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Lord Of The Rings - Oscars, We Loves Them
Suhas writes "The New Zealand Herald and many others such as Yahoo/AP are reporting that Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King has swept the Oscars by winning in all the 11 categories it was nominated in. Good to see Peter Jackson finally got the Best Director award! The official Oscar site has a full list of the winners."
This is great to see a fantasy film get the recognition it deserves...a masterful film, even if I actually didn't care for it :)
LoTR tied for most Oscar's all time with Ben Hurr and Titanic. I guess the academy decided to wait for the finish of the series to give the props that they so deserved.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Good to see Peter Jackson finally got the Best Director award!
I don't always agree with the Oscars on who should receive it, but IMHO Return of the King deserved each and everyone of them! Kudos to the jury for finally giving Peter Jackson the recognition he rightfully earned after creating (again IMHO) one of the most memorable film projects ever!
Bohoo ...... Why wasnt it nominated for best cinematography ??? I havnt seen better cinematography before.
We loves our precious
It is interesting to see a movie that contains a leat one digital artifact in every shot or sequence simply overwhelm the awards. When will we see the effects groups have a category?
Oh yes, Bill Murray should have one for best actor. No doubt.
Peter Jackson: Hopefully fantasy is an f-word that won't get bleeped by the 5 second delay.
That made me laugh, and it's sad but true, it literally took one of the greatest achievements in film making to get the movie industry to recognize the fantasy genre as a valid medium of film making, not just a bunch of movies for fanboys in costume.
ce n'est pas un Sig.
Oh yes, three quality, high grossing movies, followed by a torrent of sewage. By this time next year, we'll be watching Gauntlet: The Movie.
But hey, Ender's Game is on the horizon.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
I enjoyed them all, and towards the end of the trilogy felt like I was about to lose a good friend whom I knew for the last three years.
It was a great journey and it was completely overwhelming. Peter Jackson deserved every bit of praise he received.
Thanks for the ride. There will be none like it, atleast not for me!
Rapid Nirvana
Maybe Peter Jackson will have some encouragement (not to mention financial backing) to do the Hobbit now. Given what they pulled off with Gollum, I'd like to see what Smaug would look like...that would be awesome.
And here are the two things I had to say when RotK completed its sweep:
"GEEK MOVIES RULE THE UNIVERSE!"
"One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and with the Oscars bind them!"
Be who you are...and be it in style!
As happy as I am that this year's Oscar sweep didn't go to a movie that sucked, I still don't think Tolkien would be happy with the state of things, were he around to see it. In his famous essay On Fairy Stories, he explains why he believes Fantasy is best left to words, and that Fantasy and Drama are inherently different and incompatible:
"In human art Fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature. In painting, for instance, the visible presentation of the fantastic image is technically too easy; the hand tends to outrun the mind, even to overthrow it. Silliness or morbidity are frequent results. It is a misfortune that Drama, an art fundamentally distinct from Literature, should so commonly be considered together with it, or as a branch of it. Among these misfortunes we may reckon the depreciation of Fantasy. For in part at least this depreciation is due to the natural desire of critics to cry up the forms of literature or "imagination" that they themselves, innately or by training, prefer. And criticism in a country that has produced so great a Drama, and possesses the works of William Shakespeare, tends to be far too dramatic. But Drama is naturally hostile to Fantasy. Fantasy, even of the simplest kind, hardly ever succeeds in Drama, when that is presented as it should be, visibly and audibly acted. Fantastic forms are not to be counterfeited. Men dressed up as talking animals may achieve buffoonery or mimicry, but they do not achieve Fantasy."
Reading the series has forever been on my "to do" list but I never have. I enthusiastically sat through the first two movies, but half way through the third I thought to myself "something just isn't clicking here." Upon rewatching the first two movies, I have to say, now that the "oh wow" factor of big monsters fighting on beautiful scenery has worn off, I really didn't like these films.
