Most orcs killed in a 5-minute period. It’s a shoe-in for that award.
Dog turds are cheaper than porterhouse steaks. That doesn’t mean they taste better.
The only other “Oscar caliber” movie I saw this year was Mystic River, and that is one excellent movie. Without seeing all the nominees, I don’t know how I can even begin to judge whether ROTK should win.
Was it because of the nasty little hobbitses?
Best Adapted Screenplay. Heck, all three of the movies should have gotten it.
I’ll admit a bias to more epic movies, but I think ROTK was better than Mystic River, and Cold Mountain does nothing for me, so yeah, I think it should win best picture.
Every actor had their brilliant moments (Billy Boyd and Sean Astin particularly stick out in my mind), but I think it’s too large a cast for any one actor to get an Oscar nod.
Peter Jackson deserves some special super-duper best job of directing three movies simultaneously award or somesuch.
Um, American Splendor for Best Movie, anyone?
Besides the technical nominations, PJ probably wins for Best Director and I’d name Sean Astin for Best Supporting Actor.
I preferred RotK to Mystic River, but haven’t seen Cold Mountain yet, so I don’t know how strong the competition is. But Frasier’s book is clearly seen by Hollywood as a more serious, literary book (correctly, for once) and so that may make an impression.
I’d love to see Jackson get Best Director and the film get Best Picture. and I think it would be well-deserved. Also, Howard Shore should get (another) Oscar for his excellent music: Best Dramatic Score should go to RotK.
I thought the acting in RotK was universally strong, but no one role stands out for me. On the other hand, Mystic River boasts some very strong performances by Sean Penn and Tim Robbins… I imagine the actor awards will lean in that direction.
I agree on Best Director as well as the technical awards. I haven’t seen Mystic River or (shudder) Cold Mountain. I think many of here are too biased on LoTR to make good predictions, though. It’s a shame there isn’t a way to reward the entire movie trilogy. In every sense, it’s all one movie.
Where’s Cervaise and lissener when you really need them?
I believe that the LOTR trilogy, taken as a whole, is one of the great achivements in cinema history. But I don’t think I’d be giving any major Oscars to ROTK. It leans very heavily on the previous two entries for its impact; taken by itself, I would call it a very good movie, but not even in my top five for the year. I realize that many take the opposite view, and believe that ROTK should be rewarded for the achievement of LOTR as a whole, and while I respect that pov, I think a yearly award should reflect the outstanding achievements of that particular year.
My top five would be Lost in Translation, American Splendor House of Sand and Fog, Finding Nemo, and Dirty Pretty Things. I hold little hope of any of these having any chance for a best picture Oscar, though, which will likely end up going to ROTK or Mystic River.
If I were giving the major awards:
Movie: Lost in Translation
Director: Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini for American Splendor (This seemed to me a more difficult directing job than my number 1, which was primarily a performance-driven film.)
Actor: The most difficult of the acting categories. Sean Penn, Ben Kingsley, Paul Giamatti and Johnny Depp all come to mind here, but right now I’d go with Ben Kingsley in House of Sand and Fog.
Actress: Scarlett Johanssen for Lost in Translation (the buzz for Charlize Theron in Monster is very strong, but I’ve not seen it yet).
Supporting Actor: Tim Robbins in Mystic River.
Supporting Actress: Monica Belucci in Irreversible or Hope Davis in American Splendor.
Original Screenplay: Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation.
Adapted Screenplay: Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini for American Splendor.
My, you sure don’t let your pigheaded biases show much, do yo?
What part are you denying? That the oscars go to shitty high-budget films? When did an indie film ever get a oscar? I don’t recall that ever happening. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
I don’t recall many people here ever talking about indie films either. I do, however, recall never ending discussions on Finding Nemo, Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean.
Dog turds are cheaper than porterhouse steaks. That doesn’t mean they taste better.
I’m sorry, I really didn’t understand this statement. Are you saying that no films with low budgets can ever be as good as Hollywood films? Are you saying that a high budget makes a movie good? Star Wars: Phantom Menance would prove otherwise.
