson and co-screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens (in their Oscar-winning screenplay), like Tolkien before them, successfully pulled off the most important thing to do when you’re trying to build drama which is to always give your hero obstacles. Jackson et al did that for all three films where Frodo was concerned. Whether it was Pippin creating the commotion in the Mines of Moria that alert the orcs to their presence, or Farimir catching them and threatening to take them back to Gondor so that he can present the ring to his father, or even after escaping Shelob and disguising themselves as orcs, Frodo and Sam end up getting entangled with a battalion of orcs marching for battle. Each time Frodo had to use his wits, or Sam’s wits to get out of the problem, and each problem seemed that much more insurmountable. Then we come to the end, and it’s now the ring itself that is keeping Frodo from accomplishing his mission. Only at the very end has the burden become too much for Frodo to take, and he fails at the crucial moment. This is where the screenwriting technique of dramatic irony sets in as Gollum comes out of nowhere and attacks Frodo, biting off his finger and taking back “the precious.” Enraged, Frodo attacks Gollum as Gollum celebrates, knocking him over the ledge and into the fiery lava below, thus destroying the ring.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is an excellent screenplay for aspiring writers to look at in terms of how it dealt with Frodo and Sam’s relationship, as well as their portion of the adventure. There are many elements of the Hero’s Journey implemented in their story, and the ring’s destruction of Frodo’s mind allows for depth to be created in the relationship, like when Gollum deceives Frodo into believing that Sam will betray him, and Frodo sends Sam away. They then come full circle when Sam discovers that it was Gollum who had been deceiving Frodo all along and he comes to his rescue yet again. Any aspiring screenwriter should watch this film closely, particularly the portion of the storyline that follows Frodo and Sam, and they’ll learn a lot about character depth, depth in relationships, dramatic irony, building drama and building tension. I like to say that conflict is the mother of drama, and there is plenty of conflict in this story.

The other main driver of the story of this film has to do with Aragorn and his reluctant ascent to the throne of Gondor. We’ve learned from the previous films that Aragorn is a ranger from the north and that he has disavowed his lineage, for it was his ancestor, Isildur who was unable to destroy the ring generations ago that led to the dark times of today. The reluctant hero is a wonderful archetype and Aragorn suits it perfectly. He knows that he as a duty that he must fulfill, but his weakness is that he fears making the same mistakes as his ancestor. The same blood runs in his veins, he tells Arwen in The Fellowship of the Ring. The same weakness, he continues. It is that fear that drives Aragorn’s fear for the entire series until The Return of the King, when he finally embraces his duty, realizing that it might be the only thing that prevents the destruction of man.

It is this part of the storyline that I felt Jackson rushed through. Again, there is so much story to get through, that the theatrical version just can’t get to all of the nuance and thematic elements that make the story so strong. The extended edition, however, does accomplish that. The extended edition comes in at around four hours, so it’s very long, but it still feels like it flows better than the theatrical version. The extended versions of these films are a mixed bag for me. I prefer the extended versions of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King, however I enjoyed the theatrical version of The Two Towers over the extended version. The extended version material in The Two Towers feels tacked on to me, and never felt integral to the story. However, the opposite was the case with The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King. Even though it’s much longer, watching the extended version of The Return of the King presents a story that flows much better and doesn’t feel rushed. It allows you to savor what is going on in the story and gives the filmmakers time to give you as much as possible to make the story complete. It’s a much greater time commitment, but allows you to see a much more satisfying film.

There is one other point I’d like to make about The Return of the King, and The Lord of the Rings series as a whole. Most people know that the book was written by J.R.R. Tolkien as an allegory for what he experienced as a soldier during World War I and his subsequent return to England. In his book The Writer’s Journey Christopher Vogler writes about the final section of the Hero’s Journey, which he called The Return with the Elixir. The Hero returns home from the adventure a changed person. In one form or another, the hero has experienced death, and now the home that the hero once considered to be his whole world is now a mundane and banal place. The hero has grown beyond the trappings of home, and now no longer feels like he belongs. In the best examples of this type of storytelling, not only has the hero changed, but so has home. A similar example can be found in the 1978 Best Picture winner, The Deer Hunter, although in that film Michael Vronsky returns home from the Vietnam War in the second act, he is clearly a changed man, and the town is different as well. The differences are subtle, like his friend Stan now has long hair and a mustache, but they’re there. It’s also clear that Michael is uncomfortable and feels he no longer belongs there.

In the book version of The Return of the King, the hobbits return to the shire to discover that Saruman has beaten them there, enslaved the other hobbits and built factories and an industrial complex. That is a more similar depiction of the pastoral England that Tolkien left before the war and the industrialized England to which he returned. There is just a brief nod to that part of the story in Frodo’s dream sequence in Fellowship but without nearly the detail that Tolkien gave it in the book, and when they return to the shire it is exactly the same as when they left. The hobbits, especially Frodo, have changed however. We see it as they sit in a pub and all of the other hobbits carouse and carry on, but the four friends, having experienced death and adventure beyond what any of these other hobbits could imagine, can only sit quietly in a reality that only they understand. That is until Sam musters up the courage to go and talk to Rosie, a girl he had been too bashful to speak to before.

That is ultimately what The Lord of the Rings is about, thematically speaking. This is a story about courage, and not necessarily just courage in battle, although that is a big part of it. This story is also about the courage to do what’s right when the easy thing would be to not get involved. It’s about having the courage to look at yourself honestly and know that you still have value even if you’re not the bravest or the strongest. It’s about having the courage to ignore the pre-conceived notions of what others think you are and demonstrate that you’re really so much more. Just as Aragorn tells the hobbits at the end, “My friends, you bow to no one.”

The Lord of the Rings is an epic story, and perhaps one of the biggest, most grandiose stories ever conceived. But at its core, it’s a very simple story about being true to yourself.

Did the Academy get it right?

I am inclined to say that they did, although as I mentioned earlier, this film (at least the theatrical version) is the least worthy of any of the films in the series to win Best Picture. I am willing to say that it deserved to win as homage to the other two films in the series. Also in looking at the three films as one epic story, if this film’s win counts for all three films, then yes, it deserved to win. However there were some very good films nominated against it for 2003. Lost in Translation was a quirky film that helped Bill Murray continue reinventing himself and introduced many of us to Scarlett Johansson. It also helped Sofia Coppola express her own vision and make a name for herself beyond the shadow of her famous father. It’s a nice film and entertaining enough, but it doesn’t have the gravitas of a Best Picture winner. One of my favorite films that year was Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, another action/adventure film starring Russell Crowe about an English sea captain obsessively pursuing French privateers into the Pacific in the early 1800’s. It’s actually a film with a lot of depth, and has some great story-telling. Had it come out a year later, it might have had a better chance to win. Mystic River is another film from this very strong year that I absolutely love about three friends who can’t seem to overcome a shared childhood tragedy and one of them suspects another of killing his teenaged daughter. It’s a heartbreaking and tragic story about redemption that never arrives, and is another one that might have had better luck winning in a different year. Finally, Seabiscuit is an underdog story about an underappreciated horse and his underappreciated jockey. It’s one of those movies that makes you stand up and cheer, and was certainly worthy of the nomination that it received. However, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, especially when combined with the other films in the series, is a cinematic achievement that has rarely been matched in terms of its use of visual effects, character development and overall story arc. It’s a special story and a special series of films and the final film in the series winning Best Picture is a worthy acknowledgement of that.

