Recasting Oscar

For an event created by the entertainment industry, this Sunday’s Academy Awards are going to be amazingly boring. With the major categories pretty much locked up (Best Film: Lord of the Rings, Best Actor: Sean Penn, Best Actress: Charlize Theron, etc.), and with no known child rapist in the running for this year’s directing honor, viewers will have to rely on Billy Crystal to boost the show’s humor and intelligence quotient.

This year’s ceremony was moved up a month in part to boost the show’s TV ratings, which have been on the decline for the past five years. If the Academy truly wants to create new interest in the awards show, organizers might consider adding some new categories. Here are some of my nominations.

Most Pretentious Violence: Say you’re an aging boy genius who hasn’t made a film in years and whose relevance is fading fast. You’re incredibly arrogant and generally unpleasant; you’re also completely out of ideas for your next project. If you’re Quentin Tarantino, the solution is simple: more bloodshed. With war and terrorism dominating the news, 2003 seemed as appropriate a year as ever to degrade human life in a barrage of violence so unrelenting that even Hannibal Lecter might have wanted to put down his bag of popcorn. That irony seems to have been lost on Tarantino, who claimed retroactively that the film could be seen as a “parody” of various genres of film violence. You’d say that, too, if it had been nearly a decade since your last cinematic success and you still had to promote Kill Bill’s (surely just as terrible) sequel.

Most Pretentious Foreign Violence: While the academy wisely gave Tarantino the night off this Sunday—Kill Bill didn’t even receive any technical nominations—its logic on the Brazilian City of God seemed to be, “If no Americans are involved in the violence, it must be good!” Even Tarantino stopped short of showing graphic violence against small children (though his film does think it funny to show a school-age girl watch as Uma Thurman kills her mother in the family kitchen). City of God has no such hesitations. Yes, the film is attempting to convey the brutality of daily life in a destitute rural town run by battling drug lords. But at some point, someone, anyone, involved in the film’s production should have stepped back and proclaimed in outraged Portuguese, “Feh! We get it. Enough already!” Instead, the film’s writers, editors, and director included so much stylized violence that its physical and emotional consequences completely sail past the numbed audience. All are nominated for an Oscar in their respective field.

Most Ludicrously Overrated Performance: Diane Keaton, nominated for Best Actress, really is a gifted performer, which makes her misinterpretation of her character in Something’s Gotta Give all the more surprising and insulting. Playing an intelligent and successful 50-something playwright, Keaton’s Erica Barry falls for Jack Nicholson’s dirty old music agent like it’s 1964 and he’s a Beatle. They get it on, then he freaks out and dumps her. Are general filmgoers, much less the movie’s middle-aged target audience, really supposed to believe that Keaton’s character would spend the next three days in toddler-style hysterics? Making the story all the more unbelievable is Keaton’s acting; Something’s Gotta Give makes you wish Keaton had the dramatic restraint shown by her costar: that paragon of actorly subtlety, Keanu Reeves.

Most Ludicrously Written Role: Perhaps this year’s tightest race, victory in this category ultimately goes to Annabeth Marcus, the seemingly unimportant wife of Sean Penn’s ex-convict in Mystic River. Laura Linney gives a solid if peripheral performance all the way up to what seems to be the film’s conclusion. But then, in one of the strangest bedroom scenes ever put on film, Linney suddenly undergoes a character transformation so unexpected as to almost totally undermine the rest of the movie. The academy surely wasn’t thinking about this scene when it nominated Mystic River for Best Picture.

Credit Where Credit Is Due: Why be uniformly negative when you can find one semi-positive aspect of this year’s awards which can be given at least some halfhearted partial praise? In a year when the third Lord of the Rings movie will win Best Picture despite failing to give a coherent structure or psychological basis to its plot (why get hung up on details?), the academy was at least smart enough to recognize Johnny Depp and Keisha Castle-Hughes for making deceptively difficult roles look easy. Depp has been around forever, contributing sensitive performances in challenging films like Edward Scissorhands, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? and Before Night Falls. That his first Oscar nomination is for work in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean isn’t the result of Hollywood politics. Coming later than it should, the nomination justifiably rewards a characteristically offbeat comic performance that turned an otherwise average family film into the summer’s must-see hit for five-year-olds, college students and retirees. Castle-Hughes’ role in Whale Rider is far more understated, yet the youngest ever Best Actress nominee also deserves recognition for displaying an inner strength and patience that hold together what might have been the Maori version of Yentl.

Kudos to them, and to the academy for having the sense to give them some recognition.