Lost in the pack

Perhaps searching for stability in the Academy Awards is a futile exercise. For all that we swear we know about what Oscar voters really love -- prestige films!, comeback performances!, Meryl Streep! -- there’s always something to make trivia hawks salivate and die-hard viewers bolt from their chairs in anger or joy. Each year surprises with what didn’t get nominated, what did, how many nominations a film got, how many awards a film won compared to how many it was up for, etc.

But when you’re parsing a history that includes a best picture winner with no other nominations -- “Grand Hotel” (1932) -- and two movies that were nominated for 11 awards and won zero -- “The Turning Point” (1977) and “The Color Purple” (1985) -- you realize that Oscar oddities provide a chance to examine the bigger picture.

That said, what to make of three of this year’s five best picture nominees -- “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” and “Seabiscuit” -- receiving no acting nominations?

What this year’s occurrence literally means is that members of the acting branch of the academy didn’t see fit to nominate their colleagues from three films that they might have also put up for best picture. (In the nominations process, peers select the contenders in all the categories except best picture, where everyone pitches in. Only in the final round do all academy members vote for all categories.) But there is a natural inclination to assume that something’s off. How can a film be up for best picture without some best acting going on?

Well, a similar troika manifested itself in 1969, with nominees “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Hello, Dolly!” and “Z.” And a lack of acting nominations certainly doesn’t preclude a film’s nabbing the big one. That’s happened nine times over 75 years, starting with the first top prize winner, “Wings,” and most recently 1995’s “Braveheart.”

The most egregious examples are probably the Greta Garbo-John Barrymore-Joan Crawford-studded “Grand Hotel” and the beloved 1958 musical “Gigi,” which took nine Oscars its year without an acting nomination.

“When you look back on those films, it’s certainly the performances that help make them,” says Turner Classic Movies host and columnist Robert Osborne, author of “75 Years of the Oscars.” “Maybe those wonderful performances in ‘Gigi’ were so effortless that people didn’t really focus on how wonderful those people were. It seems to give us the impression that actors think that just being wonderful in a comedy or musical is easy, and if you get to chew the scenery and scream and throw things, you’re doing great acting.”

But none of the three best picture nominees from this year are comedies. What does the seeming incongruity actually say, then, about the movies themselves or the movies of 2003?

“I think it’s just Hollywood’s way of preparing audiences for the inevitable movie in which all the stars are virtual,” jokes film critic Peter Rainer. With computers able to generate nearly every aspect of a movie now, he notes facetiously that maybe “the only surprise is not so much that no real actors were nominated in those movies but that Gollum wasn’t nominated.” Let’s take each case separately.

Effects -- including Andy Serkis’ digitally rendered performance as Gollum -- are definitely a big part of “The Lord of the Rings,” and the big question may be whether its whiz-bang qualities and the enveloping grandeur of its otherworldly scope overpowered the work of its actors. Each film in the trilogy has been up for best picture now, yet only Ian McKellen’s wise, fatherly Gandalf from “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first movie, has gotten an acting nod. But audiences haven’t been unmoved by the characters, and this year New Line campaigned hard for Sean Astin, whose scenes as Samwise are some of “Return’s” most poignant, as best supporting actor.

Is the academy pronouncing “Ring”-leader Peter Jackson then the real star, the way veteran wizard auteur Steven Spielberg was viewed early in his career? Spielberg’s first three films to garner best picture nominations -- “Jaws,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “ET” -- were acting shutouts too, probably because they were seen as director-driven, crafty entertainments. (When he tackled World War II in a serious way with “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan,” the academy took more notice.) With Jackson, there’s even a hard-to-ignore visual corollary -- though not an actor, the shaggy, rotund Jackson certainly wouldn’t look out of place in his own hobbity epic. It could be that his expected best director win tonight will be a performance award as well: In making this monumental trilogy, a scrappy New Zealand filmmaker had to play the part of a top-tier director and fantastically became one.

What happened to Crowe?