There is one more thing I need to say about this story overall, and that is to tell you to read the books. If you have not read The Lord of the Rings, you need to do yourself a favor and get a copy and start reading it right away. It takes a little while for the story to get going and is a little slow in the beginning. However, once the adventure starts and the story gains momentum, it’s almost impossible to put down. Also, read it for the prose. If you are a writer of any kind, you need to read this book simply for the beauty, majesty and poetic prose that Tolkien wrote. He had a command of the English language that most people could only dream of and he was an amazing storyteller. It is an amazing book or series of books and deserves to be read.

For the first time since Oliver! took home the statue for Best Picture for 1968 the Academy bestowed its highest honor on a musical with Chicago. Other Musicals had been nominated in the 34 years between wins, like the previous year’s Moulin Rouge!, Cabaret in 1972, Nashville in 1975, and All That Jazz in 1979, but this once dominant genre had been slumbering from the Academy’s point of view for more than three decades. There are a lot of reasons that the musical fell out of favor with the studios and with the American public. From the studios’ point of view, musicals are often expensive showcases that rarely see a return on their investment, no matter how good the film is. From the public’s standpoint, a more jaded clientele was less likely to buy into the caricatured world where people break into song and dance as though it were a normal, everyday occurrence.

The musical could still work in animated features, but that’s because animation offers up an entirely caricatured world that is rarely reality based. Audience members’ minds are already open and prepared for the unusual, so it doesn’t feel odd or unusual for a character to just break into song. However as audiences became more sophisticate and/or jaded as we moved into the late 60’s and early 70’s, the musical underwent a massive transformation. No longer would characters just break into song. A musical now involved characters who were putting on a concert or worked in a theater or had some other real-world need to sing.

Chicago, on the other hand, was a film that harkened back to musicals of an earlier time where characters did break into song. In fact, most of this film’s story is told through song, and in that sense it’s much more like a Broadway show than a film. With that in mind, the songs in Chicago do exactly what you want songs to do in a musical. That is to say that the songs progress the story in a meaningful way. They aren’t just there for the sake of having them. Director Rob Marshall and screenwriter Bill Condon took the book of the musical play written by Bob Fosse and Fred Egg and used those songs drive the story, develop the characters and made them become an integral piece of the film.

Chicago is also a spectacle that rivals the big Musicals of the 50’s and 60’s, and even farther back. In fact, Chicago reminded me a little bit of The Great Ziegfeld with its bigger than life sets and its pure ostentatious point of view. As a musical, it also reminded me somewhat of West Side Story due to the serious nature of its content. As ostentatious as this film may be, it’s no whimsical farce, a la Gigi or My Fair Lady. This is actually a story about murder and lust and betrayal. It’s a story about doing whatever it takes to save your own skin and to get ahead in the world, even if that means lying, cheating, stealing and killing. Like West Side Story, there is a lot of fun in the music, but there are some very serious undertones to the story.

Overall, I liked Chicago but I didn’t love it. There was a lot to like about it, but it seemed like for every positive attribute the film has, there is one of equal negativity.

The songs are terrific, and so is the music. The numbers are filmed to show a ton of style and panache. Chicago is a movie that is self-aware, much like many of Fosse’s movies. This is a movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously and is like the party that everyone wants to be invited to. It’s fun. It’s irreverent. It’s sexy. Most importantly of all, Chicago is an entertaining film with laughs, drama and tension. Also, the Art Decoration/Set Design and Costume Design are spectacular and worthy of the Oscars that they won as well. I enjoyed the performances of Renee Zellweger (Best Actress nominee) and Catherine Zeta-Jones (Best Supporting Actress winner), although it took me a little while to determine whether or not I liked Zeta-Jones’ singing voice. I ultimately determined that I did, and I was surprised at how well she and Zellweger handled the musical numbers. They’re both fine actresses, but I had never seen them perform in Musicals before and their singing and dancing were both very good. Indeed, the performances of both Zellweger and Zeta-Jones went a long way towards making this movie as good as it was, and the chemistry that they had was terrific. I only wish they shared the screen more often in this picture.

However, I’m usually a fan of people learning something in a story, or suffering consequences when they don’t. There is a scene about half way through the film when Roxie Hart (Zellweger), who is relying on the dashing lawyer Billy Flynn (Richard Gere) to help her beat a murder rap. Over the course of his defense of her in the hearts and minds of the public, she becomes the star and celebrity that she always wanted to be but was never able to become on stage. She starts to become a little too big for her britches until Billy thinks that he has a more attractive client available, and he leaves her behind like an old glove. Then when one of the cell mates is taken to the gallows after all of her appeals have been exhausted, Roxie realizes the error of her ways, and rediscovers her humility. That humble lifestyle is short-lived, however, once the rap is beaten, and she ends up in an act with Velma Kelly (Zeta-Jones), herself having beaten not only a murder charge, but possible perjury as well. They both got away with murder and became big stars because of it. There really were no consequences to their actions at all.

That leads me to a larger point about the story and that is that this is a film filled with unlikable characters. Roxy starts out the film as fairly sympathetic, but not particularly likable. The first thing we see Velma do is wash the blood off of her hands which we deduce is from her sister whom she probably just killed. Both of these characters exude a smugness over the course of the story that isn’t admirable at all. It’s really just off putting. These are also characters that appear to be doing everything they can to make sure that they screw over the other characters in the story before they themselves are screwed over. These are back-stabbing, conniving people who live in a world that is a pessimistic place. Indeed, the one (presumably) innocent person in this story ends up on the gallows. I found myself not caring for any of these characters in any meaningful way.

That leads me to the story. It doesn’t matter how good or how dramatic your story is. If the audience doesn’t like, or even worse, doesn’t care about your characters, then the story will not succeed. That’s what I found to be the case with Chicago. I really didn’t care about the characters, so the story ultimately ended up just being tedious, and it lost all of its drama by the end. I didn’t care, and I left the story unsatisfied.

Overall, I found Chicago to be entertaining, which at the bottom line is what you want from any movie experience. However, I felt that they left a lot on the table, and had they done something to make either Roxy or Velma to be more sympathetic, not even necessarily likable, but at least sympathetic, then I might have been able to engage with the story more than I did. While it was entertaining and had some great musical and dance numbers, this was ultimately an unsatisfying movie because they didn’t do enough to get me engaged with the characters and that caused me to lose interest in the story. All of the music and dancing created a great show, but there was nothing underneath it to make it truly special. Chicago is a wide but shallow film.

