What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2004

The Year: 2004
What the Nominees Were: The Aviator, Finding Neverland, Million Dollar Baby, Ray, Sideways 

Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the most obvious one! For that matter, Mean Girls is a better movie than The Aviator.

What Did Win: Million Dollar Baby
How It’s Aged: It’s a good movie. Gruesome and unpleasant, but an excellent acting showcase for both Clint Eastwood and Hilary Swank.

What Should’ve Won: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
How Hard Was the Decision: Sideways is almost equally great, and it was very hard choosing between the two. But ultimately, I think Endless Sunshine might be my favorite of the 21st century, so I should certainly award it the prize for the best movie of 2004.

Director: Michel Gondry
Writer: Charlie Kaufman, from a story by Kaufman, Gondry and Pierre Bismuth

Stars: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, Tom Wilkinson

The Story: Joel Barish pays a company called Lacuna to erase his memories of a painful relationship with a girl named Clementine, but in the middle of the process he starts to rebel and tries to flee the wave of annihilation making its way through his memories.

Any Nominations or Wins: Just two: It won Original Screenplay and lost Best Actress for Winslet. It’s insane that Carrey didn’t get a nomination. The Academy really hates him.
Why It Didn’t Win: Too weird, I guess? In a year full of weak nominations, the failure to nominate this movie has to be remembered among the Academy’s greatest marks of shame.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Michel Gondry won the right to direct this after making some brilliant music videos (check out “The Hardest Button to Button”) and he went afterwards on to make some very good movies (I’m a big fan of Be Kind Rewind) but nothing that matched this. The imagination that fueled the music videos is on display when he creates a giant table for grown-Carrey to hide beneath as he relives his small childhood.
   
2. Why does the Academy hate Jim Carrey so much? He’s never gotten so much as a nomination despite deserving wins for The Truman Show and this. Is it because he got his start in such anti-intellectual fare as Ace Ventura, or is it a certain quality of guilelessness he can have that the Academy finds either disturbing or disingenuous? Either way, their bias is a mark against them, not him.
   
3. Like Memento this is a puzzle box movie where you let out a big “Ah-ha!” when you figure out the order the scenes are happening in, realizing we begin with a flashforward, not a flashback. Some of Charlie Kaufman’s other scripts were too clever by half, but in this one he found the perfect balance of genuine emotion with mind-bending brilliance.
4. Kaufman and Gondry pack the screen with dazzling imagination as the memories are deleted (starting with the spines of books), but there are also great visuals that have nothing to do with the deletions. As Taylor Swift would later realize, snow at the beach is always an arresting image.
   
5. This may be the only chance I get to praise the always great Kirsten Dunst, who is both funny and heartbreaking here as an assistant with a crush on the head scientist, and who gets to deliver the title line, though she accidentally credits it to Pope Alexander, rather than Alexander Pope.
   
   
   

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2003

The Year: 2003
What the Nominees Were: The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Lost in Translation, Master and Commander, Mystic River, Seabiscuit
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: American Splendor should definitely have gotten a nomination. Elf and the first Pirates of the Caribbean are both shockingly good movies and I wouldn’t mind if either had gotten a nod.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
How Hard Was the Decision: A very hard choice between that and American Splendor, which is certainly my favorite of the two, but ultimately I came to the same conclusion the Academy did: The totality of the Lord of the Rings films deserved some acknowledgement, and the most convenient time to do that was with the final film in the series.

Director: Peter Jackson
Writers: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Jackson, based on the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien
Stars: Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Liv Tyler, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin

The Story: Questing Hobbits Frodo and Sam finally throw the ring into Mount Doom, while their human friend Aragorn (assisted by Legolas the Elf, Gimli the Troll and Gandalf the Wizard) takes over the titular job.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It got no acting nominations, but it did win all 11 it was nominated for: Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction, Costume Design, Editing, Makeup, Score, Song, Sound Mixing and Visual Effects!
How It Won: The previous two films in the trilogy had been nominated, but neither even attempted to have a satisfying ending, which would have made it downright bizarre if either one had won. But this one had six endings, so they couldn’t complain about that this time, and now it seemed like the series was overdue. As an 8-hour epic, it was pretty damn impressive.

Why It Won:

1. Of course, nobody watches the 8-hour version anymore, because the series was expanded to 11 hours on DVD and this is one case where the expanded cut is clearly superior, filling in holes that were baffling in the theater (I hadn’t read the books yet at the time. Shortly afterward, I read them myself, then later read them aloud separately to both kids, so I’m hyperaware of what’s still missing.) This Oscar I’m giving is really for that version.
   