The omission of “Master and Commander” is a little harder to figure. As viscerally complete as best director nominee Peter Weir’s conveyance of life at sea feels, Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany bring critical warmth, humor and electric camaraderie to this acclaimed adaptation of Patrick O’Brian’s beloved books. So has the often grouchy Crowe worn out his welcome with the academy’s actors after getting three best actor nominations in a row and winning for “Gladiator”? Or did the movie just seem too stout and male to convince female voters that it was worth their time? Or, considering the on-screen charm represented by nominees Johnny Depp and Bill Murray, would citing Crowe’s man-among-men charisma have deemed the best actor race a tad too lighthearted?

The horse biopic “Seabiscuit” has a dual affliction: no acting nominations and no director nomination for Gary Ross. This isn’t an impossible circumstance to overcome -- “Driving Miss Daisy” won best picture of 1989 without Bruce Beresford getting nominated -- but it gives the film the same odds its stubby-legged subject had as a racing novice. Acclaimed actors Jeff Bridges, Tobey Maguire and last year’s best supporting actor winner, Chris Cooper, are the redemption-seeking men at the movie’s core, but perhaps the overriding social context -- how an underdog horse soothed a depressed nation’s soul -- effectively kept the individuals around Seabiscuit sidelined. And what makes a film a success doesn’t always translate into easy-to-categorize awards.

The Screen Actors Guild award committees this year didn’t give nominations to Astin, Crowe, Bettany, Bridges or Maguire either. (Cooper’s stoic trainer was up for an award, though.) But the SAG honors have compensated for possibly noteworthy omissions by bestowing an award for outstanding cast, something it’s been doing for nine years. Although not limited to movies with a long roster of performers, the award means there’s a chance that a movie powered by an ensemble won’t get left behind in a world of star turns and showy supporting roles. Last week, New Line ran full-page ads lined with rows of cast boxes -- both a campaign for the SAG award and a reminder to the academy of what it missed out on. And last Sunday, the cast of “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” won SAG’s award for “ensemble of a theatrical motion picture.”

“Actors love that award,” says Kathy Connell, co-executive producer of the SAG Awards show. “It’s an acknowledgment that they don’t act alone, that they work together.”

There’s a broadcaster’s savvy too in giving out a well-timed group award. It allows a program to end on the kind of communal, piling-onstage catharsis that typically signifies the best picture win at the close of the Oscars. But in terms of merit, the SAG’s cast award is one of the more satisfying recognitions of the awards season, because it’s probably the only honor that acknowledges the collaborative nature of the medium.

Ideally, the best picture award represents that kind of artistic alchemy (even though it goes to the producer/s), but in the now-fractious war among indies, specialty-arm flicks and big-budget pictures there seems to be a decisive split over what a best picture should entail. Is it something classy and large, or edgy and small? The flip side of a trio of acting-deprived Oscar-nominated films is the lack of technical nominations for their character-driven competitors. But where is the cinematography nod for the way “Lost in Translation” captured a moodily lighted, hotel-centric world? Where is the editing nomination squarely deserved for the indelible human rhythms of “Mystic River”?

Undoubtedly there’s a link between the growing lack of consensus about what merits an Oscar and the myriad upheavals in the industry: the reliance on the expensive event film, the demise of the midrange picture, the muscling in of the indies and the frequent inability to determine which is a little-movie-that-could (“Whale Rider”) and what’s a little-movie-that-has-gigantic-coffers-to-promote-it (“City of God”).

Next year’s weird Oscar aberrance may not involve whether any films with original screenplays get best picture nominations in an industry increasingly averse to serious work without a best-selling book behind it. (“Lost in Translation” is the only nonadaptation of the 2003 best picture nominees.)

Inevitably film buffs will be scratching their heads or wringing their hands in the opening months of 2005. And maybe that’s how it should be, if it keeps alive the dialogue on what makes a noteworthy film, or -- more entertainingly -- what goes through the minds of academy voters. “It’s why I think the Oscars have had such a lifespan,” Osborne says. “They’ve never really allowed us to get too bored with them.”