Did the Academy get it right?

They certainly did not. There was a lot of stiff competition for 2002, and I can only imagine that the votes split and were thinly spread among all of the nominees. There’s also another factor to remember and that is that the country was very divided with the run-up to the Iraq War, and it’s entirely possible that the fun and entertainment value of Chicago, when compared to the very serious nature of the other nominated films, struck a chord with the voters in the same way that films like Going My Way and Oliver! beat out superior films during very serious times. For example, Gangs of New York was a highly publicized film by Martin Scorsese that had a sublime performance by Daniel Day-Lewis and adequate performances from Cameron Diaz and Leonardo DiCaprio, although both DiCaprio’s and Diaz’s inability to maintain their Irish accents drove me a little crazy. This is a violent and intense film and those components may have ultimately turned off some voters. It’s a good film, but not close to Scorsese’s best, and that fact might have kept it from overcoming the amount of violence, unlike a future Scorsese winner will do, and I’ll get to that in a few weeks. The Hours was an interesting film using the works of Virginia Woolf, as well as her suicide as the driving force behind three concurrent stories. It’s a fine, but depressing film and Nicole Kidman’s performance as Virginia Woolf would earn her a win for Best Actress. I honestly can’t believe that The Pianist didn’t win Best Picture that year. It’s a bit like Schindler’s List-Light, but it’s a heavy film and Adrien Brody’s masterful performance as the Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Warsaw Jew who eluded the Nazis for years earned him Best Actor honors. This is an intense film that almost any other year should have won, and I’m shocked that it didn’t. That said, my favorite film of the year was The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, which is my favorite film in the series. It was better in every way than Chicago. It was more dramatic, was a bigger and more complex production that was executed better. It was more cutting edge from a technological standpoint and it had a more compelling story with more sympathetic characters being performed by better actors. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers should have been your Best Picture winner for 2002.

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.

I am going to start right off by stating that I’ve always been a fan of this film. I saw it in the theater when it first came out and I was a big fan of it then, and I’ve continued to like this movie very much over the years. Gladiator is a terrific blend of outstanding action, very good acting, strong thematic elements, and an intricately woven story. The action sequences in the Colosseum and other arenas are tense and bloody without being gratuitous. They actually showed the brutality that passed as entertainment in those days, and we see that these were actual human beings that were forced in to the carnage.

The acting is also great in this film, if somewhat over the top. Russell Crowe is the hero and does a great job of combining Maximus’ military integrity and intensity with the dry  wit of someone who has seen it all. But there are also some very good performances from Joaquin Phoenix as the usurper of the throne, Commodus; Connie Nielsen as Lucilla, Commodus’ sister and a former lover of Maximus; Oliver Reed (Sikes from Oliver!) as Proximo, the former gladiator and now slave trader who serves as Maximus’ Mentor in the arena; and finally Richard Harris played Marcus Aurelius, the emperor who would not willingly pass  the crown to his son. All of these performances, as well as those of the more minor roles, displayed characters with depth, emotion and real human frailty.

Actually, and perhaps ironically, my biggest criticism with Gladiator is in the characters of General Maximus Decimus Meridius, as well as Commodus. I was taught, and I’ve written in this space, that when composing your heroes and villains that it’s important to give them depth. You always want to give your hero some flaw, especially an inner flaw that he or she needs to overcome in order to achieve real growth as a character. Barring that, at least some sort of personality flaw that allows them to remain relatable to the average movie-going audience member. You want your main character to be a hero, but not necessarily a superhero. On the opposite side of that coin is the villain, who should be a carbon reflection of your hero. Everything that your hero is, your villain is not. Likewise, everything that your villain is, is what you’re hero could become if he makes the wrong choices. But the main thing is that you want to give your villain some sort of quality that makes him feel human. Ultimately your villain needs to be a human being who feels like he’s the hero of his own story, but he has to have something, be it wit or charm or humor or intelligence that makes him more than merely a monster. They were really close with Commodus. He clearly feels like he’s the hero of his own story, but I never get the sense that he feels what he’s doing is best for Rome. He’s selfish and spoiled and vain and wants to have sex with his sister. Yes, he is kind to his young nephew, Lucius, but that kindness is merely a veil for him to disguise his true intentions. There are two things that director Ridley Scott and Screenwriters David Franzoni, William Nicholson and John Logan failed to do. One of those things was to give Commodus some sort of human quality that kept him from being merely a monster.

The other thing they failed to do was to give Maximus any kind of character flaw. Even his name, for crying out loud, is MAXIMUS! For the most part, Maximus is a great character. He’s likable, he’s admired by his men, and he’s a natural leader. Even his fellow gladiators quickly fall in line because he earns their respect and admiration in the arena. He plans their battles so that they can survive, so naturally they’d follow him anywhere, including the climactic battle against Roman Centurions. Rather than giving him a character flaw, per se, Scott, Franzoni, Nicholson, and Logan humanized Maximus by making him grieve for his wife and child who were murdered at the hands of Commodus. While that is certainly something that anyone could relate to, it’s kind of an easy way to do it. Killing off a close family member is how any amateur storyteller can  get an emotional response from an audience, and it’s as cliche as any storytelling motif that there is. It’s not a great way to add character depth. Avenging their deaths is Maximus’ main motivating factor, and we can argue over the virtues of that, but I personally do not consider that to be a negative character trait. In fact, one of the most powerful moments in the film is when Maximus first reveals himself in the arena to Commodus, and after stating his real name and position, he says, “Father to a murdered son. Husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.” He comes off there as nothing but heroic and defiant towards an evil man and he forces that evil man to spare him in order to maintain his power. So even in attempting vengeance, Maximus appears heroic, just like in pretty much every other point in the film. He’s a likable character, and I enjoyed going on this journey with him, but I wish that he had been given more depth by the filmmakers.

The signature of this film is obviously the action sequences. Gladiator joined the ranks of Braveheart, Patton, Ben-Hur and Bridge on the River Kwai as action epics that won Best Picture. Ridley Scott, known previously for such films as Alien, Thelma and Louise and Blade Runner, and was certainly not afraid to use graphic violence graphic violence to tell his story, took the graphic nature that we had seen in Braveheart up a notch for Gladiator. This is a graphically violent film, but not at all in a gratuitous way. This is a film about a violent time in human history and the people who had to live through a particularly violent period in it. It’s also worth noting that this violent lifestyle was forced upon them by the whims of others. Whether Maximus is an honored general fighting at the behest of Emperor Marcus Aurelius for the glory of Rome, or an enslaved gladiator fighting to save his own life for the entertainment of Commodus and the Roman citizenry, he is still fighting and killing other men at the pleasure of his superior/masters. That made the violence necessary in order to tell the story, and showing the violent and graphic manner in which these people died exposed the irony in “the glory of Rome”, which was one of the central themes of the film. Rome was the center of the known world in those days and represented the height of technology, education and governance. And yet, 50,000 people would crowd into the Coliseum to watch men slaughter each other for sport.

