The 76th Annual Academy Awards

The 2004 Academy Awards show was was pretty plain this year, with no surprise winners and this year lacked tons of nominations. The Best Picture this year went to the obvious third sequel "Lord of the Rings: Return of the King" with eleven wins tying with "Ben Hur" and "Titanic". Billy Crystal was fine as the host, he usually has a good sense of humor, but this year as the Master of Ceremonies probably wasn't his greatest compared to the 1997 Oscar show. The Best Director went to Peter Jackson for "Lord of the Rings", and Sofia Coppola won the Best Screenplay award. Blake Edwards took the Lifetime Honorary Achievement Award for his long career as a comedy director. The acting awards were kind of odd, I was hoping Bill Murray would win the Best Actor Oscar for "Lost in Translation", but he lost to Sean Penn for Clint Eastwood's "Mystic River", Tim Robbins won the Supporting Actor for "Mystic River" and Renee Zellweger took the Supporting Actress award for "Cold Mountain". Charlize Theron won the Best Actress Oscar as real life serial killer Aileen Wuornios for "Monster" the film's only nomination and win. Another odd thing about the acting awards this year was the International stars that didn't win. We have New Zealand born actress Keisha Castle-Hughes for "Whale Rider". Hughes was the youngest ever nominated in the Best Actress category. Japanese actor Ken Watanabe was nominated for "The Last Samauri", African American actor Dijimon Honseu was nominated for "In America" as was English actress Samantha Morton and Iraq born actress Shohreh Aghdashloo for "The House of Sand and Fog". Other known nominees for acting included Diane Keaton for "Something's Gotta Give", Johnny Depp for "Pirates of the Caribean", Alec Baldwin for "The Cooler", Ben Kingsley for "The House of Sand and Fog" and Holly Hunter for "Thirteen". Academy President Frank Pierson did a terrific job at presenting the In Memoriam segment of the show, which was very long this year to pay tribute to the many stars that died this year. They included Gregory Peck, Bob Hope, Hope Lange, Wendy Hiller, Charles Bronson, directors Elia Kazan and John Schlesinger, Buddy Hackett, Buddy Ebsen, Art Carney, Jeanne Crain, Guy Rolfe, Ron O'Neal, Hume Cronyn, Karen Morley, Robert Stack, John Ritter, Ann Miller, Donald O'Connor, Gregory Hines, Michael Jeter and a very special memorial to screen legend Katharine Hepburn.

It all began so well with Billy Crystal's amazing opening number but after that nothing spectacular happened. What happened to all the musical and dance numbers the Oscar ceremony always used to had?

And as for the awards, nothing unexpected happened and it wasn't even tense since all the winners were already as good as known weeks before the ceremony. The only category that was tense was the one for best performance by an actor in a leading role. Bill Murray and Sean Penn were favorites but there also was a chance for Johnny Depp to win. Sean Penn won and most likely he deserved it to win and oh boy, Bill Murray looked mad and disappointing. Billy Crystal responded brilliantly with saying: Common Bill we love you! And he was right at that. Anyway Bill Murray deserved to win an Oscar years ago for his role in "Rushmore" but that's a whole other issue. I just hope he will get nominated again. No doubt that he then will win his long deserved Oscar.

And then the big winner of the night: "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King". It won 11 Oscars, in other words it won everything it was nominated for. Finally justice will most people say but as a movie critic you can hardly call it justice. Sure I understand why it won, it was a tribute to the ending of one of the best trilogy's in movie history and a compensation for the last two years when the previous two movie hardly won any Oscar's of importance. But I don't think it's really fair to give just only the last movie all the awards, they should have awarded all the three movies since they are all part of a trilogy that should be seen as one big whole movie. And really did they have to win really every award they were nominated for? It wasn't really fair and it didn't do any justice to all the other movies that were nominated and it surely didn't do any good to the tension but at least the fans are happy now.

The presenters were nothing special this year, except for Robin Williams and Adrien Brody that were at least a bit interesting. The "thanks speeches" were as always not interesting and nobody even cried although some came close to. But at least there was luckily hardly anything political said.

All in all; nothing spectacular or exciting this year. And thank God that "Lord of the Rings" will not be a contestant next year! The only reason why it was watchable was because of Billy Crystal, the "in memoriam sequences" and the honorary award for Blake Edwards who in my opinion really deserved it.

