fox

So, wow: Tom Hanks is normally very good with the prompter, so it must be that the folks running the prompter are giving him the lines reaaally slowly.

I don't expect to have a lot to say about a lot of the rest of the thing, on account of I'm exhausted and I'm just going to sit here and let the watching happen.

Am I the only person who really enjoyed Moulin Rouge and Fellowship of the Ring but nevertheless felt each got more Oscar nominations than it deserved?

Twenty-five years ago, Sir Alec Guinness did not win an Oscar for Star Wars -- its only acting nomination (Supporting Actor). I forget who the other nominees were that year -- I was too young to be paying attention -- but the odds are good they gave performances of more depth and substance simply because they were working with material of more depth and substance. Now, Sir Alec was a great, great actor, don't get me wrong. He could bring depth and substance to a rain puddle. But slow though some years are in terms of good, solid, meaty roles, I have a hard time imagining a year in which a performance of a role that can be summarized by pulling a description out of stock -- in this case, Short-Lived Mentor -- could be the best performance by an actor in a supporting role.

Similarly, Sir Ian McKellen is a bloody brilliant actor. Fellowship of the Ring was a far better, more tightly-written movie than Star Wars, even. But the best performance by an actor in a supporting role? It's not Most Fun Performance For The Audience To Watch. It's not Coolest Actor in a Supporting Role. It's not, god help us, Supporting Role Where We Like The Character Best. It's not a lot of things that it sometimes winds up looking like -- Gwyneth Paltrow, for instance, won her Oscar for Biggest Difference Between The Performance We Thought We Were Going To Get And The Performance We Actually Got From An Actress In A Lead Role, which is a far different thing than Best Performance By An Actress In A Lead Role -- and sometimes the popular favorites don't win. I haven't seen Iris yet, so I'm not in a position to say whether I think Jim Broadbent gave a better performance than Sir Ian. In my general social circle here in RL, in fact, hardly anybody has seen Iris. So what do we know?

My grandmother went to her grave thinking Tom Cruise was robbed when he didn't win the Best Actor Oscar for Born on the Fourth of July in 1990. She also went to her grave never having seen My Left Foot, for which Daniel Day-Lewis did win. Her feeling was from the heart, but only partially-informed.

I was glad to see that Moulin Rouge won for costumes, and Lord of the Rings for, what, cinematography and some of that other stuff it really did do impressively. It's a little disappointing that Rings didn't get the screenplay award, but not having read the book in years or the screenplay at all, and not having read the books or the screenplays for the other nominees as far as I know, I'm less comfortable expressing solid opinions on that category. And it's a little disappointing that Baz Luhrman didn't get the directing award, but Best Director is such a crapshoot anyway -- a long time ago I gave up on that one, and decided it's a case of it actually being the real honor to be nominated, since you genuinely don't know who's going to win. Styles. They're so different.

But, I mean, now. Nicole Kidman was nominated for Best Actress. Since the nominations, I've been hearing people weep and moan that Ewan McGregor wasn't nominated for Best Actor -- the most common refrain is "How can you nominate only half the duo? How can you nominate her and overlook him?" Where I'm sitting, though, dudes -- the question is more like, How could you nominate her in the first place? (See above, re: Gwyneth Paltrow, with the caveat that I do think Nicole Kidman is capable of excellent work as an actress -- this just wasn't really it.) The fact, to my mind, that Ewan McGregor was not nominated while Nicole Kidman was does not mean he was overlooked. I don't think Renee Zellweger deserved her nomination, either, and I was frankly relieved that she didn't win. Talk about eliminating any shred of legitimacy left in the Academy Awards! (There's not much -- it's mostly all about fun. What it is mostly is a whole lot of self-congratulation, and it wouldn't hurt if there were a well-respected, high-profile award given by some disinterested party.)

I mean, both Nicole and Renee did fine, competent work. There was nothing at all wrong with either performance. But they were just not, not, not the best performance of the year by an actress in a lead role. Neither one. Not even the best performance I saw all year by an actress in a lead role.

That, I suppose, would have been Jennifer Connolly in A Beautiful Mind, for which she won best supporting actress -- but that's another rant. :-)