Aside from the violent nature of the action, the choreography of it and its cinematography are spectacular. They also did an excellent job of increasing the intensity of each action sequence, as well as the suspense as they progress throughout the film. The first action sequence is the final battle of the Roman campaign in Germania. While the action is intense,  there isn’t a lot of suspense, as the Romans are seasoned and battle-hardened soldiers going up against what are essentially barbarians. The next big action sequences involve the arena in Zucchabar, a desolate Roman province in the North of Africa where Maximus is first exposed to the brutality of the arena. The fighting is frenetic and brutal, but Maximus’ training allows him and his new compatriots to survive. Maximus, now known as The Spaniard, becomes a famous gladiator, and he and the other gladiators that Proximo owns are taken to Rome where Commodus is staging 150 days of games in the Colosseum. This is like the Major Leagues, and Maximus and the others have to step up their games in order to survive. These battles are more choreographed, involving more professional gladiators, chariots, riders on horseback, and even chained tigers. These action sequences are intense and dramatic, and each one of them in their own way help to drive the story. Gladiator is one of those rare action films where the action is in the film as a means to telling the story, rather than the story just being the bridge between action sequences.

For example, Maximus’ penultimate battle in the arena is against a retired gladiator who was unbeaten before gaining his freedom. This battle is set up by Commodus as a means to kill Maximus without him having to do it since Maximus has grown to such popularity. Commodus also rigs the game with chained tigers, making it nearly impossible for either gladiator to survive. Yet, Maximus emerges from the hand to hand combat victorious, standing with sword in hand over his vanquished foe with 50,000 Romans chanting, “Kill! Kill! Kill!” Commodus give the thumbs-down signal, ordering Maximus to kill the gladiator, but Maximus throws down his sword and walks away in open defiance of the emperor. Someone from the crowd exclaims, “Maximus the merciful!”, thus making Commodus’ hold on the crown that much more tenuous. There is a clear set up to this action sequence and there are clear consequences due to its outcome. That makes the sequence an integral part of the story as well as a vehicle for the story’s progression.

That leads me to the story itself, and it’s a very good one. Gladiator is a story that is told in four acts. Act I, which is Maximus’ Ordinary World takes place on the battlefield. Maximus is a general who longs to be done fighting so that he can tend his farm, be a husband to his wife and a father to his son. However he is very talented on the battlefield, both at leading his troops and killing his enemies. In fact he is a master motivator, and it’s clear that his soldiers would go to the ends of the earth for him. He is also in the good graces of Caesar Marcus Aurelius, who views him almost as an adopted son and provides Maximus with his Call to Adventure. Marcus asks Maximus to serve as the Steward of Rome until the Senate can take over and Rome can become a Republic again. Maximus initially Refuses the Call, but remains loyal to Marcus and seems as though he’ll ultimately acquiesce to Marcus’ wishes. However Marcus’ decision is not acceptable to his actual son Commodus, who murders his father in a fit of passionate rage. Assuming the title of Caesar, Commodus then orders Maximus and his family to be killed.

Maximus Crosses the First Threshold into Act II and the Special World of the Adventure by killing his would-be assassins and then racing home only to discover that he’s too late, and his wife and son have been crucified and burned alive. Despondent and wounded from fighting, Maximus loses consciousness and is picked up by slave traders who take him to Zucchabar and sell him to Proximo so that he can be trained as a gladiator. In Zucchabar Maximus, again known only as The Spaniard) excels in the arena, and he and his allies are sent to Rome to compete in the Colosseum. It is here that Proximo turns into a Mentor to Maximus. Proximo tells Maximus that he’s a good gladiator, but that he could be great, and that greatness could ultimately buy him his freedom. He also tells him that he’ll get an opportunity to perform before the emperor, and that truly does get Maximus’ attention.

The third act of Gladiator has Maximus and the others arriving in Rome, and Maximus reveals himself to Commodus, as well as Lucilla who eventually tries to reach out to Maximus telling him that his defiance of Commodus could eventually lead to Commodus’ downfall. Maximus continues to prove his worth in the arena, defeating all comers and gaining popularity and notoriety that starts to exceed even that of Commodus. He also continues to gain the trust of his comrades and the attention of the Senate. In fact, Lucilla tries to arrange a meeting between Maximus and Senator Gracchus, but Maximus doesn’t see how it can help, and he again refuses the call. Then Maximus sees his old servant Cicero, who tells him that his armies will follow his command if he can somehow return them, and that sparks in Maximus an idea.

The Fourth Act begins the conspiracy. Cicero finds Lucilla and tells her that Maximus will meet with the Senator. Lucilla arranges the meeting and Maximus tells the Senator of Marcus’ final wish, and that he will bring his army into Rome, and kill Commodus and then leave Rome under the control of the Senate. The plan never gets put into place, however, as Commodus finds out about it from Lucilla’s unwitting son. Senator Gracchus is arrested, Proximo is killed, as is Cicero, and Maximus is captured. The climax of the film pits Commodus fighting Maximus in the Colosseum after mortally wounding him when no one was looking. You’ll have to watch the movie to find out how it ends.

That’s the story in four acts. One other thing I would like to mention is the depth of this story. Scott, Franzoni, Logan, and Nicholson did an excellent job of creating a dramatic story, especially in the fourth act. We see what Maximus and the rest have to gain, and conversely what they have to lose. That is the lifeblood of drama, and if you’re an aspiring screenwriter or filmmaker, that is what you should be searching for in your own stories. That is where drama is born and nurtured. This story is also strong thematically. The Glory of Rome is always the backdrop, and yet we’re constantly shown the contradiction in that belief. The glory of Rome is an idea that either never existed or had been forgotten about, so that all that was left was some archaic belief. It was that type of depth in the story and in its ideas that ultimately won Gladiator Best Picture.

Did the Academy Get it Right?

I believe they did. Chocolat was a nice movie, but not really one that should have been nominated for Best Picture. I’m still puzzled how it was nominated over a movie like Cast Away. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a Chinese martial arts film that used some great acrobatics and camera work that hadn’t been seen before. The fight scenes were very entertaining, but I found the film to be too long and much of it tedious. The strongest competition probably came from Erin Brockovich and Traffic, the former being a David and Goliath story about a woman taking on giant chemical companies on behalf of the reluctant lawyer for whom she works and the latter being about the drug trafficking between Mexico and the United States. Both movies had excellent casts and terrific stories, but I’d probably give a slight edge to Erin Brockovich as the best of the non-winners for the year 2000. However none of them were as good as Gladiator, which was clearly the Best Picture of the year.

The Academy closed out the 20^th Century by awarding its highest honor to American Beauty, a film that can be interpreted in many ways. It’s not that American Beauty lacks a clear meaning, but it is about so many things, and that makes it one of the most deeply thematic films I’ve ever seen. Indeed, this film could be about finding your own voice in your life or feeling trapped in the gilded cage that is suburbia. Some films scholars have interpreted the film to be about the pressure to conform to a certain lifestyle or look. Others say the film is merely about beauty.