A budget doesn’t make a movie good or bad. There are bad high-budget films just as there are bad low-budget. Personally, however, I feel the last good Hollywood film was the last Indiana Jones, which was a good film, provided you switched you brain off before watching.
You seem to think that Hollywood can do no wrong and that indie films are tosh. I beg to differ. The only reason there is even more shit in indie cinema is because the films are so cheap to make that more talentless people can invest in it, whereas Hollywood films are usually have to prove themselves a good bet for money-making if they want to get off the ground.
One thing I do believe, however, is that Undead breaks new ground for indie films in terms of what can be achieved on a limited budget. I also believe that the film is much more advanced in look and entertainment than most Hollywood films. Obviously you can’t see that though.
Are you one of those people who thought the Matrix invented slow-motion gun-play?
I deleted the rest of the post because there’s no need for repeating such vitriolic pedantry.
Pulp Fiction, an independent film, won Best Original Screenplay. I don’t have time to consult IMDB.com right now, but I’m sure other independent films have won Oscars in the past.
John, you had to expect a snarky response after you basically insulted the tastes of every single poster on this board. You’re a newbie, so I would suggest you read rule no. 1 for posting on this board: Don’t be a jerk.
So, please, don’t be a jerk.
Hollywood has made a lot of great movies in the past few years: American Beauty, The Matrix (despite the taint it now has of two sub-par sequels), just about everything by Pixar, Schindler’s List, The Silence of the Lambs, Platoon and a host of other films that didn’t win Best Picture.
To be sure, many indie films get the shaft, but they get more recognized now than they ever did in the past. Lost In Translation comes to mind… it actually cracked the top 10 here in the states for a few weeks, and deservedly so.
You seem willing to give indie movies all the chance in the world. Perhaps you should do the same for the studio films. A lot of people work very, very hard on them and most of them are written by fairly anonymous screenwriters.
Back on topic, I think ROTK is going to win Best Picture and Best Director and a host of technical awards, with nominations for Sean Astin and best song, even though I hate Annie Lennox and also hate songs put at the end of films with orchestral scores solely for the reason of getting a Best Song nomination.
echoes everything said by SNenc
Also just found out that Howard Shore is eligible for the “Best Score” award, even with the new rules this year, and I’d like to air my hopes that it wins. ROTK’s score is the best of the three scores, with its more subtle use of (and ultimately, its maturation of) the leitmotifs that Shore has been developing for all three films. It encompasses an enormous breadth: from the glorious new Gondor theme, perfectly evocative of a proud kingdom in decline, to the chilling strains of “Shelob’s Lair,” to the simple song that Pippin sings in Denethor’s hall backed by quiet, well-timed strings. I’ve been listening to the album endlessly for the past few weeks, and it has yet to feel overplayed. The emotional intensity is just plain extraordinary.
Lots of **spoilers **in the above and below posts, sorry. Though I suspect that nobody is going to be reading this thread unless they’ve seen ROTK already. 
Anyway, I forgot to add: I didn’t expect to like Annie Lennox’s contribution to the score, either. I’m not one for female-vocalized pop songs (“May it Be,” especially, did nothing for me). But this indie rock snob finds himself brought back to the edge of tears just listening to “Into the West,” and feels that it perfectly encompasses the combination of sadness and healing that the end of Frodo’s journey represents. Better than “May It Be” and “Gollum’s Song” combined, IMO.
I personally thought that it would be good to mention, in passing, that I despised the film because it would give people the idea that even though there’s people out there who don’t really like it, they still respect that it was a mammoth achievement for the cast and crew (I’ll admit that my “big-budget shit” remark was snarky, sorry about that one). I also wanted to present a film of the same year which I felt deserved more recognition because it was more of an effort in the technical field (except for the composer, the soundtrack was complete arse).
I thought it would be fair to present a film (which I admit, has not a bloody chance at any awards, indie or otherwise) which I felt topped LOTR is sheer effort. Did LOTR accomplish more? Yes, it did. LOTR had hundreds of millions of dollars more though.
