May I confess something slightly embarrassing?
I’m not, deep in my heart, convinced that Return of the King and Peter Jackson deserve to win tonight.
Oh, I want them to win, mind you. It would be a gross injustice and blot on the Oscars’ (anyways-spotty) record if the Lord of the Rings trilogy failed to bring home a Best Picture and Best Director award. I want to see the acceptance speechess. I want all the glory and vindication that’s due for the trilogy.
But it should have already happened.
Two years ago, Fellowship of the Ring— the finest overall movie of the three, and a beautiful, magnificent piece of work– lost to the actively awful Beautiful Mind, a movie with very close to no redeeming value.
Last year, Two Towers— a somewhat lesser movie, though an even greater directorial accomplishment– lost to the fine-and-fun-but-nothing-really-special Chicago. Considering how terrific the stage musical is when it’s done well (I got to see it on Broadway with Marilu Henner and Bebe Neuwirth– and Neuwirth was electrifying, amazing, orders of magnitude better than the fine-and-fun-but-nothing-really-special Catherine Zeta-Jones performance), the really noteworthy thing about the movie Chicago is how uninpired it was. It wasn’t execrable like Mind, but it seems to me that it didn’t even come close to measuring up to Two Towers.
Now it’s the year for Return of the King— a slightly lesser movie still, and noticeably fallen off from the standard set by Fellowship. And it’s up against Mystic River and Lost in Translation. And I’m just not convinced that, taken on its own rather than as the representative for the whole trilogy, RotK is a better overall movie than, or Jackson’s directing of it a more impressive accomplishment than Sofia Coppola’s or Clint Eastwood’s accomplishments in directing, River or Translation.
There’s something really special about a movie that’s pitch-perfect, one that sets an ambitious goal for itself and accomplishes it with no false notes, no real mistakes, one that somehow adds up to more than the sum of its parts. I thought Fellowship was such a movie. And I think River and Translation both are. RotK? Not so much.
What would probably make me happiest tonight is if the past two years’ Picture and Director awards got revoked and given to Rings/ Jackson, and then River and Translation split the two 2004 awards. Sadly, that ain’t how it’s going to happen…
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