As I was watching it last night, I was racking my own brain to try and determine what Director Sam Mendes and Screenwriter Alan Ball (both of whom also won Oscars for their work on this film) were trying to say. As I mentioned, this is a film that is about a lot of things, but I never got the feeling that the film loses focus. I remember being a big, big fan of this film when it was first released, and I saw it multiple times, although before yesterday I hadn’t seen it for several years. What I remember most about watching it back then was how depressing I found it to be. It’s a brilliantly made film, which is all the more impressive when you remember that it was Mendes’ feature film directorial debut. What I interpreted this film to be about is the fact that nothing is as it seems, which its tagline of “…look closer” suggests.

To expand on that idea I’ll mention the two main families in the film. First, there is the Burnham family. The husband, Lester (Kevin Spacey in the role that would garner him the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role) and wife, Carolyn (Annette Benning in an Oscar nominated performance) are trapped in a largely loveless marriage and are struggling to connect with their teenage daughter, Jane (Thora Birch). Lester is stuck in a dead-end job and Carolyn is struggling to succeed as a real estate agent. However Carolyn is excellent at presenting a façade of stability, and her rosebushes are stunning, her house is immaculate. Anyone looking at this family from the outside would see a stable, well-put together family in which all of the family members seem happily engaged with each other.

The other family is the Fitts family, who moves next door to the Burnham’s at the opening of the film. Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley) the only son in the family seems to be mentally unstable and is also a successful drug dealer. His father, Colonel Fitts (Chris Cooper) is a retired Marine Corps officer who is as bigoted as he is strict and he demands his son adhere to the rules of his house and of society, but he has no idea how to communicate with him and no appreciation for who he is. The wife, Barbara Fitts (Allison Janney) seems to have checked out emotionally and looks to be living at least part time in a reality that is alternate from our own.

Living in suburbia these two families project certain images. They look to the outside world as solid American nuclear families that have it all together when the realities of each situation are darker and much more nefarious. There is beauty to each of these families on the outside that belies the ugly reality of what is happening behind closed doors. These are both families that are on the verge of breaking up, and in fact, each family will become broken by the end of the film. As the tagline is suggesting, we are given a closer look at each family and are shown that things are not what they seem to be.

The same thing can be said about the individual characters as well. Whether it’s Col. Fitts’ homophobia masking his repressed homosexual desires, or Ricky’s distant and aloof personality masking a vulnerability that his father would never permit and his image could never sustain, or Carolyn’s type-A personality masking a deep-seeded insecurity that she’ll never measure up, there are many characters in American Beauty who are trying desperately to hide the very aspects of their respective personalities that make them human. To me the character that represents that aspect the most is Jane’s best friend, Angela Hayes (Mena Suvari). Angela is the leader of the cheerleading squad and an aspiring model. She portrays herself as a sexually free individual who can use her sexuality to get what she wants out of any man she wants, even men who are older and successful. The crack in this veneer shows up relatively early when she tries to hit on Lester who was smitten with her from the first moment he saw her, and would act uncomfortably awkward whenever she was around. When he shows himself to be open to her advances, she awkwardly leaves to go find Jane. Then, at Lester’s moment of truth she has laid herself bare for him and confesses that this would be her first time. The girl that we’ve been shown to be almost sexually predatory has now been revealed to be what she really is; a vulnerable, insecure girl who has been trying to make herself appear to be more than she is. Even that attitude is ironic, since that insecurity and purity actually make her more attractive and a better person.

That leads me to Lester Burnham. One of the reasons I always found American Beauty to be so depressing is that finally at the end Lester achieves the happiness that has been eluding him, and he doesn’t even get a chance to enjoy it. He doesn’t get to live the life that he’s attained because (WARNING: SPOILER ALERT!!!) he’s murdered by Col. Fitts after rejecting his sexual advances. Lester attains this happiness when it appears that he’s going to have sex with Angela until she confesses to him that she’s never had sex before. He realizes how terrible a thing it would be to take advantage of this young girl, and he helps her feel better in a deeper and more compassionate way. In doing that Lester has the epiphany that he can be a nurturing father and that he can be a good husband. He doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone else. He’s his own man, and that’s good enough. And no sooner does he reach this realization than his brains are blown all over the wall.

Now, the reason I didn’t feel depressed when I watched the film last night is because Lester reached that level of redemption in the first place. The fact that Lester achieved this redemption is the reward for following this story, and he doesn’t need to continue to live this life because the people surrounding him no longer deserve him. Lester has moved on from their petty grievances in almost a spiritual way and in this metaphorical instance, Lester moves on from this life with a redeemed soul. Personally I find that very uplifting.

There are a couple of other aspects of this film that combine to form one very impressive component to the overall production, and I’m sure that they assisted in American Beauty winning Best Picture. The Cinematography, Art Direction and Production Design on this film are thoughtfully conceived and meticulously executed in a manner that helps to progress the story and set the overall tone of the film. I’m sure you’d be happy to tell me that that’s what they’re supposed to do, and I would whole-hardheartedly agree with you. Unfortunately that’s not always what happens.

I was always impressed with the art direction, specifically Art Director David Lazan’s complete control over the color, or should I say lack thereof. Look closely at this film, and you will see that it’s essentially black and white, other than the very obvious injections of very pure red at strategic points of the film. When I watched it last night, I was watching very closely and I was particularly impressed with how little color there is throughout the film. The interiors are drab and the exteriors are as well. This is a film that goes out of its way to show that these people live in a world that is unremarkable. The world that they live in is as monotonous as their lives. Part of the credit for pulling that off also goes to Naomi Shohan and her outstanding Production Design. Neither Lazan nor Shohan were recognized by the Academy even with nominations, which is really too bad. It might sound funny to say this, and it certainly is ironic, but American Beauty and its message would not be nearly as powerful without the muted and subtle look of the film.

One person who was recognized was Cinematographer Conrad Hall. Already a well-known commodity in Hollywood, having already won an Oscar for his cinematography on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Hall also shot such memorable films as The Professionals, In Cold Blood, and The Day of the Locust among many others. He would posthumously win another Oscar three years later for Road to Perdition. It was his work on American Beauty, though, that I find particularly wonderful, as the lack of color was enhanced by Hall’s use of both shadow and space. If Lazan created a look that was primarily black and white, Hall created a film that was largely flat. Again, look at the film closely, and it takes place primarily in flat space. There is very little depth anywhere in the film, unless we’re specifically looking from Ricky’s point of view. Since his mind appears to be the deepest of the other characters, it makes sense that his POV would be where most of the depth lies. There are a few other strategically placed shots with deep space, and those come when there perspective is changing, like when Carolyn enters the house to confront Lester about buying the old muscle car, and he stands up to her in a way that he hasn’t before. Otherwise, this film shows a world that is flat in a way that compliments the art direction and production design, and shows a world that is drab, unexciting and difficult to live in.

