"In one of the weakest years in memory, not just for performances but for great films, 2001 saw Denzel Washington and Halle Berry knock two birds out with one stone, as the former declared on Oscar night, as two African Americans won the top acting prizes for the first time ever. And it was difficult to argue with either".
says John Forte in a retrospective piece over at In Contention. Stop right John, I'm gonna have to disagree with ya right off the bat. First off, 2001, although not broadly a great year for movies, the second year of the new millenium will be remembered as the year that Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring changed the landscape of a what a fantasy, big budget, big cast spectacle could be and became a legendary film for my generation, in the same way Star Wars was to those who grew up in the late 70s. Nobody who saw Lord of the Rings on it's first run will ever quite forget the jaw hanging from your mouth feeling that Peter Jackson conjured up. Finally a movie that matched those illustrated fantasy stories you grew up with, or those Ray Harryhausen adventure films. Finally a movie that meant you didn't have to compromise to say you liked something because this one actually exceeded ALL expectations you could have had. Speechless, I think is the word that summed up my reaction when I left the cinema, and I wasn't to feel that again until The Dark Knight. For the lack of a big bunch of great movies (and actually there was a few...A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Amelie, Mullholland Drive, Ghost World, Spirited Away, Training Day, Enemy at the Gates, In the Bedroom, Sexy Beast), The first Lord of the Rings movie surely made up for it. I also don't think it's that difficult to argue that the Academy got it wrong with their choice of Best Actor/Actress winners. 2001 was a year that contained longer lasting, historically remembered performances that I believe, were overcome by the sympathy, and dare I say it, the politically minded vote. Denzel Washington's crazy performance in Training Day, just isn't quite as well remembered as that of Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind, a superior performance from a superior film. It always bugged me that A Beautiful Mind won for Best Film, Best Director (Ron Howard), Best Supporting Actress (Jennifer Connelly) and Best Writing (Akiva Goldsman) but Crowe didn't pick up a win. Was it Crowe's attitude and off-screen persona that cost him the win, or was it simply too soon after winning for Gladiator the previous year? The Academy agreed it was the best movie of the year (written, directed & overall) and recognised what good performances were in the film, but the real heart of it, the man who kept it all together, was strangely left off. Personally, I believe it's one of the biggest mistakes of this century's Oscars. I'm not saying Denzel Washington isn't an Oscar worthy actor because he himself could feel hard done by with not picking up the statue with Malcom X (when Al Pacino wrongly took the globe for Scent of a Woman... how many you guys seen that picture, eh?), and I'm sure he will be challenging again for the gold someday but that's not his best performance, or was it the best performance, or the best remembered of that year. It's was Crowe's movie and he got screwed out of it. Onto Best Actress. Halle Berry was good in Monster's Ball but I was never blown away by her performance, or the film for that matter. 2001 was the year of Amelie, and sadly it was a little too early for the mass media of internet Oscar pundits we have now, as the community seems more knowledgeable about what we nominate, and there's no way that a performance as strong as Audrey Tautou, even if it was in a French movie, would be overlooked. For Tautou not to have been nominated in 2001, well it was a crime. Amelie was chosen as France's entry for Best Foreign Film but lost out to the Bosnian war drama No Man's Land. And Jim Broadbent's admittedly fine performance in Iris, overlooking the work of this guy.. Ian McKellen as Gandalf the Grey, his career defining performance in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of The Ring. Shameful.