A Personal History of Oscar Watching: 2005

Jim Taylor and Alexander Payne win the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 2005 Academy Awards ceremony.

The 77th Academy Awards

Ceremony date: February 27, 2005

Best Picture: Million Dollar Baby

Best Director: Clint Eastwood for Million Dollar Baby

Best Actor: Jamie Foxx for Ray

Best Actress: Hilary Swank for Million Dollar Baby

This was the last year I did not see the Best Picture nominees before the ceremony. There is a story behind that decision, but let’s save that for the next piece. Truth told, the only nominee I had seen prior to the ceremony was Sideways, which I loved. I love it to this day. It is one of my 20 favorite movies ever, and if you want to get really nerdy, the commentary track on the DVD – featuring Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church – is one of the best commentaries out there.

This was also the last year I did not have my finger on the pulse of the awards race. I was completely out of the loop, in fact. My memory from this year was that The Aviator was winning everything as the show kept going. It won several below-the-line awards, as well as Best Supporting Actress for Cate Blanchett. In total, it won five of the 11 awards for which it was nominated. To my untrained Oscar-watching eye, it looked like Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes epic was going to win Best Picture. Obviously, that did not happen.

Instead, a movie I had barely heard of won the top three awards of the night: Picture, Director, and Actress. Million Dollar Baby was in my consciousness only because its dark, powerful ending had proved moderately controversial. I remember Roger Ebert, already my favorite critic even then, going on CNN to talk about the ending. There was certainly a cultural moment around it. I just did not realize that moment came with Academy cache. It did, and the 74-year-old Clint Eastwood was the belle of the ball.

Apart from enjoying Sideways, I did not really have a dog in the fight. I had enjoyed Mystic River from the year before, so I was happy enough to see Eastwood win the award. This, of course, was prior to any empty chair nonsense, though I must admit I still admire many of the films he makes, up to and including last year’s Richard Jewell. It does seem Eastwood’s misfires are becoming more frequent than his successes, though.

I was vaguely aware some people were disappointed Jim Carrey was not nominated for Best Actor for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a film that missed me completely at the time but of which I was aware. Aware enough, in fact, that I remember being pleased for the writing team of Michel Gondry, Charlie Kaufman, and Pierre Bismuth, two of whom would go on to make some of my favorite films of the ensuing years, winning Original Screenplay.

Eternal Sunshine might be Gondry’s best, though I have a soft spot in my heart for The Science of Sleep, but this is Kaufman mid-ascent. Kaufman’s best remains Synecdoche, NY, and Anomalisa probably surpasses Eternal Sunshine, as well.

In the Adapted Screenplay category, I was happy for Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor winning for their still-perfect Sideways script. If you want a quick lesson in adaptation, check out the scene of Giamatti and Virginia Madsen on the porch. His speech is from the book. Hers is not. It is seamless, and Payne and Taylor’s thorough understanding of their characters makes it so. Like I said, one of my favorites.

I was a fan of Documentary Feature nominee Super Size Me, a film which only grows more problematic by the day. Another good commentary track, but you have to get past Morgan Spurlock as a #MeToo symbol and the Subway sandwiches pedophile Jared Vogel. Add to that the shaky science and generally unrepeatable nature of the experiment, and well … Anyway, Born into Brothels won the award, which is probably for the best, considering everything.

Beyond that, my reminiscences of this year are few since I had little awareness of the movies in the race. That will not be the case moving forward. My Oscar night plans will also get a little more elaborate as we move through the years, so stick around if you like hearing nerdy memories of making people hang out with you while you watch an awards show.

Quick notes: I have gone back and watched most of the major contenders from 2004. Sideways is still my favorite, but The Aviator probably ought to have won Best Picture. Oh well, we’ll get to Marty soon. … I did see Best Animated Feature winner The Incredibles in theaters. I liked it a lot. … Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio both losers this year. That will happen again in 2006. She will finally break through in 2008. He had to wait a little longer.

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Next time: My first Oscars party! Oh, yeah, and a little movie called Crash shocks the world.

On the color version of Alexander Payne's Nebraska

Bette Davis wears a red dress to the ball with Henry Fonda in the classic Jezebel.

“Keep Ted Turner and his God damned Crayolas away from my movie.” – Orson Welles on the possible colorization of Citizen Kane

The dress is brown. In an iconic moment from a near-forgotten classic, a Southern belle wears a red dress to the ball. She means it as an act of defiance but quickly regrets this decision. To prove a point, the target of her defiance – and the object of her affections – forces her to dance with him. The floor clears, and all the attendees watch the shameful display of the woman in red who has crashed their party.

The film is William Wyler’s fantastic Jezebel, a Best Picture nominee in 1938 for which Bette Davis, the belle, won her second Best Actress Academy Award. Henry Fonda plays the love interest. It is a classic epic romance of the time period, preceding even Gone with the Wind by a full year. The performances are grand, the scenery is lush, the racial politics are suspect, and it is, of course, shot on black and white film stock.

Colorization is a tragic business-over-art decision that has thankfully been avoided throughout the years, though there are any number of classic films available as candy-colored nightmares if you look hard enough. The true artists of cinema have always fought back against this kind of commerce-first decision making, including people such as Orson Welles, as evidenced by the quote that heads off this article.

It is hard to blame the money men. Black and white is a tough sell. I once knew a girl who refused to watch Casablanca because she did not like black and white movies. Best Picture winners The Artist and Schindler’s List are among the few exceptions, and for every one of those, there is a Good Night and Good Luck or a Nebraska the studio heads look at and say, “What if they had been in color?”

Well, this weekend, they get their wish. Epix, a cable movie channel you may or may not be familiar with, will air the colorized version of Alexander Payne’s wonderful Nebraska. It is a version that exists as a compromise between the filmmaker and the studio, which ever-concerned with its finances wanted a more commercial option. It is not the version anyone should see, nor is it the vision Payne and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael intended to communicate.

I urge you to avoid this version. Do seek out the film. You will not be disappointed. It is witty, charming, a little sad, and ultimately uplifting. It is a great film that landed firmly in my top 10 of last year, but what it is not is a color film.

The truth is: Red does not really read on black and white stock. The blood in Raging Bull is chocolate sauce. The same is true of the black and white sequences in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films. And so too is Davis’ dress in Jezebel. The dress is brown because that is the art of shooting a film in black and white. The technology exists to make it red, but it would be nothing more than a coloring crayon representation of a classic film. The money men will always color their pictures, but that does not mean we have to hang them on our fridge.