Unfortunately time has not been kind to American Beauty. I’ve read some critics’ and historians’ takes over the last couple of days, and it does seem at the very least divisive. People either love it or hate it, and many people who used to love it have decided over time that it really wasn’t that great of a film. I will admit after watching it last night, and not having seen it for several years, that it does feel dated. It feels like the 90’s in that it was a film that was self-aware of how cool and subversive it was attempting to be, and how it was trying to take stereotypes and sacred cows to force us to “look closer” at ourselves. It seems hard to imagine, just sixteen years later, this film finding an audience in today’s movie-going culture. It isn’t exciting, and it forces the audience to pay attention not only to what’s happening in the foreground, but also what’s happening in the background and just below the surface. This is another one of those films that requires effort on the part of the viewer, and you will not care for this film if you’re not willing to put forth that effort.

Did the Academy get it right?

I believe that they did. I’m not a huge fan of The Cider House Rules, and in fact, I feel that’s a film that is far more depressing than American Beauty, but without any of the subtext. I do quite like The Green Mile, and that film evokes in me many of the same types of emotions that American Beauty did, and thematically had some of the same things going on. It was a sad, yet uplifting film that still left me feeling somewhat empty when it was over. I loved The Insider. This is the film in which Russell Crowe started to show his versatility and I thought Al Pacino’s character was an inspiration. This film also did a great job in showing the point where the news was no longer the news. Then there was The Sixth Sense. This film was more of a sensation than anything else, and the twist at the end had everyone talking. It also marked the beginning of the career of M. Night Shyamalan, and unfortunately he hasn’t been able to replicate the quality of this film since then. The Sixth Sense is actually a fine film through and through, but its Best Picture nomination was more a result of the sensation that it caused rather than the film’s quality. In looking at all of these films, I could see someone making a case for The Insider and possibly even for The Green Mile. Both of those films were well-made and had compelling stories with rich and deep characters. Those films have also held up better over the long run in my opinion. Even with that said, however, I’m still inclined to look at American Beauty as a complete package. It’s a film that is well-crafted and still very entertaining. For 1999, it was the correct choice for Best Picture.

One of the biggest surprises in Oscar history occurred the night of March 21, 1999 when Shakespeare in Love beat out the heavily favored Saving Private Ryan to win Best Picture. It was an interesting year in that two Elizabethan films (Shakespeare in Love and Elizabeth, both incidentally starring both Geoffrey Rush and Joseph Fiennes) went up against three World War II dramas (Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line & Life is Beautiful). Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan boasted what was considered at the time to be one of the most intense opening sequences ever put on film as it depicted the D-Day landing on Omaha Beach. It was one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year, and was a certified WWII epic. Shakespeare in Love, on the other hand was a romantic comedy, and more of a feel-good movie. Under normal circumstances in Oscar history it seems hard to imagine that Shakespeare in Love would have stood a chance against Saving Private Ryan, but alas at the end of the night the producers of the former were holding the statues and Spielberg was once again left out in the cold.

Personally, I love Shakespeare in Love, and I am an unabashed Shakespeare fan. I mentioned that several months ago when I wrote about the year that Hamlet won Best Picture. The thing that’s interesting about Shakespeare in Love is that it’s obviously not an historically accurate representation of Shakespeare’s writing of Romeo and Juliet, but it’s also obvious that it isn’t trying to be. The filmmakers weren’t setting out to make a classical Shakespearean masterpiece, but they were trying to make an entertaining film and they accomplished that with gusto. I applaud Shakespeare in Love because it does what most adaptations of Shakespeare fail to do, and that is make Shakespeare accessible to a mass audience. What this film did that was so effective was that not only did they just bring the material to a mass audience, but director John Madden and screenwriters Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard also showed Shakespeare’s greatness and made that dynamic one of the emotional pillars of the film.

Even people who don’t read Shakespeare are at least generally aware of not only his existence, but also of his greatness even if they fail to recognize it. There isn’t a ton of information available about Shakespeare’s actual life, so creating a fictional account of him really offers up a blank page and Madden used his full palette to fill that page. When we first meet Will Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) he is a second-rate writer who is struggling to come up with new material. He is a womanizer and a drinker who has claimed to have lost his muse. The words no longer come to him, and he’s at a loss for how to find them. Then he happens to meet the noble Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow in an Oscar-winning performance), and her beauty inspires him. He falls in love with her and the words she inspires him to write become the poetry that would stand the test of time by staying relevant into its sixth century.

As the story progresses we see how Shakespeare’s greatness is recognized by his contemporaries. There is some truly great film making going on in this film because, other than Viola, no one ever says to Will, “Boy, you’re great!” We are shown how great everyone thinks he is by seeing their reactions to witnessing the material. We hear the eloquent lines being recited and we see the other actors and later the audience just riveted to what they’re seeing and hearing. We see the expressions of total immersion on their faces and we can see that Shakespeare’s greatness is being recognized.

Not only is that great film making technique, but it is also subtle film making in a film that was largely over the top and boisterous in its tone and style. It had wonderful art direction and production design, as well as superb costume design. In fact, Costume Design and Set Decoration were two of the seven awards that Shakespeare in Love would take home on Oscar night. There was little that was subtle about this film, which is what makes the subtle techniques that they use throughout the story so effective.

Shakespeare in Love also had an amazing cast. As mentioned above, Paltrow won the Oscar for Best Actress for her portrayal of Viola, and Judi Dench won Best Supporting Actress as well for her performance as Queen Elizabeth. Geoffrey Rush was nominated for Best Supporting Actor and Joseph Fiennes gave a very good performance as well. Beyond that, this film had a cast of actors who would go on to become stars, superstars, or at the very least recognizable. From people like Geoffrey Rush and Ben Affleck and Colin Firth and Tom Wilkinson to Imelda Staunton (Harry Potter series) and Jim Carter (Downton Abbey) and Mark Williams (Harry Potter series), there are actors and actresses sprinkled throughout this film whose faces you will recognize. However, it isn’t just that these actors were famous, or at least nearly famous. The entire ensemble gave a wonderful performance. In fact, the cast of this film was set up much in the same manner that the cast would have been set up in one of Shakespeare’s plays. That is to say that there are a couple of main characters and then an ensemble of incredibly talented actors who develop chemistry by sharing the stage, or in this case the screen, and becoming a tight-knit group of players who not only perform well, but look like they’re genuinely enjoying the performance they’re giving.

