Oscar Looks Beyond Obvious Choices--and U.S. Shores

We don’t have the Oscars to kick around anymore. At least not this year.

If the nominations for the 73rd Academy Awards announced Tuesday demonstrate anything, it’s the academy’s increasing willingness to look beyond the traditional kind of ponderous studio-produced Oscar pictures and venture into the headier arena of independent and even foreign-language films.

In fact, with the exception of “Gladiator” (which led all contenders with a dozen nominations), none of the academy’s choices--”Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “Erin Brockovich,” “Traffic,” even the syrupy “Chocolat”--was an obvious best picture possibility when it debuted.

As exemplified by “Crouching Tiger’s” 10 nominations (a foreign-language record especially notable for a film in Mandarin and one that received neither acting nor, most surprisingly, visual effects recognition), the academy is increasingly open to seeing film in general and the Oscars in particular as a worldwide stage. Voters, like critics, recognized the superb work of best actor nominee Javier Bardem, almost unknown in this country before his performance in “Before Night Falls,” and they singled out Benicio Del Toro’s Spanish-language performance among “Traffic’s” wide-ranging, and largely English-speaking, ensemble.

What that and the academy’s choices in other categories also underline is the power of critics and the media to discover and champion unexpected films, and the willingness of the academy to listen with an open mind. “Crouching Tiger” was voted best picture by the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn., and the kind of year that led Steven Soderbergh to an unprecedented double-double (best picture and best director nominations for “Erin Brockovich” and “Traffic”) had previously won him honors from every major critical group. The gap between what reviewers look on as the best work of the year and the choices of Oscar voters is smaller than it has ever been.

Those voters, without doubt taking advantage of the easy availability of less obvious films on videotape, also cast a wide and notably discerning net in picking out whom to vote for in numerous categories, most notably the four acting sections.

Although both films were independently distributed and barely made it into theaters in December, academy members saw enough to nominate Ed Harris and Marcia Gay Harden for “Pollock” and Willem Dafoe for “Shadow of the Vampire.” And the classically independent, Sundance-winning “You Can Count on Me” got a pair of major nominations, a screenplay nomination for writer-director Kenneth Lonergan and an acting one for Laura Linney (better known in Hollywood than her equally good, un-nominated co-star, Mark Ruffalo).

Of course, if you are of a mind, there are academy selections and omissions you could complain about--for instance the lack of picture and director nominations for both “Almost Famous” and “Wonder Boys.” The latter film saw none of its performers, not even star Michael Douglas or co-star Frances McDormand (who was nominated for “Almost Famous”), get a nomination.

And you could fulminate about the academy’s traditional weakness for regrettably sentimental material, which led to three nominations for “Billy Elliot” and five (tying it with “Erin Brockovich” and “Traffic”) for “Chocolat,” which in itself is yet another tribute to the Oscar wonders Miramax can accomplish with questionable material when it sets its mind to it.

On the other hand, and more significantly, the academy avoided the pitfalls of the over-inflated “Cast Away,” awarding it, besides the inevitable re-annointing of star Tom Hanks, a nomination for sound and nothing more.

The academy made some interesting choices in the foreign-language film category. Aside from the irrepressible “Crouching Tiger” from Taiwan, it selected “The Taste of Others,” the year’s most successful French film; “Divided We Fall,” an unexpected pleasure from the Czech Republic that played at Sundance; a largely unknown Belgian film called “Everybody Famous,” and, in its most adventurous pick, the highly regarded Mexican film “Amores Perros,” a picture that, if advance reports are reliable, would have been deemed too violent for the academy in years past. True, the members didn’t connect with Wong Kar-wai’s rapturous but elliptical “In the Mood for Love” from Hong Kong, but clearly tastes are evolving.

Voters also largely avoided putting all their eggs in large baskets, not nominating the same films straight down the line just because they were satisfying overall and ferreting out what was praiseworthy in pictures that didn’t do very well in the more prestigious categories.

Witness “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” getting nominations for art direction, costume design and makeup; both Bjork and Bob Dylan earning best song nominations (for “Dancer in the Dark” and “Wonder Boys”); two sound nominations going to the edge-of-your-seat “U-571”; an art direction nomination for the vapid but gorgeous “Vatel”; one for visual effects for “Hollow Man”; and even one for makeup voted on by the unfortunates who had to sit through “The Cell.”

Given how perspicacious so many of the academy’s choices have been, it’s dispiriting to have to report that one of the few areas not doing well is documentary, which revamped its procedures a few years back in an attempt to get a more representative class of nominees.

While the five documentaries in contention are all praiseworthy (it’s especially nice to see “Sound and Fury’s” unexpectedly moving look at deafness on the list), it is troubling, to say the least, to find that last year’s three most lauded and successful documentaries (“Dark Days,” “The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg” and “Paragraph 175”) are all missing from the list. Did voters feel those films had had enough success? Was there a de facto effort to ghettoize the documentary Oscar for poor but deserving films? Who can say?

Probably the year’s most amusing selection was the nomination for “screenplay based on material previously published or produced” that went to the Coen brothers script for “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Though a title card reads “Based upon the ‘Odyssey’ by Homer,” that attribution is as much tongue-in-cheek as anything else. In fact, the Coens thought of, but rejected as gilding the lily, an additional deadpan card reading “Portions also based on ‘Moby Dick.’ ” In hindsight they were clearly right.

*

More Inside

Oscar Coverage: Calendar offers a closer look at the nominees, commentary and a full list, F1

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

BEST PICTURE NOMINEES