Sorry about not posting up every day last week. I've had my mind full of other matters. It's funny how I had all these plans for what I was going to try to accomplish this weekend, but didn't get around to completing them.
Anyway, it's time for February's Oracle. I was supposed to publish it on February 15, but my visions were cloudy. They are now clear:
I am predicting that New Line Cinema's rendition of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King WILL WIN the Academy Award for Best Picture, and that New Zealand Director Peter Jackson WILL WIN the award for Best Director. My feelings about this subject are that these two awards will be given as a nod from the Academy for the cumulative effort of the entire project as a whole.
I often attend a Tolkien enthusiast group which meets once per month. At last month's gathering, this subject was one of hot debate. One girl strongly held forth that the Academy has never given out an Academy Award for Best Picture or Best Director for a film that was either a science fiction or fantasy genre film. The Academy would give out awards to such films for such lesser honors as Best Costumes or Best Special Effects, but never for Best Picture. The Academy is eternally biased against such films and it will NEVER do so, or so goes the thought. If it did, then it would have to accept that future science fiction or fantasy films would have to be included as potential contenders for future Academy Awards.
After having given the matter some thought, my own opinion on the matter is that there have only been a handful of classic science fiction or fantasy genre films that could even have been considered contenders for highest honors. One obvious contender would have been the original Star Wars, released in 1977. The 1978 Best Picture honors went Woody Allen's Annie Hall. Now tell me this: Who outside of Woody Allen fans or film buffs, have seen Annie Hall? Now count how many people have seen Star Wars?
Star Wars was not only a landmark film in that it changed - forever - how films were made (spawning plenty of cheap imitators in its wake), but it was so awe inspiring that it left an indelible impact on an entire generation of people in the Western world. Without a doubt, the original Star Wars is one of the greatest movies ever made, easily right up there with Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, The Graduate, Patton, Rocky, and others.
As a side note, I looked up on an Academy history page:
http://www.ofpmovies.com/awards/winners.htm
and found that in the classic year 1939, Gone with the Wind swept most of the awards. Thomas Mitchell got best Supporting Actor for Stagecoach, but The Wizard of Oz was left out entirely.
When I think of other sci - fi / fantasy genre films, there are no other contenders I can think of that I would nominate as Best Picture material. 2001 - A Space Oydessy is a bit strange for many people's taste, though Kubrick's vision was extraordinary. Star Trek IV was a great film which did well at the box office, but I don't think it was Best Picture material. On the other hand of course, there is the quasi - historical 2001 Best Picture winner, The Gladiator, which I thought was a very good film.
There are many in Hollywood that are both impressed with Jackson's work, but at the same time there is a ton of jealousy about LOTR. There is no doubt in my mind that there is jealousy in Hollywood about how all of the other studios executives blew it in passing over filming rights to the project. There are directors who think they could have done a better job than Jackson in directing it. There are actors and actresses who think they would have made a better Aragorn or Eowyn than either Viggo Mortensen or Miranda Otto did. There are special effects outfits that think they could have done a better job than WETA in producing the special effects, and so forth.
Well too bad!
By the way, it seems that my Oracles for January 2004 will both come true. My Super Bowl prediction came true, and it appears that John Kerry will be the Democratic nominee to run against President Bush in November 2004.
Also notable was that in June 2003, I predicted that President Bush's prescription drug benefit handout for Medicare recipients would exceed the initial estimates of $400 billion in its first ten years. This past month, the Bush Administration admitted that the plan will cost at least $530 billion in its first 10 years, a 35 percent markup! What was amazing to me was not that the plan would cost more than the public was told, it was that the Bushies admitted this ONLY ONE MONTH into the legislation's existence!
Until next month...
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at February 21, 2004 09:38 PM