15 Times The BAFTAs Corrected Huge Oscar Mistakes
5. The Fellowship Of The Ring Wins Best Picture And Best Director - 2002
If you put on A Beautiful Mind without any context, chances are you'd think it was a rock-solid film filled with brilliant performances; nothing too memorable and not always the best-written or best-paced affair, but overall a perfectly good movie.
If someone then told you that it won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars that year, you'd probably think they were having you on, but it's true. It's a decent film, but it's nothing particularly memorable. It wasn't super acclaimed at the time and it hasn't lingered massively since, so these wins are very hard to understand.
This is why the 2002 BAFTAs were so satisfying. Best Adapted Screenplay went to one of the internet's all-time favourite movies, Shrek - a very fair win - and better still, Best Picture and Best Director went to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and Peter Jackson.
Fellowship, unlike A Beautiful Mind, is a true masterpiece of cinema; an utterly enthralling fantasy adventure that gets pretty much everything right, and in a fair world, this would've been the big winner at the 2002 Oscars. It's Fellowship that people are still talking about, rewatching and loving today, not A Beautiful Mind!