5/10

http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

Is it that time of the year already? Well, sort of, they have come a month early this year in an effort to cut out the whole nasty marketing campaign that was seen in the last few years. Whether or not this was needed in the year when I suspect no amount of smouzing would have stopped Return of The King from collecting Oscars covering all three instalments.

As it was, there were almost no real surprises at all - certainly not in the main categories. Each of these were made up of two likely winners and three `the nomination is enough' type nominations (City of God, Johnny Depp, the girl from Whalerider etc). Did anyone doubt that LOTR would get Director and Best Picture? Or that Penn would get actor with Robbins the only sure fire supporting Oscar. Zellweger was not a worthy winner on this role alone but she was always going to get it and with her makeup, weight gain and performance, it was always going to be Theron. The only surprise to me that was that LOTR managed to sweep every single nomination it had.

So as an awards ceremony I didn't really find any controversy or any major talking points, but (thanks to fast forward) I did enjoy the show. Crystal is the best host the show has had in the past decade or so. He is witty, imaginative and very funny. His traditional opening of being edited into films was not quite as good or sharp as it has been before - only Michael Moore declaring the hobbit's was `shameful and fictitious' got a big laugh from me. However, his songs and his gags were all pretty good and only occasionally fell flat. `Seabiscuit' to the tune of Goldfinger was hilarious and singing `Mystic River' in the style of an old spiritual was just inspired. The show is great with him and the host is the main reason I watch it.

Everyone accepted their awards with good grace and everything was pretty clean and obvious; only Sean Penn dropped a little dig about WMD's apart from Crystal's scripted digs. Overall this was a good show despite the usual problems of it being too long and having absurdly long commercial breaks all through it. Crystal makes it worth seeing but it is a shame that the main awards were so very obvious - I tried to get a combination bet on the 5 main awards but no bookie's would allow me to do that combination and the individual odds were just a waste of time (1-16 for Jackson to be director?!). Aside from this it was a good show - but I would never watch it live, I need the fast forward!

This was one of the good Academy Awards ceremonies before they started getting out of touch. Billy Crystal was a good host and he brought life to all the worthy nominations.

I always watch with immense pleasure The Oscars as they proved to be the most important and influential event in the film business. Producers, directors, screenwriters, actors all around the world wait for their work to be acknowledged as a sign of recognition of their talent, commitment and inspiration!

TALENT, COMMITMENT AND INSPIRATION!...Key words! They are the essence of true art; it's like Soderbergh so nicely put it (on winning the much coveted Oscar)that we should first of all thank all those who take a pencil and create a piece of canvas or write a script before thanking friends and relatives.

You can imagine my surprise with last year's Oscar Ceremony:Lord of the Rings won 11 out of 11 nominations... a film that otherwise lacks both talent and inspiration but unfolds as a continuous futile effort to shock and amaze!!

Nevertheless I have to give Peter Jackson credit for his commitment(the only key word that applies for the production)to put an end to this long, long sometimes too long struggle to adapt(very poorly!) a book which conquered the hearts of millions of children and adults worldwide!

But is this the true purpose of The Academy? Do we still have to praise films which are beautifully "dressed" like an artificial Christmas Tree with impressive decorations but eventually lacks branches!

I'm not Minghella's number one fan but "Cold Mountain"was the best of 2004! Not by far though! Perhaps Cold Mountain's best merit would be that it respects truthfully the golden rule of Hitchcock's films: the real villain is never shown! We can sense it in this raw and brutal environment, we can feel the presence of ravens floating above the reddish snow but we are never told precisely what forces govern the destiny of two main characters! (Well done for Law, Kidman and Zellweger)

Anyway here are MY Oscar winners for 2004:

Best Picture: Cold Mountain

Best Director: Fernando Meirelles (City of God)

Best Actor: Sean Penn (21 Grams)

Best Actress: Charlize Theron (Monster)

Best Supporting Actor: Tim Robbins (Mystic River)

Best Supporting Actress: Marcia Gay Harden (Mystic River)

Best Foreign Language Picture: Good-bye Lenin

Best Animated Feature: Finding Nemo

Nevertheless a poor year for the Oscars! My vote for the 2004 Ceremony 7/10