The Academy awarded the Best Picture Oscar to another default selection this year, surprising everyone by choosing Gladiator, a professionally made, though thoroughly forgettable, sword-and-sandals epic that shouldn't have been remembered for anything other than Olivier Reed dying during production and the producers being forced to spend three million dollars to finish his performance through the the use of a stunt double and a CGI-rendered mask of Reed's face. Instead, the film's Oscar glory briefly launched Russell Crowe into a period of superstardom until his narcissistic behavior launched him right out of it again. The awards race was wide open with the New York Film Critics selecting Stephen Soderbergh's Traffic for the top honor, their colleagues in Los Angeles selecting the Chinese-made Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and the National Society of Film Critics and National Board of Review not helping anyone with their left-field selections of Yi yi: A One and a Two and Quills, respectively. The Academy went with Gladiator, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Traffic, the Julia Roberts box office smash ode to feminine empowerment Erin Brockovich, and Chocolat, a tribute to the deep pockets of Miramax Films' publicity department.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon received ten nominations (a record number for a foreign language film) as well as the top award from the Directors Guild of America (no one questioned why an American guild was giving their top honor to a Chinese film), and it seemed like the Academy would finally get over their longtime phobia of giving major awards to foreign language films. At times, the film seems like a sumptuously beautiful love story that turns briefly into a Nintendo game with its elaborate (and sometimes unmotivated) samurai battles, but there is no denying its visual poetry or the marvelous performances of Chow Yun Fat, Michelle Yeoh and Ziyi Zhang. In the end, the Academy chickened out and gave the award to the mediocre Gladiator, still not willing to admit that the finest film of the year can be spoken in a language other than English.

It is the great tradition of biographical motion pictures to cast actors who are remarkably more attractive than the real-life people that they portray. Ron Howard's film of A Beautiful Mind, the inspiring story of schizophrenic economist John Nash who managed to overcome his debilitating mental problems to ultimately win the 1994 Nobel Prize for a paper that he wrote in 1949, follows this proud line in casting super-hot Russell Crowe as Nash and Jennifer Connelly as his patient wife Alicia in following 45 years through the couple's life and in the end seeing them only having some graying around the temples to show the results of their aging (the film's nomination for Best Makeup is an absolute joke). But the couple's physical appearance isn't the only aspect of their story to get a makeover, as Nash's story received a typical movie whitewash (failing to make any references to Nash's homosexual past - supposedly to prevent the audience from associating his sexual history with his illness - or to the child he had with Eleanor Stier in 1953, three years before he met his future wife), resulting in a typically schmaltzy Ron Howard-directed mass entertainment. The film does have some genuinely moving sequences and Russell Crowe delivers an impressive movie star turn as Nash (he was a shoo-in to win the Best Actor Oscar until his self-indulgent public behavior turned the tide in the favor of Denzel Washington for his brilliant performance in the otherwise silly cop movie Training Day), but Nash's powerful story is covered with far too much Hollywood gloss to be a serious contender for the finest film of the year.

It is almost embarrassing to call The Fellowship of the Ring, the first installment of Peter Jackson's epic trilogy of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Ring saga, as the finest film of the year since its final chapter The Return of the King tied for the record of receiving the most Oscars in history. But the LOTR trilogy is arguably the most impressive achievement in motion picture history, and each film must be taken on its own merits. The Fellowship of the Ring is the most moving of the three films (although The Return of the King is the most impressive), because it is the one that we first meet the story's myriad of characters, so it is is more about human (so to speak) interaction than about the spectacle that is so prevalent in the second and third installments (it is telling that The Fellowship of the Ring received the trilogy's only acting nomination for Ian McKellen's performance as Gandalf, which also won the Screen Actor's Guild Award). Those who are not taken in by stories of hobbits and wizards and axe-yielding dwarves may disagree with this choice, but for our money there was no better example of movie-making prowess in 2001 than the first installment of The Lord of the Rings.

Real-life Nashes

Super-hot movie Nashes

The old-fashioned movie musical was a dying art by 2001 when Baz Luhrmann's controversial big-budget freak show Moulin Rouge! showed the studios that a film could have singing and dancing and still turn a profit. The time seemed right to go back to the archives of Broadway just like MGM did so successfully in the 1940s and 1950s, and the show that was the ripest for a movie version was the 1975 Bob Fosse/Fred Ebb/John Kander hit Chicago, which ran an impressive 936 performances in its original production and a spectacular 4000+ in a 1997 Broadway revival. The film version was entrusted to movie neophyte Rob Marshall, who had been nominated for five Tony Awards but whose film experience was limited to choreographing a few TV shows. The freshman director took the bull by the horns and did a spectacular job mounting the show for the screen, despite being saddled with actors who weren't skilled at musical performance like Renée Zellweger and Richard Gere, whose singing had to be digitally enhanced and dancing had to be hidden by careful editing. The film's best moments are when Zellweger and Gere aren't in frame, especially in the spectacular "Cell Block Tango" number led by the magnificent Catherine Zeta-Jones (who also does wonders with the most famous song in the show, "All That Jazz") or John C. Reilly's performance of "Mister Cellophane." The musical is based on a 1927 Broadway play of the same name by Maurine Watkins, which was filmed as a silent in 1927 and a talkie called Roxie Hart in 1942. Marshall retained the show's Prohibition-era sensibility while loading it with razzle-dazzle so that even Zellweger and Gere came off as accomplished musical performers. Of the other five nominated films of the year, Gangs of New York, The Hours, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and The Pianist, only the heartbreaking The Hours seems like a legitimate contender for the top award, but the Oscars is too frequently a testimonial to self-consciously arty drama, and the selection of the slick and entertaining Chicago is a welcome break from tradition.

