Once again I've tinkered with the best picture and director categories to take into account two movies that are highly regarded for wildly different reasons.
One you've probably heard of — The Blair Witch Project, a horror movie with a tiny budget that minted a fortune at the box office. I thought it was good but it didn't occur to me that it would continue to have legs among film fans and critics twenty-five years later. Hence it's inclusion here.
The other, Beau Travail, is ostensibly an adaptation of Herman Melville's Billy Budd set in the modern day French Foreign Legion, but it's really pure cinematic revenge for one hundred years of the so-called "male gaze" (defined here) with director Claire Denis doing the gazing and a platoon of hot, sweaty soldiers serving as the object of her camera's lust.
It was voted one of the ten best movies of all-time in the most recent Sight & Sound poll. Personally, I'm not buying it — to me, it's ninety minutes of men ironing shirts — but a lot of people who think they know what they're talking about disagree with me and you should have the opportunity to vote for it.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
I can't blame math for this one — I nominated the top six movies and the two or three consensus picks in each of the other categories and then filled out the rest with my own choices. Feel free to rip me on Yelp.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
My choices are noted with a ★. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ.
It's a Hollywood tradition to nominate child actors in the supporting category no matter how much time they spend on the screen or how essential to the story they are. But we here at the Monkey don't give a damn about Hollywood tradition. Haley Joel Osment is the co-lead in The Sixth Sense with Bruce Willis, thus the lead actor nomination.
I had the advantage of living in England when The Sixth Sense came out. Katie-Bar-The-Door and I had never heard of it when we came back to the U.S. for a visit; all we knew was that it starred Bruce Willis and that Katie's mom had seen it—twice! That notion was so incongruous to us that we raced right out and saw it, too, with no idea of what it was about—no hype, no trailers, no spoilers, no nothing, not even a knowledge of what genre it fit into. We might have been the only two people in history who were throughly surprised by its twists and turns: we didn't even know that it had twists and turns.
We've since seen it a number of times. For us, anyway, it still holds up.
PICTURE (Drama) winner:The Sixth Sense (prod. Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall and Barry Mendel)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical) winner:Three Kings (prod. Paul Junger Witt, Edward L. McDonnell and Charles Roven) Must-See Comedy/Musical:
PICTURE (Foreign Language) winner:Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother) (prod. Agustín Almodóvar and Michel Ruben)
ACTOR (Drama) winner: Kevin Spacey (American Beauty) nominees:
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Jim Carrey (Man on the Moon)
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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