Let’s delete all three of the American Beauty awards. That means we need a new Best Picture, a new Best Director, and a new Best Actor. And this being such a mammoth year for movies, I think it’d be a little too disrespectful to use up one or more of the WLTOW exemptions, so let’s treat the replacements here seriously.
For Best Picture, it’d be smart to pick something that has gone on to have, in one way or another, an everlasting effect on movies or moviemaking. That means we’re picking between The Matrix (new technology), Fight Club (affirmation of David Fincher’s directorial brilliance), Being John Malkovich (extremely weird), The Blair Witch Project (mainstreamed a clever film device), The Sixth Sense (zeitgeist moment), or Office Space (a cult classic moment). Of those, The Matrix today stands the tallest (we got the creation of Bullet Time; it was the first movie ever to sell a million copies of a DVD; it was an action movie but it worked very hard to exist as a philosophy movie; etc.). That’s our new Best Picture winner. Let’s give Best Director to David Fincher for Fight Club because it’s good and he should’ve probably won it for Seven anyway. And let’s give Best Actor to Jim Carrey, who was positively brilliant as Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon. That all feels right.
I do not dislike any of these picks. They’re all strong. If anything, there’s maaaaaaaaybe an argument to be made that you can take the Best Actress award from Julia Roberts and give it to Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream, but I’d jump in front of a bus being driven by an even bigger bus before I ever did anything like that to Julia Roberts, so no thank you.
How about this: Since Russell Crowe won Best Actor for his role as Maximus in Gladiator, let’s swipe the Best Picture award from that movie1 and go with a dark horse pick instead. Let’s give it to Memento, a movie filmed in reverse about a man who loses the ability to form new memories that I have seen at least ten times and still don’t all the way quite understand. And I guess let me go ahead and also grab Marcia Gay Harden’s Best Supporting Actress award that she won for her part in Pollock (which to me always felt more like a stage play than a movie) and cash in one of the WLTOW exemptions so I can give the award to Eartha Kitt for her role as Yzma in The Emperor’s New Groove. She was so fucking funny in that.
Two things here: (1) give Ethan Hawke his oscar for his role as Jake Hoyt in Training Day. Everyone else is safe. That’s the only change that needs to be made. (2) There was a larger conversation going into this year’s Oscars about how Black actors and actresses are so infrequently honored at the Academy Awards. (This is a conversation that is still happening today, as it were.) When Halle Berry won the Oscar for Best Actress (making her the first ever Black woman to win the award), she gave this really touching, really tearful, really beautiful speech. When Denzel Washington won Best Actor a little later in the evening (his first ever win in the category, because I guess nobody at the Academy watched him in 1992’s Malcolm X), he glided up the stairs, then glided to the microphone, then accepted his award, then hugged Julia Roberts (she was presenting the award), then stood at the mic and waited for everyone to sit down. When they did, he laughed a little, then said, “Two birds in one night, huh?” It was incredible, and a perfect Denzel Washington moment.
I would very much like to replace all of these, but since we’re capped at three replacements let’s go with: (1) Take the Best Picture award away from Chicago and give it City of God, which has aged itself into a truly remarkable piece of art. (2) Take the Best Director award away from Roman Polanski and give it to Fernando Meirelles for City of God. (3) And take the Best Actor award away from Adrien Brody2 and give it to Robin Williams for his role in One Hour Photo as Sy Parrish, an extremely lonely photo lab employee who becomes obsessed with a family whose photos he develops over a long period. Williams is incredible as Parrish. Watching him toggle back and forth between a kind-eyed old man and a mentally unstable loon is really unsettling. (His 2002 is such an interesting slice of his career. He played Sy in One Hour Photo, a maniacal former children’s show host gone mad in Death to Smoochy, and a killer in Insomnia.3) (I care a great deal about Robin Williams.4) (I think part of that might be because he kind of looks like my dad.) (I don’t know.) (It’s complicated stuff.) (And I’d rather not try and parse it out in the pages of this book.)
There’s a scene in Cold Mountain where Renée Zellweger, who plays a no-nonsense molasses-mouthed mountain girl, auditions for a job as a laborer by tearing the head off a rooster that’s been bothering Nicole Kidman. And the reason I mention it here is because when that scene happened, my wife, who was watching the movie with me one night, saw it and said to me, “If it’s not too much of a problem, would you mind doing that to me? Because I don’t think I can watch too much more of this.” Cold Mountain is bad. And Zellweger’s accent is a full-on C-A-T-A-S-T-R-O-P-H-E. Let’s take her Best Supporting Actress award and give it to Marcia Gay Harden for her spot in Mystic River because (a) she was perfect in Mystic River, and (b) we took her Best Supporting Actress earlier so this is retribution for that.5
Also, as wonderful as Charlize Theron is in Monster, let’s grab the Best Actress award from her and give it to my beloved Diane Keaton for Something’s Gotta Give because that was one of the five or six best ever performances in a rom-com.
And I don’t want to replace the Best Picture award outright, but what I would like to do is go ahead and slide in a Best Picture nomination for Love Actually. So now that’s a thing, too.