2. Of course, then you’re not done, because, while you have the DVDs out, you have to watch the 10 hours of documentaries, which reveal that this may be the greatest seven year collaboration in filmmaking history, with a crew of long-suffering New Zealanders manually linking over twelve million individual polycarbonate rings using pliers to make all the chainmail, not to mention every other gorgeous element of the world you see onscreen. Dozens of other fantasy films followed this one, but they all lacked Jackson’s mad vision and an antipodean country full of laborers willing to follow him off that cliff.
   
3. Heartbreakingly delivered by Sean Astin, “But I can carry you” is one of cinema’s greatest lines. I’m tearing up as I’m typing this. It’s a crime that Astin wasn’t nominated.
   
4. I’m not sure I would have nominated anyone else in the cast for this one, but they’re all excellent, especially Viggo Mortensen in the title role. He had been plugging away as a minor actor for 15 years (He’s in Witness!), then got the call-up for these epic movies with two weeks’ notice after Stuart Townsend filmed a few scenes and didn’t work out. It’s one of the great Hollywood Cinderella stories. Like Wood and Astin, he’s an American embodying a quintessentially British hero, but he has all the gravitas of a RADA-trained dramatic actor.
   
5. Of course, when I read these books to my daughter, she couldn’t help but point out how little the female characters are given to do (Jackson, Boyens and Walsh made halting efforts to beef up their roles in the screenplays), but thankfully this book and movie have one great feminist moment that makes up for a lot of it. Say it with me: “I am no man.”
   

Ah, 2003: Alas, I couldn’t find any interesting ads. Maybe it’s time to retire these as we get to the era of fewer print ads, less nostalgia and everything being less dated.  

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2002

The Year: 2002
What the Nominees Were: Chicago, Gangs of New York, The Hours, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Pianist
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Spike Jonze’s meta-mindbender Adaptation, Haynes’ mediation on melodrama Far From Heaven, and Spirited Away.

What Did Win: Chicago
How It’s Aged: It’s good. It can never quite decide if it wants to be a full adaptation with period sets and costumes, or just a filmed staging of the musical with modern sets and costumes, but Zellweger and Zeta Jones both give excellent full-tilt performances.

What Should’ve Won: Spirited Away (the American dub) (the Japanese version was released in 2001, but I’m trying to recognize movies on the year they were eligible for the American Oscars, and this movie’s American dub won an Oscar for 2002, so that’s the cut I’m recognizing.)

How Hard Was the Decision: The Pianist was eliminated due to problematicalness, which left Adaptation, Far From Heaven, and Spirited Away. In the end, I decided that the Parasite Rule must prevail and I had to choose the animated classic. (Odd that all three times I’ve used the rule it’s been for Japanese films. I don’t think of myself as a Japanophile, but that’s just the way it’s sorted itself out.)

Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Writer: Hayao Miyazaki
Stars: The late Daveigh Chase, who is wonderful; Jason Marsden; Suzanne Pleshette; David Ogden Stiers

The Story: Chihiro and her parents are en route to a new home when they get lured into an abandoned amusement park with food that turns the parents into pigs. Chihiro must take a job at a bath house for spirits in order to win their freedom.

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Best Animated Feature, which was its only nomination.
Why It Didn’t Win: Miyazaki always had some American filmmaking fans, but it wasn’t until after he (semi-)retired that he was finally recognized as one of the all-time greats. There has still never been an animated Best Picture winner, much less a foreign one, so it’s a stretch to say this could have won, but it’s been universally recognized in the years since as one of the best films ever made, so I’m giving the people of 2002 the ability to spot that.

 
Why It Should Have Won:

1. This is one of many masterpieces made by Miyazaki (I’ve been failing to point out that his other films should have been considered) but this one merges the best elements of his other films: It combines the bountiful visual imagination of Castle in the Sky and satisfyingly complex mythology of Howl’s Moving Castle, with the good-natured gentleness of My Neighbor Totoro. This is the ultimate expression of his life’s work.
   
2. For its dramatic engine, the film revisits a topic from another early Miyazaki film, Kiki’s Delivery Service: the first job. But whereas that one was about (what would come to be called) the gig economy, this one is about starting out in a minimum wage job under one roof, and it perfectly captures the ups and downs of that experience: Sometimes you spot clever solutions that the drudges around you fail to see, sometimes you make rookie mistakes that almost bring everything crashing down.
   