And I think the reason is this: the characters do not interact with each other, and are for the most part not interesting. There's a tedious romance encountered entirely via flashback and voiceover. There's an INCREADIBLY obvious and overstated (again and again and again) little rivalry with Sam and Gollum for Frodo's attention. Aside from that the characters really have no relation to one another, they just wander together, and by the end we learn (but never really see) that they've all become the best of pals. Even more eggregious, the bad guys have no direct connection to the good guys. No character has a personal stake in what he's working toward. They're just bad, and the fellowship is working against them because they're the heroes. No further explanation is really provided.
Upon watching the third movie I realized that maybe Aragorn was reclaiming some sort of birthright or something, but why this is a really big deal (aside from the movie's vauge assertion that kings are better than other forms of leadership) is beyond me. The rest of the characters either literally wandered onto the screen with no real explanation (in the case of 3 out of 4 hobbits) and stuck with the quest just because they were nice guys, or showed up already billed as heroes around a table. I never knew who Legolas was and I never really cared.
Boromeir was pretty interesting, and the rivalry/respect he had going with Frodo and Aragorn was the only conflict between individuals that was the least bit interesting in the whole trilogy. Every other time individuals clashed with each other it was the result of an evil mage or something, and there was no ambiguity whatsoever to what was going to happen.
I voiced all of this to a friend of mine and he said that if I read the books, people's motivations would be a little more fleshed out. Sorry, but that just doesn't cut it. I'm watching these movies as movies, and they're too long and don't really make much sense.
They're certainly better than most sci fi blockbusters, I just don't think ROTK was Oscar worthy. They beat the entire Alien series hands- down. They're more consistently entertaining than the old Star Wars and way better than the new one. The first Matrix was a better movie, but the sequels were a mess of "cool" with no logic. Perhaps the fantasy / sci-fi action genre isn't for me, but the movies seem universally poorly written. I don't see why it's so hard to have interesting, believable people interacting with each other inside a fantastic environment.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
This post is from August 25th of 1998, more than five years ago. It's the first mention of the movies being made that I could find on Slashdot. No comments, but it's interesting to realize that tonight's awards ceremony has been the the culmination of a story we've all been following here for more than half a decade.
I want the fire back.
It's days like this, when NZ really shines, that makes me proud to be a Kiwi.
I watched Bad Taste, I watched Meet the Feebles, I watched Braindead and I knew this guy had talent.
Good to see Peter Jackson finally got the Best Director award!
Why? Did you see the other nominated films? By what metric do you determine the 'best director'? If you feel he has been snubbed in the past, that's too bad. The nomination was for this film. (Yes, the voters have frequently righted past wrongs or close calls). A body of work award is typically rewarded specially, and much later in the career.
It's not as if Jackson is particularly old, either. So what is the reasoning behind the 'finally' comment? I just don't see it. There were plenty of good contenders. Nope, it boils down to plain old nerdish fanboyism.
And while I'm burning karma, perhaps the voters were actually thinking of G. Lucas when voting for Jackson. Sure, Jackson pumped out a couple of great movies, did wonders for product management, but Lucas helped define a genre and a generation, both in the insular world of Hollywood and in US culture in general. Yet he's never been 'blessed' by AMPAS, as space opera was too kiddyish. Here's the chance to correct that mistake.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Lets go for something a little less kiddie than Eddings. If a director could get the main character right, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever by Donaldson would be good. Although I'll be happy with damn near anything that doesn't go the Xena/Hercules route.
Hmmm. Hard to think of too many. Many fantasy series are so long its not doable in a single movie, and I don't see too many more multi-parts in the near future.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I'd like to see some of the Baen fantasy works adapted. The Bahzell books by David Weber, the SERRAted Edge urban fantasy series by Mercedes Lackey, the Deed of Paksenarrion by Elizabeth Moon.
(Incidentally, all five thus far of the Baen bound-in freebie CDs' ISOs--the ones with explicit permission to copy and share noncommercially--are now being distributed via BitTorrent at oberon.zlynx.org: that's one each from David Weber, David Drake, and Mercedes Lackey, and two from John Ringo. Get 'em while they're well-seeded and don't forget to stay connected until you've uploaded at least as much as you downloaded!)
