THE OSCAR NOMINATIONS 2005: Click here.
Isn’t it interesting that 1 of The Passion‘s three nominations is for an “original score” that was largely plagiarized from Peter Gabriel’s soundtrack for The Last Temptation of Christ?
Here are a few more Oscar abominations:
Best Actor – No mention of Paul Giamatti (Sideways).
Best Actress – No mention of Julie Delpy (Before Sunset).
Best Director – No mention of Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).
Best Supporting Actress – No mention of Maia Morgenstern (The Passion of the Christ), who played Mary and was, in my opinion, the only thing in that film truly worthy of an Oscar nomination.
Visual Effects – No mention of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Perhaps the effects were so convincing and clever that the Academy didn’t notice them.
Sigh.
Oh well. This year’s nominations are actually much better than average. I don’t have any major complaints except the Giamatti-snub and the ignorant honors for The Passion‘s carbon copy score.
Some interesting facts via Movie City News:
- The two acting nominations for Jamie Foxx make him the 10th person to be nominated in both acting categories in the same year. The others are Fay Bainter (1938), Teresa Wright (1942), Barry Fitzgerald (1944), Jessica Lange (1982), Sigourney Weaver (1988), Al Pacino (1992), Holly Hunter (1993), Emma Thompson (1993) and Julianne Moore (2002).
- No one has yet won in both categories in the same year.
- Four out of five leading actor nominees portrayed real life characters. Only Clint Eastwood in Million Dollar Baby played a fictional character.
- There have been 13 nominations to actors portaying boxers and retired boxers. Hilary Swank is the first woman nominated in that group.
- Catalina Sandino Moreno’s performance is in Spanish. There have been 20 Nominations and 4 Oscar wins for performances in roles using spoken languages other than English. In addition, Marlee Matlin received the 1986 Oscar for a performance almost entirely in American Sign Language.
- France received its 33rd nomination for the Foreign Language Film category. Italy is in second place with 26 nominations. A win for France would tie Italy’s record of ten wins in the category.
- John Williams’s 43rd nomination ties Alfred Newman’s record in the music categories
My wife and I went to see Crash last night after reading your review. First time we’d been to the show at night in years. Our favorite movie is Grand Canyon so we may be a little biased but we both thought Crash was a pretty great movie. Much better than your review made it sound. I thought Sandra Bullock’s part was spot on. I particularly liked the way that the movie left, at least me, feeling at the end that I had stereotyped all of the characters, the Matt Dillon character, the Chinese man, Matt Dillon’s partner, The ones I had assumed were bad turned out to be good and the ones political correctness had led me to assume were good turned out to be bad. The worst of the racism was actually on the part of the DA and his advisors who were trying to play all the right racial notes purely for political reasons. One odd thing was that there were no hispanic racists in the movie. Kind of strange for a city that is mostly hispanic. A really great movie, a “9” I think.
Greg Marquez
goyomarquez@earthlink.net