The storyline itself is not a particularly complex or complicated one, but it’s very well-written and very entertaining. From a structural standpoint, the story is a typical romantic comedy and it hits all of the necessary beats for that genre. There is forbidden love mixed with a love triangle and we fear that the lovers will not end up together. What makes Shakespeare in Love rise above most other romantic comedies is the fact that they added particular sophistication to it with the Shakespearean themes and language. I’ve mentioned before that romantic comedies rarely do well at the Oscars, with only It Happened One Night and Annie Hall being previous winners that really fit hat genre. I would say that Annie Hall is the most similar to Shakespeare in Love in that in Annie Hall Woody Allen added a different type of sophistication that was a more post-modern intellectualism. Romantic comedies are generally escapism films that are highly entertaining, but shallow thematically. Annie Hall and Shakespeare in Love demonstrated that romantic comedies can cross over into more a more respected and respectable class of film making. Please don’t get me wrong. I am not dissing romantic-comedies. In fact, a little over a year ago I wrote a blog espousing the virtue of the romantic comedy and how there is generally more to it than people think. But there is a perception that romantic comedies are shallow, star-driven vehicles that have a one size fits all formula and are all essentially the same story that is just painted a slightly different color. A film like Shakespeare in Love resonates because it takes the romantic comedy model and adds the sophistication that many people feel is missing from the genre. Another way of putting it is that it has depth in the story that many people feel is lacking from the genre as well.

Another thing that I loved about this film was the references to Romeo and Juliet that pop up throughout the film. For example, near the beginning of the movie when we’ve just been introduced to Will and learned of his writer’s block, he passes a preacher who is speaking out against the immorality of the two rival theaters in the film, yelling, “A curse on both their houses!” As he walks by, Will seems to take a mental note of the line, and then he continues to move on. Then there is the relationship that grows between Will and Viola, and it parallels the relationship that grows between Romeo and Juliet, complete with balcony scene, but with a slightly different payoff. Although it doesn’t end nearly as tragically, it still ends with a sort of bitter sweetness that sets Will off on the path to his future greatness. This dual narrative is just one more example of how the filmmakers were expertly opening up the genius of Shakespeare for mainstream audiences whom otherwise would not have been interested.

          

The dual narrative also helped Shakespeare in Love succeed where in my opinion Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet did not. Luhrmann attempted to modernize Shakespeare by taking the play and setting it in a modern day city with modern-day settings while still using Shakespeare’s original dialogue. I always applauded the effort, but the result was too disjointed and the problem still remained that the average viewer still had a hard time processing the dialogue. Shakespeare in Love works because Madden embraced and romanticized the 16^th Century and gave us a similar love story without the tragic ending. The dialogue was stylized to fit the times, but still rendered in an understandable way. Even the excerpts that were shown from the play highlighted the poetry in the dialogue so that even if you didn’t understand what they were saying you could still appreciate the beauty in the language. Truly, Shakespeare in Love is a deep and well-crafted film that uses modern storytelling techniques to effectively update a classic and tell us that classic in a new and entertaining way.

Did the Academy get it right?

Well, there’s the rub. Many people vehemently disagree with the Academy’s decision for this year. Most people like Shakespeare in Love for many of the reasons I mention above, but look at a film like Saving Private Ryan is an epochal cinematic masterpiece. And you know what? It is. Should Saving Private Ryan have won Best Picture? I don’t think there’s any doubt that it should have won. Steven Spielberg did win Best Director or the film, and he created a brutal, no holds barred look at the ugliness of a war that has been largely glorified since it ended. Now, there’s no fault in glorifying World War II. It was a seminal time in our history and catapulted the United States into being in the position of the greatest country on earth. But many movies about that war glamorized it to the point where it looked more like an adventure than a war. Saving Private Ryan took a hard look at WWII and showed the real violence, the real devastation and the real emotional toll that the war took on the men who fought in it. It did this in a way that brought the audience in to an emotional meat grinder where the tension was non-stop, because that’s how it is in a war. People left the theater emotionally exhausted and beaten down after seeing Saving Private Ryan. To put it in context, there have been many instances where a feel-good film has beaten a superior film for Best Picture that had more depressing overtones. It happened in 1944 when Going My Way beat Double Indemnity. It happened in 1951 when An American in Paris beat A Place in the Sun and A Streetcar Named Desire. It happened in 1958 when Gigi beat Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Then it happened again in 1998 when Shakespeare in Love beat Saving Private Ryan. Sometimes the Academy just gets it wrong. But to be perfectly honest with you, my favorite movie of 1998 was Life is Beautiful.

One of the true juggernauts in cinema history closed the deal by being named the year’s best picture after it had already been crowned the all-time box office champion. In late 1997 and early 1998, Titanic became a cultural phenomenon, the likes of which had rarely been seen. Not only did the movie make more money at the box office than any film before it, it also made household names out of its stars and director, spawned an Oscar winning and Grammy winning number one hit song, and claimed a large wedge in the vernacular of popular culture.

The actual story of the R.M.S. Titanic is one that piqued people’s interest for decades. Deemed to be unsinkable, she struck an iceberg and sunk on her maiden voyage, taking more than 1,500 people with her to the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean. For the next 74 years, no one knew the final resting place of the ship. The water was deep and cold and the legend of the ship often found its way into popular culture, be it in books, television or cinema. The sinking of the Titanic was one of the stories that those of us of a certain age grew up with, and the legend behind the ship and her sinking haunted dreams for decades.

A few years after the wreck was found, Writer/Director/Producer James Cameron embarked on the, ahem, titanic task of bringing the story to the screen. Instead of doing a strict historical story, he wrote in a love story between well-to-do and betrothed 19-year old socialite Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) and Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a young man of a more meager upbringing and background who is a struggling artists currently living as a drifter. With that in mind, the actual story of the Titanic serves as a backdrop to this love story, particularly over the first half of the film.

James Cameron had made a name for himself in the late 80’s and early 90’s by directing such science-fiction and adventure classics like Aliens, The Terminator, T2: Judgment Day, The Abyss, and True Lies. Through these films, Cameron established himself as one of the top directors of action films however he hadn’t done much to spread his wings into more dramatic material. Titanic would present him with that opportunity, and he would fight two studios and suffer a ton of bad press over the increasing budgets and expanding schedules in order to complete the film and see this opportunity through to the end.

To me Titanic is two separate films, each roughly an hour and a half long. Each film also demonstrates James Cameron’s strengths and weaknesses as a director. The first film is a romantic drama between these somewhat star-crossed lovers from opposite sides of the socio-economic tracks. There are some moments of wit and charm during this segment of the film, but I have always found it to be border line unwatchable. There are two things that frustrate me the most about the first half of Titanic. The first is the performances of both DiCaprio and Winslet. They were both in their early 20’s when this film came out, and were two of the most promising young actors at that time. Indeed, time has borne that promise out as they’ve each enjoyed stellar careers in the ensuing 18 years since Titanic’s release. What’s more is that the films they had starred in previous to Titanic like Sense and Sensibility for Winslet and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Romeo + Juliet and The Basketball Diaries for DiCaprio showed each to be fine actors. However, those acting skills are not apparent in Titanic. I’ve seen a lot of films with each of these actors, and I can’t think of a film for either of them in which their performances are as weak as they are in this film. I put that on Cameron, because as great as he is at directing action, he’s not nearly as strong at directing drama, and he was not able to pull even marginally convincing performances out of DiCaprio or Winslet.

