Oscar nods, and some heads shake

TWO of our largest, most prestigious and bigger-than-life cities, Chicago and New York, are right where they should be, battling it out for the year’s best picture (“The Harveys,” by Robert W. Welkos and Susan King, Feb. 12). And best yet, they each deal with a vintage piece of Americana, with “Gangs of New York” focusing on the Irish American riots to protest being inducted into the military during the Civil War and a young man seeking retribution for the murder of his father, while “Chicago” is about two murderous women competing for tabloid publicity during the Roaring ‘20s.

And isn’t murder and music and riots and revenge and dreams and dalliances and immigrants and ideals and gossip and guns what America is made of?

Kenneth L. Zimmerman

Huntington Beach

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AS a viewer of quality cinema, I was truly appalled by the academy’s snub of the excellent film “About Schmidt.” While Jack Nicholson and Kathy Bates received deserved nods for their brilliant portrayals in the film, writer-director Alexander Payne was shut out of the screenplay and directing categories, as was the film itself for best picture.

What academy members failed to realize is that “Schmidt” is a tragicomedy of the highest order, a “Death of a Salesman” for the millennium. Schmidt is a man who has a profound epiphany about a life insignificantly lived. Either the academy members found this sobering look at an unfulfilling life too depressing and too reminiscent of their own shallow lives, or they simply “didn’t get it.”

Steve Finkelstein

Los Angeles

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WHAT was the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences thinking? Roman Polanski [who received Oscar nominations as director and one of the producers of “The Pianist”] is a wanted man in this country. He pleaded guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old, then fled the country to avoid prison.

Maybe none of the members of the academy have 13-year-olds in their families but I have a niece close to that age. I’m disgusted that such an honor would be bestowed on a child rapist. Shame on them all.

David Saucedo

Monrovia