3. Everyone is pursuing their own self-interest except Chihiro, who is trying to rescue her parents, but even she eventually realizes that the only way to get them back is to deprioritize them and instead pay the new debts she has acquired. The theme is one of letting go (from the flowers she is crushing at the beginning, from her old school and life, and from her parents), reclaiming your name from those that would take it from you, and helping out wherever you can, without insisting on overturning the apple cart.
   
4. Most great stories contain elements of real life national pain. This film focuses on the environmental damage of Japan’s economic boom, and the financial suffering of that boom’s bust. The magical land is said to be one of many amusement parks abandoned during the recession. The stink spirit Chihiro saves is filled with pollution, and her friend Haku turns out to be the spirit of a river that was paved over. Restoring balance is always a major theme in Miyazaki’s work. (Compare this to truly terrible American animated films with environmental themes like PIXAR’s Hoppers.)
   
5. I’ve had financial opportunities I did not take because I never wanted to force my kids to move once they’d started school. Every middle-grade story about the wrenching pain kids undergo when they have to do so has affirmed that decision.

Ah, 2002: To this day, nobody knows what to do on these anniversaries...

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2001

The Year: 2001
What the Nominees Were: A Beautiful Mind, Gosford Park, In the Bedroom, The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, Moulin Rouge
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: In retrospect, the most acclaimed movie of this year is now David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. The Coen Brothers turned out one of their weirdest but best with The Man Who Wasn’t There. Wes Anderson almost equaled Rushmore with The Royal Tenenbaums. Donnie Darko was a great one-hit wonder. And then of course, there’s Memento…

What Did Win: A Beautiful Mind
How It’s Aged: Anyone who knows anything about mental illness was going to feel very frustrated here, wanting to shout “that’s not how that works!” An honest portrayal of the life of John Nash, who was not a very good person, would have gone down very differently.

What Should’ve Won: Memento
How Hard Was the Decision: This is another hard year because the general consensus is that the Academy was wrong and that the best movie of this year was Mulholland Drive. But I just can’t get behind that choice. The movie started as a TV pilot, and I’ve always felt it would have been a great TV show, but the decision to tack on an ending and try to wrap things up quickly was ultimately a mistake. Don’t get me wrong, the movie is great, and maybe if I didn’t know the history, I wouldn’t notice this at all, but once you know it, it’s tremendously obvious. So I decided to go with Memento. (I should point out that Memento was released in festivals in the year 2000, and won some awards that year, but didn’t have a wide release until 2001 and that was the year it was eligible for Oscars, so I’m counting it as a 2001 release.)

Director: Christopher Nolan
Writer: Christopher Nolan, based on the short story “Memento Mori” by his brother Jonathan Nolan
Stars: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano

The Story: A former insurance investigator named Leonard Shelby, who cannot make new memories, makes the extremely bad decision to hunt down his wife’s killer. A femme fatale named Natalie manipulates him into killing a sketchy cop named Teddy …Or that’s what we eventually figure out, but every scene in the movie is in reverse order, making everything very confusing, and putting us in his shoes.

Any Nominations or Wins: It was nominated for Original Screenplay (despite being adapted) and Best Film Editing, but lost both.
Why It Didn’t Win: An “inspiring” “true story” like A Beautiful Mind beats this gritty mindbender any day of the week.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. This is the ultimate puzzle box of a movie, and you feel very smart as you snap the jigsaw pieces together (and occasionally dumb as you fail to do so.) It’s a very satisfying reveal when we find out that the one really jerking Leonard around is neither Natalie or Teddy, but he himself. Like most of us, Leonard is his own worst enemy.
2. One of the enduring mysteries of Hollywood: why wasn’t Guy Pearce more of a star? He made a big splash with L.A. Confidential, then he had this masterful performance, and then… very little. He was lucky to get a villain role in Iron Man 3. But why wasn’t he playing Iron Man himself? Is it a case where he was picky in his roles, or was he difficult to work with, maybe? I don’t know. (For that matter, Carrie-Anne Moss should’ve gotten more parts too.)
   
3. The bizarre DVD requires you to take a psychological test to get to the menu, and if you answer it in just the right sequence it’ll give you the ultimate easter egg: the movie rearranged in chronological order. Massively edifying to see it that way, and it is possible to cheat using the internet, so check it out!
4. It’s funny to watch today. For a movie from the 21st century, the plot is very reliant on outdated technology (landlines and a polaroid camera). Leonard Shelby may still be out there killing the wrong people, but hopefully he’s doing it more efficiently these days with the help of a smartphone.
   