The other frustrating thing about the first half of Titanic is the script, penned by Cameron. Structurally the script is sound. It hits all of the right beats and the drama builds well as the story progresses. The script loses me with its dialogue and in its details. For instance, the love story that drives the entire narrative feels very contrived. I understand that Rose has a free spirit that is being repressed by her mother (Frances Fisher) and her fiancé, Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), and that Jack allows for that free spirit to be released, so in that regard the love story works. The problem is that the drama is just vanilla and superficial. Even my teenage daughter referred to the first half of Titanic as “fluff”, and she’s right. The script really goes after lowest common denominator themes like class envy and the fun-loving rogue (Jack) vs. the uptight socialite (Cal). There is no depth to this story in the least. All of the characters are paint-by-number caricatures.

In a past blog I mentioned a screenwriting instructor who said that when you’re developing your characters make sure that you give your hero at least one fault, or negative character trait and that you give your villain at least one positive character trait. This is how you add depth. For if your hero is infallible and your villain is completely inhuman, your audience won’t be able to relate to them at all and they’ll just be flat characters. That’s what we have in Titanic, as Jack is a hero with no visible faults, no weaknesses that he has to overcome, other than his lack of money, but Cameron portrays that as a positive anyway. In Cal, we have the same problem on the opposite side of the coin. He’s just a jerk through and through and has no good qualities whatsoever. Cameron does make a point of showing us that Rose is essentially being forced to marry him by her mother because her father left them in debt, and with only their good name to essentially sell. That leaves Rose feeling trapped and gives us the ensuing incident of Jack preventing her from jumping off of the back of the ship on the first night of the voyage. But again, the main problem is that both Jack and Cal are flat characters. Jack is completely heroic and Cal is completely villainous. Neither one works as a character.

I mentioned this briefly a moment ago, but I would also like to expand on it with a little more detail because I believe that the lack of a strong theme adds to the shallowness of the film and shows the need for having characters with depth. The theme of a film is quite often the lesson or message of the story. What is Titanic trying to say? There is a certain element of man vs. nature, and man’s arrogance coming back to bite him in the end, but it’s thinly veiled through the guise of class envy and class warfare in the film. As a writer and a director Cameron was going for out basest emotional responses, and he didn’t only do that with the theme of the story. He made a point of showing children suffering and crying. One of the most famous shots is of the mother telling her young children a bedtime story as the boat is sinking, and another mother telling her young child that it will all be over soon as the ship is about to make its final plunge. We see other scenes with crying children, but it doesn’t work. I hate to say this, but simply showing scared children is lazy storytelling. Yes, it gets a visceral emotional reaction, but it that’s the easy way out. When you rely on that, it means that you haven’t taken the time to allow the audience to get to know the characters and to get to care about them. You’re just figuring that everyone hates seeing harmful things happen to children, and that’s where you get your drama.

However, once the ship hits the iceberg and starts to sink, we begin the second version of Titanic, and her Cameron is in his element, and the film jumps several notches on the entertainment value scale. The second half of the film does suffer slightly due to the incomplete characters and story development of the first half, but Cameron did an excellent job of pacing the action in a way that it the tension and action built slowly as the ship starts to sink and the characters slowly learn the gravity of their collective predicament. As the ship slips more and more beneath the surface of the ocean the pacing of the action, editing and storytelling gets more intense and frenetic as water steadily fills the ship. Finally, as the ship violently breaks apart during its last moments above the surface, the action reaches its crescendo before we have the denouement of Rose, having been rescued, avoids being seen by Cal and discovering the priceless diamond that he had given her.

All of the above action is happening parallel to Rose and Jack attempting to find some way to escape what looks like certain death. Despite the lack of character development, we do root for them to survive, even though we already know that only Rose does due to circumstances from earlier in the film, and it is exciting to watch them escape every precarious situation they’re in until at last the ship sinks, and Rose is able to climb on to a floating piece of wood as Jack tries to keep her confidence up that life boats will soon be arriving. In his last moments, he implores Rose to live a great life and a long life, and to not let anyone else tell her how to live it.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that all of the action on the Titanic takes place through flashback. The film starts with a team of grave robbers, er, salvagers led by Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton) who are using submarines to search the wreckage of the Titanic for the Heart of the Ocean diamond. Thinking that they’ve found the safe that contains it, they haul it up and open it on board their vessel, but the diamond is not there. What they do find, however, is a sketch of Rose that we will later see Jack draw, and Rose is nude except for the diamond necklace. Now 100 years old, Rose sees the story on the TV news, and she and her grand-daughter fly to the Lovett’s vessel where she regales him and his crew of the fateful voyage. Gloria Stuart played Old Rose, and was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her work on this film, and she did steal a couple of scenes that turned out to be some of the most memorable scenes in the film.

One other thing that should be discussed regarding this film is its use of visual effects and how Art Directors Martin Laing and Charles Dwight Lee along with Production Designer Peter Lamont meticulously recreated the interiors and exteriors of the ship whether through reconstruction or CG. Titanic actually took computer generated visual effects to another level and the look of the film undoubtedly assisted in its popularity. Watching it the other night, I must say that the visuals do not hold up to today’s standards. It still looks good, but it doesn’t look nearly as realistic as it did in 1997.

Overall, Titanic was a cultural phenomenon. I used the word juggernaut earlier, and that’s really what it was. It was a juggernaut that rolled over box office records and rolled through the Oscars. In many ways, it was a once-in-a-lifetime cinematic phenomenon that brought more people to the movie theater than had been there in years. For that, Titanic should be applauded.

Did the Academy get it right?

I was talking to a friend of mine who made a good point about this. He said that Best Picture is essentially a production award, and when you look at it in that context then yes, the Academy did get it right in 1997. Getting Titanic produced required a Herculean effort on the part of James Cameron and the other people who produced the film. They raised the standard of visual effects and created a production the size and scope of which hadn’t been seen before. On top of all of that, they produced what has to at least be considered a film which is a very fine one indeed. However, it was not the best film of the year, so I am going to say that no, the Academy did not get it right for 1997. Of the four other films that were nominated that year, I would have voted for three of them ahead of Titanic. As Good As It Gets, Good Will Hunting and L.A. Confidential were all better films than Titanic. They all had much more compelling stories, better written screenplays, more developed characters, and better acting. I could spend another 2,000 words espousing the virtues of those other films, but the fact of the matter is that the times quite often dictate the national mood, and the national mood in 1997 was extremely pro-Titanic. It’s easy for me to sit here 18 years later and say that the Academy got this one wrong when I can actually remember how monumental of an event this film’s release was. Although even back then, I was rooting for Good Will Hunting, and now I consider L.A. Confidential to be the film that should have won. Either way, I can’t blame the Academy for selecting Titanic as Best Picture of 1997, but I will never believe that it was the year’s best film.