Oscar Buzz, Part One:

The Nominees That Should Have Been

My Oscar quest continues in earnest as the countdown to the March 23 Academy Awards nears its final days. Next week column we’ll look at some of the nominees and I’ll give my opinions on who should walk away with Hollywood’s most coveted prize. But as a warm-up, I’d like to take some time this week to examine some of the snubs from the 2002 movie year and take a peek at some worthy entries that missed out on the Oscar cut.

*Best Director: In my year-end column, I tabbed Insomnia as the winner of the “Oscar-Caliber Movie Most Likely to Be Forgotten at Oscar Time” award. Well, guess what? Screenwriter-director Christopher Nolan was indeed passed over for Insomnia, an engrossing, psychological thriller featuring some brilliantly underplayed acting volleys between Al Pacino and Robin Williams.

After the twisting narrative of Memento and this more carefully paced examination of one character’s moral and ethical descent into darkness, I can’t wait to see what this exciting talent does next: the news that Warner Bros. has hired him to helm the next Batman movie was music to every comic book fanboy’s ears. 

*Best Supporting Actor: We’re getting into some murky, uncharted waters here, but the performance by Andy Serkis in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is hard to overlook.

You’re probably asking, Andy who? Serkis gave voice to the CGI character Gollum, a mysterious, strange creature that teams with Sam and Frodo on their quest to destroy the One Ring. Admittedly, much of Gollum is an artificial creation made of pixels and complex computer algorithms, but Serkis did more than a simple voice-over: he also performed with the actors in a motion-capture suit that allowed the visual effects folks a source on which to model the animated character’s portrayal.

The result is stunning, and if the Academy isn’t yet ready to tackle this issue of digital acting vs “traditional acting,” then it better start making plans because Serkis’s work here is truly scene-stealing, Oscar-worthy stuff.

*Best Supporting Actress: Ever since her role as mute laundress Hattie in Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown, Samantha Morton has become one of the best chameleon-like young actresses in film today, and this was confirmed by her strong work in Minority Report. She has a way of making idiosyncrasies, like her comically silent character in Allen’s film, and the eerie otherworldliness of her prescient Pre-Cog character Agatha in Stephen Spielberg’s summer hit, more than just precious actor tricks. She makes them part of the very fabric of her character and thus helps submerge audiences further into the world of the filmmaker.

*Best Actor: Though part of me wants to rail on how Richard Gere “wuz robbed” by not receiving a nomination for his work in Chicago (after all, he won a Golden Globe for his courageous singing and dancing in the film), I have to say that it would have been nice if Dennis Quaid could have received some notice for his sturdy portrayal of real-life pitcher Jim Morris in The Rookie. He took what could have been a standard, by-the-numbers sports film and gave the piece the subtlety and emotional reality it needed to transcend the cheesy, rah-rah movie it might have become if he had phoned it in and not given such a heartfelt performance.

*Best Picture: Though Road to Perdition ended up with a hearty six Oscar nominations (including a first-time Supporting Actor nod for veteran actor Paul Newman), director Sam Mendes’ follow-up to American Beauty still failed to get the sort of recognition it deserved (most probably because of its summer release instead of an end-of-the-year unveiling, when it would have been fresher on voters’ minds).

Tom Hanks stars as a Prohibition-era hit man who must go on the lam with his son when his boy witnesses a horrible crime. The film is one of brooding intensity, a movie more interested in rich imagery and dense emotional tone and resonance than in complexity of plot. It’s a movie of few words, but maximum effectiveness. Perhaps time will be kinder to this gem of a picture and it will be rightly recognized as one of last year’s best.