5. I can’t say for sure whether or not we’ll be seeing Christopher Nolan again, because I’m writing this book in order, but I can say definitively that this is my favorite of his films. I have a limited tolerance for the narrative trickery of some of his later films, but this one hits me just the right way, setting a bar that he still has yet to surpass, in my opinion. This time around, the central conceit is dazzling, and a little dizzying, but never deadening.
6. As Leonard himself point out, this whole situation is karmic justice for him denying an insurance claim of a man with a similar condition.  At the heart of so much of American literature is the evils of our health-care system.  

Ah, 2001: I guess it’s never the wrong time to send the right message, but this was an odd choice, Kenneth Cole…

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2000

The Year: 2000
What the Nominees Were: Chocolat; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Erin Brockovich; Gladiator; Traffic
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: The Coen Brothers’ delightful O Brother Where Art Thou?

What Did Win: Gladiator
How It’s Aged: Your milage may vary, but I feel that this is a fundamentally silly movie that takes itself way too seriously. I actually preferred the critically derided Gladiator 2, because that movie knew just how cheesy it was.

What Should’ve Won: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
How Hard Was the Decision: Not very. I love this movie.

Director: Ang Lee
Writers: Wang Hui-ling, James Schamus and Tsai Kuo-jung, based on the novel by Wang Dulu
Stars: Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Chang Chen

The Story: Master swordsman Li Mu Bai entrusts his treasured green destiny sword to his never-quite-happened love interest Yu Shu Lien but the sword is then stolen by a young noblewoman-by-day, thief-by-night named Jen Yu. Jen Yu is tracked by down by her own conflicted lover, a mountain bandit named Lo. Will our heroes get the sword back, and who will end up dead in the process?

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Foreign Language Film, Art Direction, Cinematography and Original Score. It lost Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Costume Design, Editing and Original Song.
Why It Didn’t Win: Obviously it was under serious consideration, because it won four awards, but ultimately it couldn’t compete with Gladiator’s revival of the good old fashioned sword-and-sandal flick.  Maybe the Academy just prefers its epics in English (though there was a crude English dub of this one.)

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Neither Chow Yun Fat nor Zhang Ziyi were trained martial artists, but you’d never know it, because Lee and fight choreographer Yuen Wo Peing (who also did The Matrix) beautifully and balletically choreograph everything down to the smallest gesture. (Lee says in the commentary, “I learned the hard way making this martial arts film…the way this kind of film works, it’s more like music, more like dancing choreography…It’s cinema. It’s cinematic skills rather than the skill of beating someone up.”)
   
2. His co-writer, co-producer, and co-commentor James Schamus then cuts him down saying: “It’s not cinema, it’s a movie.” The commentary is great fun as Schamus keeps needling Lee about his previous flops (“Ride with the Devil, what a bomb”) and any other way he can. They’re a fun pair.
3. I was shocked to discover that the movie is exactly two hours. It feels more like three, in a good way, in that it’s got a lot of epic sweep crammed into its handsome runtime. The twenty minute flashback to Lo and Jen’s romance, shot on the scenic wastelands of far-Western China, is worthy of David Lean.
   
4. This is the first Lee movie I’ve gotten to (but not the last, of course.) It’s radically different from his previous movies in some ways, but Schamus points out that it’s sort of Sense and Sensibility with Martial Arts. “We’re talking about the relationship between individual freedom and the oppressive orders of a society that has yet to deal with the aspirations of its female members.” (He of course later sums this up more dismissively as “Ang Lee, repression, blah blah blah.”) It’s great to see Michelle Yeoh, who had made lots of good chop-socky movies, get a meaty part like this.
5. Peter Pau’s Oscar winning cinematography steals the show throughout, and he’s particularly good at one of the biggest challenges in film: Day for Night (scenes set at night but shot during the day.) Digital color-timing was new and this was the first movie to master the advances to make Day for Night work, really for the first time in cinematic history (Lean himself never mastered it and that’s the biggest flaw with Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia)
   
6. The Pitt-Jolie version of Mr. and Mrs. Smith would steal from this movie the whole “prove someone’s a super-assassin by dropping something at the dinner table and their super-reflexes keep it from hitting the ground” bit, but this gets points for doing it first and doing it better. The look Yeoh gives Ziyi when she gives herself away is devastating.
   

