The Nominations Oscar Forgot

The summer season is usually considered the most hectic time of the year at the cinema, but February-March is perhaps the busiest for this moviegoer. Once the Academy Award nominations are announced in early February, I have until late March to get in all the movies I haven’t yet seen so I can give an educated opinion come awards time. Also, I can now peruse the lists and consider some worthy entries that didn’t make the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s cut. For that reason I am calling this week’s column “The Nominations Oscar Forgot.”

Although Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon nabbed ten nominations (the most ever for a foreign-language film), the 2001 Oscars are plagued by the yearly complaint that the Academy’s choices are not bold enough to include more minority talents. Granted, there should be no quotas of any kind (“We must re-vote...we need more blacks!”), but more effort surely must be expended to embrace worthy works from individuals of all ethnicities. With that in mind, my list of overlooked performers includes high-caliber work from top-notch artists, yet also serves to add a little color (pardon the bad pun) to the mix.

For the category of Best Supporting Actor, I would have loved to have seen Rob Brown (Finding Forrester) and Jeffrey Wright (Shaft) get some notice. Brown, in his acting debut, more than held his own matching wits with a roguishly cranky Sean Connery. Ironically, he also appears with Anna Paquin, who won this award for her debut performance in The Piano. Wright, on the other hand, crossed the path of Samuel L. Jackson’s ultra-cool Shaft and turned in a memorably flamboyant, scene-stealing turn as the eccentric drug lord, Peoples Hernandez.

Zhang Ziyi (Crouching Tiger) and Catherine Zeta-Jones (Traffic) are my neglected picks for Best Supporting Actress. As the impetuous Jen, Zhang was a beautiful dynamo full of sound and fury, while Zeta-Jones brought a tangible realism to the stunning pragmatism of a wife and mother willing to do whatever it takes to protect family and home.

Over in the Best Actress category, my votes would go to Zhang’s co-star, Michelle Yeoh, and Renee Zellweger of Nurse Betty. Yeoh exuded stateliness and simple nobility in her role as a veteran warrior capable of besting the deadliest foe, and Zellweger effectively and convincingly transformed herself into the deluded, titular protagonist of Neil LaBute’s whimsical, dark and idiosyncratic comedy.

Though these two stars would hardly be overlooked as part of the current Hollywood pantheon of bankable actors, Bruce Willis (Unbreakable) and Denzel Washington (Remember the Titans) were definitely passed over for Best Actor for their unheralded work last year. Willis turned in his most quiet and unmannered performance as an unsettled everyman searching for his place in life and family, while Washington converted his role as a stern football coach from what could merely have been a lark job into a sterling, captivating performance.

Though the Academy did honor talents (i.e., Ang Lee and Steven Soderbergh) of singular, unique style, my missing nominations for Best Director would include helmers Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous) and M. Night Shyamalan (Unbreakable). It’s difficult to think of two more distinct voices last year working on pieces that so clearly reflected their uncommon tastes: Almost Famous is dripping with Crowe’s autobiographical influences and his undeniable fondness for his characters, and Unbreakable is so true to Shyamalan’s own peculiar storytelling style and logic that it polarized most of its audience into either “love it” or “hate it” factions.

Finally, for Best Picture, my initial thought was to name two personal faves from last year, Chicken Run and Unbreakable, as the forgotten flicks, but instead I’ll go with Almost Famous and Billy Elliott, two films that appeared to be especially hurt by two factors: one, they were not released late enough in the year to be in the forefront of voters’ minds; and two, although both scored as critical darlings (as signified by nominations in other top categories), neither really made a huge dent in the box office standings, and thus, unfortunately, they were left behind. It’s too bad that apparently in some cases, the nominations seem merely another form of popularity contest.