Nominations: What the Oscar Voters Missed

Here’s a real tough one for your readers: “Shakespeare in Love” is to “Saving Private Ryan” as “Moulin Rouge” is to what movie?

Admittedly, “Black Hawk Down” is “disquieting” (Kenneth Turan’s word), but is that really why a piece of obnoxious fluff received a best picture Academy Award nomination in its stead?

I wouldn’t exactly call “In the Bedroom” uplifting.

Could it be that industry folks just found it too distasteful to honor a film that celebrates values so alien and repugnant to them? The message that “Black Hawk Down” sends so clearly--that our way of life must sometimes be defended with force and that those who fight on our behalf deserve our thanks--is truly a disquieting one for Hollywood.

STEPHEN QUINN

Huntington Beach

*

The academy deserves high praise in its selection of the nominees in that they were able to stay awake while judging “Moulin Rouge.” Or maybe they didn’t, and that was the problem.

BERNARD LEHRER

Ventura

*

Though “Gosford Park” was a wonderful movie, I question Robert Altman being nominated for best director. One wonders why all that great talent was assembled for the film when some played such minimal roles. Probably the most egregious example of this was Derek Jacobi, a great actor who, I don’t believe, had more than two lines.

JOHN HAGGERTY

Woodland Hills

*

Once again, the academy’s documentary branch displays its usual dubious expertise and denies even a nomination to what was clearly the year’s best documentary. For many, “Martin Scorsese’s ‘My Voyage to Italy’” was not only the year’s best documentary but the year’s best film. Period.

This beautiful four-hour cinematic history lesson brought tears to my eyes, as it reminded me again and again of the potential power and beauty of the cinema, from the days when some people still treated movies as an art form.

As usual, the documentary branch didn’t do its homework.

DAVE SCHMERLER

Westminster