Of those films, I am not a fan. If we should learn anything from this, it’s that people have different tastes.
I would, if one came out that even mildly interested me. I don’t see a film just because it’s indie or just because it’s Hollywood, it needs to have that wonderful thing known as appeal.
Okay, I’ll not post in this thread again. I think I may make a trainwreck out of this thread if I decide to post more. If mods want to delete my posts or even go further, well, I guess that’s their decision.
I’ll finish this off my favorite quote by my personal god, Bruce Campbell: “Support only the films that you really want to see. Don’t be fooled into seeing something, just because of the hype.”
I was thinking about this the other day. Does anyone today seriously believe that Chicago was a better picture than The Two Towers? That it was a more monumental achievement in cinema? Yeah, I didn’t think so. The same thing went the year before that. Didn’t A Beautiful Mind beat out The Fellowship of the Ring? If it wasn’t that, it was yet another utterly forgettable movie. Hollywood gets stuck with a lot of dross and sometimes doesn’t realize which movies are world-changing until after the change has already taken place. Hopefully, this time, they’ll get the message early enough (though still three years too late), and give these people their damn Best Picture Oscar. Even if they don’t, though, these are the movies that people will be watching in ten or twenty years, saying that the early years of this century were good years for movie-making. They won’t be watching Cold Mountain or Lost in Translation.
If it doesn’t get an award for best sound design, it’ll be a crime against humanity. The sound design in that movie was just brilliant.
If I ran the show, the awards would be: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor to Sean Astin. I’m somewhat skeptical that it’ll happen, but it’d be interesting if it did.
I would like to see it just for the sake of the cast & crew getting some real validation for all their work. But the awards stopped being a good indicator of the quality of the movies several years ago, if not earlier. I just saw Braveheart for the first time recently, as well as A Beautiful Mind. Ick.
And I’d give a special-achievement Oscar to Doghouse Reilly for that post.
Um, I don’t know where you find that 22 year time frame, but if you mean from SW to TPM, you’re leaving out Empire and Return.
However, GL wrote in between: Episodes for Young Indiana Jones, Captain Eo, The Indiana Jones trilogy, Radioland Murders. He didn’t direct a lot, but as a producer and with the clout and money to get his vision done, he’s done a lot: * Body Heat, Labyrinth, Howard the Duck, Willow, Powaqqatsi, Tucker, The land before time* and the titles mentioned above. On top of that, there is all the stuff for video games and like. I think most of what he’s done after Empire sucks, but he didn’t sit on his ass and collected royalties.
No. Pulp fiction was produced by Miramax, which is owned by Disney. Hardly an indie movie.
No indie film has won ‘best picture’, but I don’t have the energy to search all the cathegories. Possibly an indie film has won some kind of award from the Academy.
As for the part about insulting. Sorry, but I really don’t think every single poster adore the LoTR trilogy. In fact, I believe there are quite a few that stay away from the slew of threads on the subject. I, for one, would wish there was a separate forum, so I wouldn’t have to wade through all the threads essentially saying the same things, but that’s just me (and I do enjoy the movies). Invoking the ‘You’re a newbie’ argument is jerkish behaviour, AFAIC. A thread asking posters if RoTK should win any Oscars is inviting all kinds of responses. If you can’t handle a fellow doper wandering in here and offering an opposing view, I suggest you start a fan site, if you think that those that exist aren’t enough.
The refreshing thing about this board is that one can learn from people who doesn’t share one’s own views, or people who can suggest things, one might not even have thought about. Had I only visited fan sites, I would never have discovered a whole bunch of good books, movies, and tv-shows that I have found out about here.
I think Kill Bill should get an Oscar. Possibly Best Picture, because it was very artistic. ROTK is up there with it though.
I am denying just about everything you said. Most of all, I am denying your ridiculous assertion that all high-budget Hollywood films are shitty. It’s a completely asinine thing to say.