Ah, 2000: You keep using this word “punk.” I do not think it means what you think it means.

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1999

The Year: 1999
What the Nominees Were: American Beauty, The Cider House Rules, The Green Mile, The Insider, The Sixth Sense
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: This year is very frustrating for me. The internet (and even an actual print book entitled “Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen” by Brian Raftery) loves to claim that this was one of the all-time best years for American film. I just don’t see it. Most of the nominees are merely okay movies. As for non-nominees, it’s supposedly a shame that The Matrix wasn’t nominated? Really? When I saw it, I immediately tagged it as a recipe for creating psychopaths (nobody is real but you) and that’s proven to be very true. Fight Club has similar problems. Magnolia is a very good movie but it’s also a mess, where half the storylines don’t work as well as they ought. Eyes Wide Shut is a bit of a trainwreck. I enjoyed Being John Malcovich at the time but tried to rewatch it recently and couldn’t get through it because it’s just too self-consciously quirky. Election is brilliant, but its attitude toward child-abuse has aged very badly. Speaking of which…

What Did Win: American Beauty
How It’s Aged: Hoo boy. This very sympathetic portrait of a would-be child molester has aged even worse. Could you make an unproblematic movie about that subject matter? Maybe so, if you were very careful to get the tone right, but this movie doesn’t pull it off. And of course, given later allegations against star Kevin Spacey, it’s deeply ironic he got (and won an Oscar for) this role.

What Should’ve Won: The Talented Mr. Ripley
How Hard Was the Decision: Ultimately, there are only three unproblematic movies I love from this overrated year: Galaxy Quest, The Sixth Sense and The Talented Mr. Ripley. I rewatched the latter two to help make my decision and this one won (though I really enjoyed Sixth Sense and I do recommend it highly. Talk about a movie that rewards rewatches!)

Director: Anthony Minghella
Writer: Minghella, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith
Stars: Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Cate Blanchett, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jack Davenport

The Story: After borrowing a friend’s blazer for a piano recital, young con man Tom Ripley gets a chance to go to Italy and try to convince a rich man’s son, Dickie Greenleaf, to come home. Instead, Tom kills Dickie and takes over his life, then has to tell many lies to try to avoid being discovered.

Any Nominations or Wins: Astoundingly, it didn’t get a Picture or Actor nomination, but it did get nods for Supporting Actor for Law, Adapted Screenplay, Score, Production Design and Costume Design. It won nothing.

Why It Didn’t Win: American Beauty oozed Profundity with a capital P (Oh, the plastic bag!) so this neo-noir beauty couldn’t compete, I guess. Still, it’s baffling that it got beat out for a nomination by weak fare such as The Cider House Rules.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. It certainly seems that the Academy has never loved Matt Damon (though 2026 may finally be his overdue year). This is one of multiple years he should have won the award, perfectly capturing both the psychopathic hollow soul and the achingly sympathetic underdog that form the warring cores of the character. Those two aspects shouldn’t go together, but Damon makes it work beautifully.
   
2. I’ve always said that the special ingredient to a great performance is to always give your actor a secret that is not revealed in the scene. Even better is when they have conflicting lies that the audience knows about that are about to smash together, and then we watch them acrobatically get out of it. Damon’s linguistic gymnastics are delightful and riveting.
   
3. At this point I’ve read the novel, seen the original French adaptation with Alain Delon (Purple Noon), seen this, and seen the excellent black-and-white TV adaptation “Ripley” with Andrew Scott in the role. I enjoyed all four, but this one is the best of them, because Minghella complicates the story more, twisting the many knives that are out for Tom at all times. (Most of the second half of the movie, featuring the Blanchett and Davenport characters, was added by Minghella.)
   
4. One of Minghella’s many changes was switching Dickey’s amateur dabbling from painting to jazz, which is inherently more cinematic (though the TV show got great fun out of Dickie’s terrible paintings.) You can tell that Minghella loves luxuriating in the late-night jam sessions, just as much as he loves to recreate midcentury Europe at its most gorgeous.
   
5. Speaking of gorgeous, is there any better casting as “the beautiful people” than late-90s Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow? They’re both great actors, but they also needed ethereal good looks for these part to work, and they certainly make the movie easy on the eyes.
   
   
   

Ah, 1999: Their slogan was “Don’t Be Evil.” Then they changed it.