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Oscar aberrations a little on the nose

February 13 2003

Shooting for an Oscar... Australian cinematographer Dion Beebe.

A few enchanting prospects offset the strange logic behind some nominations, writes Garry Maddox.

There are some delicious prospects about the 75th Academy Awards after the nominations were announced yesterday.

One is the thought that bad boy rapper Eminem will stroll down the red carpet in a designer tux, chatting amiably with fellow music nominees John Williams and Philip Glass, then feigning modesty when his name is called.

Somehow that seems unlikely. While 8 Mile has given him a degree of mainstream respectability, the world will be a saner place if the best-song nominee, for Lose Yourself, resists turning into Elton John or Sting.

Then there is also the delightful idea that Hollywood will finally give Martin Scorsese a best director Oscar this year. He has missed all four times he has been nominated previously.

As Scorsese told the Herald last week, it has reached the point where academy members believe they must have given him one or two Oscars in the past.

What an irony if he finally wins for Gangs of New York. It is an ambitious epic. It has some powerhouse acting. It took 25 years to get to the screen. But it ain't Taxi Driver, Raging Bull or Goodfellas.

From an Australian perspective, there is also the enchanting prospect that Nicole Kidman will win best actress for The Hours after her second successive nomination. Once routinely derided as the less talented half of a famous Hollywood marriage, she has shown her talent in Moulin Rouge, The Others and now playing novelist Virginia Woolf in The Hours.

Those who say Renee Zellweger should win for stretching to singing and dancing forget that a certain Australian actress did the same thing for Moulin Rouge ... then lost to Halle Berry. So who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? I'm guessing Zellweger for one.

As usual, things went wrong with the nominations as well. The academy messed up last year when it nominated Moulin Rouge as one of the year's best pictures but overlooked director Baz Luhrmann. It has happened again and cost another Australian a nomination.

By any known standards, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is a remarkable achievement in filmmaking. Rightly, the second instalment of the trilogy is up for best picture against the musical Chicago and the dramas The Hours, The Pianist and Gangs of New York.

But, hey, what about director Peter Jackson and Australian cinematographer Andrew Lesnie? Is this another case of a film making itself?

The strong speculation that the academy was reluctant to give further recognition to the films until The Return of the King closed the trilogy has proved accurate.

Lesnie won the cinematography category last year but could not even get a nomination this year. Could it be because the academy feels the trilogy is just one film? There is no logic to that. The Star Wars saga isn't one film. Whatever the rationale, Lesnie was hard done by.

There are other aberrations that suggest Oscars voting is an imperfect system - as if we didn't know that already, after Shakespeare in Love won best picture.

How come Julianne Moore is nominated as best supporting actress for The Hours when she is on screen longer than Kidman? It might have something to do with the awkward prospect that Moore would be competing against herself in Far From Heaven. She now has a chance to win both acting categories.

And how come Meryl Streep is up for best supporting actress when she is the female lead in Adaptation? That might have something to do with her being touted - unsuccessfully as it turns out - for a best actress nomination for The Hours.

Oh, and there's one more entertaining aberration. A fictional character has been nominated. And it's not Richard Gere.

In the best original screenplay credit, the nod went to Charlie and Donald Kaufman for Adaptation, the whimsical film about the difficulties of adapting a book for the screen.

How will Charlie Kaufman get out of giving a screen credit to an invented twin brother if he does collect an Oscar? Maybe Nicole Kidman could use that prosthetic nose again.




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