The first two installments of The Lord of the Rings trilogy had already won a combined six Academy Awards when The Return of the King opened, so it would be fair to assume that the members of the Academy felt that they had done enough to honor Peter Jackson's epic. But the third part of the story resulted in what may be the most miraculously impressive spectacle ever put on film, winning a record tying fourteen Oscars that probably would have been more if the Academy could have come up with some additional technical categories. Anyone who isn't a fan of the sword-and-sorcery genre might feel that the Oscars got carried away with their adulation of The Return of the King and they might have a point: at a whopping 201 minutes (251 for the extended DVD version), the film is a marathon for the backside and the screenplay probably holds the record for the most false endings in a single film. But the Academy can be forgiven their excesses because the perception was that the awards were for the trilogy as a whole, and even if one isn't taken in by Tolkien's magic, there is no denying that the finished product is arguably the most ambitious and impressive piece of filmmaking ever attempted. There are certainly some sequences that require a hefty lump of suspension of disbelief (such as when the diminutive Miranda Otto effortlessly chops off the head of a massive flying lizard with one swing of her mighty blade), but there are are others which are unforgettable in their sheer spectacle (such as when Aragorn calls on the ghosts of his father's generation to join him in battle) or deeply moving (like the wizard Gandalf - brilliantly played by Ian McKellen - reassuring a member of his company about the nature of winning and losing on the eve of being defeated in battle). The selection of The Return of the King as Best Picture is boring and predictable, but it also absolutely correct.

The Academy selected Million Dollar Baby as the year's best picture, Clint Eastwood's moving, bittersweet tale of a female boxer on the rise that takes the viewer through an inspiring upward climb before taking an unexpected (and jarring) left-turn into tragedy and defeat. It is wonderfully acted by Eastwood and Oscar winners Hillary Swank (who underwent a demanding workout regime to acquire the physique of a professional boxer) and Morgan Freeman and contains the usual solid and professional Eastwood direction, but it is chock-full of boxing clichés dating back to the 1940s and has some painfully contrived moments (such as trusty old trainer Freeman suddenly putting on a pair of gloves and flooring an arrogant young boxer half his age and twice his size, just to teach the whippersnapper a lesson). But for all its familiarity, Million Dollar Baby managed to raise a well-publicized controversy in its apparent defense of euthanasia that was a testimony to the effectiveness of the film. But that is part of the problem with the film - by taking on such an untried plot device as the world of female boxing and using the framework of a million other boxing movies that we've already seen, Eastwood is trying to have his cake and eat it, too. In the end, we don't feel that we've gotten a glimpse at the world of professional female boxers at all; just another well-made, well-acted boxing movie that happens to have a woman cast in the lead role. And the movie's uncomfortable plot turn two-thirds of the way in makes it seem as though the filmmakers had lost confidence in the film that they started on, and decided to make a different one at the last minute. It's undeniably moving, but it also doesn't entirely work.

Sideways, Alexander Payne's heartwarming comedy about a wine connoisseur and would-be novelist whose world is changed after meeting an attractive waitress during a trip to the wine country of Santa Barbara, California, works on every level. Wonderfully acted by Paul Giamatti (who was robbed of a Best Actor nomination after winning the New York Film Critics Award), Sandra Oh, and Oscar nominees Thomas Haden Church and Virginia Madsen as a quartet of fresh and unpredictable characters, the movie is both funny and touching and possesses a wonderfully inconclusive ending that is far more satisfying than Eastwood's apparent social commentary. It won its only Oscar for director Alexander Payne's original screenplay, a quantity that should have risen drastically if the Academy didn't have such a fetish for somber drama.

The selection of Crash, director Paul Haggis' collection of episodes depicting racial unrest in Los Angeles, for Best Picture was a stunning surprise on Oscar night because the film hadn't been awarded that honor by any other major awards group prior to the ceremony. The award was anticipated to go to Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee's meandering saga of two gay cowboys, which had not only been named the best film of the year by almost every major group, but boasted the most frequently parodied film poster of all time. Both films are highly flawed - Crash's Oscar-winning script relies far too heavily on outrageous coincidences and lacks a clear sense of anything specific to say about race relations, and the quality of its performances is inconsistent: Bahar Soomekh as the compassionate daughter of an overwrought Persian shopkeeper, Michael Pena as a put-upon locksmith, and especially Matt Dillon in an Oscar nominated performance as a racist cop are all outstanding, but more famous names like Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser and Don Cheadle flounder about in unconvincing characterizations. Brokeback Mountain also has its drawbacks - at 134 minutes it is probably half an hour too long, and its leisurely pace makes it seem even longer. But there is no question that Brokeback Mountain made the biggest impact of any film released that year and despite its drawbacks is a highly moving, well-acted love story that represented a great deal of courage on the part of its makers and will be regarded as the defining movie of 2005 long after Crash is forgotten.