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I don't know about the Oscars, but the Grammies work by the collection of all individuals who have ever worked on a movie, album, etc. voting on the winners. The record and movie executives cough up the dough to send copies of the works they want to receive nominations and awards for to all those voters, and voila! You have a total sham for an awards show.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
You're right about Tolkien signing over the movie rights.
You're wrong about how C.Tolkien feels about the movies: I was quoting a story on CNN's "Paul Zahn" show 3 days ago with a Bio on Michael Tolkien. They said there was bad blood and C.Tolkien did not like the movies.
But Tolkien did sell the rights, in the late 60s. He thought it was impossible to make them.
I'm not that much a purist: I would like to see in 20 years an all photorealistic CGI version made in 6 movies, one for each "Book" (each volume is two books), and a more faithful one.
Part of the joy of Tolkien's work is knowing that this river is 20 miles from that hill. Those who have read the books hundreds of times know it that well. (And it has been emboddied in the Tolkien MUCK.) They missed the boat on the magic.
And yet Tolkien was the one who signed away the movie rights, and even suggested editing changes, such as removing Helm's Deep because it was "unnecessary" to the story. Read his letters sometime.
If Peter Jackson had suggested cutting Helm's Deep, how many of the purists would be saying things like "Tokien would be turning in his grave!" Meanwhile, Tolkien suggested it!
Amusingly, Tolkien was much more liberal about Lord of the Rings than his own fans--he was editing and changing his mythologies up until the very end of his life. He stated several times he would have done things differently had he the chance to write the book over again.
People who quibble because someone said something that someone else said in the books, or the Ents didn't decide to go to war and instead had to be convinced, etc., are UPTIGHT.
Lousy minor setbacks! This world sucks! -- Homer Simpson
You guys are idiots: you are +5 informativing a liar. Here is Simon Tolkien's own website:
i le .html
http://www.simontolkien.com/final%20review/prof
"I haven't spoken to my father, except in an annual business-meeting context, for the past four years," he says, as matter-of-factly as possible. "My father is very angry with me - angry to the point that he never wishes to have anything to do with me again.
"He communicates with me now through his lawyer, so I have to live on the basis that he will never speak to me again as long as he lives. He will never see my children. He will never have anything to do with me." He pauses. "And I grew up thinking this was such a wonderful person."
I've got a dozen Charlie Chaplin DVDs, not quite 100 years on but 60-80.
It's the best _adapted_ screenplay, yeah, I agree with that. It took an -amazing- amount of work to convert that from book to screen. No other project took even a tenth amount of work as LOTR did.
Best movie? No, to me, that was Lost in Translation, hands down. I'd put ROTK as maybe 4th, _maybe_ 3rd best movie of 2003. Nah, probably 4th. Maybe even 5th, depending on my mood. Freaking whiny Frodo, Sam & Gollum annoyed me no end. Fortunately, in ROTK all the other characters had great big important things to do. By far the best of the three LOTR films for me. Would love to see a Peter Jackson version of the Hobbit - let's hope all the legal wrangling gets sorted out. Definitely interested in seeing his version of King Kong.
Anyway, best original screenplay? LIT won, and it _absolutely_ deserved to. What a subtle & sublime joy that film was. If they'd been kowtowing to Sofia, I guarantee you LIT would've won more than just what it did. _11_ for ROTK? Gimme a break - that's excessive, to put it mildly. Unfortunately, they were kind of stuck. Having ignored the LOTR movies more than they should've previously, they kind of had to give it a lot this time around. That's okay - Sofia & LIT have won so many awards in so many other awards shows recently, I think everyone knows how fantastic it was. It must suck not to be able to enjoy LIT, but some movies aren't for everyone. Strange that something so many geeks have loved for so long is the more mainstream option, but there ya go. If you look at the all-time box office champ list, you'll note that the vast majority of the top films are sci-fi or fantasy. Strange how the sci-fi/fantasy literature world doesn't get much respect, even though sci-fi/fantasy novels are generally FAR superior to what gets made into movies. I don't consider LOTR to be the height of fantasy literature, though I know many do.
As for best movie? No _way_ did it deserve that. Even Finding Nemo was better than ROTK, but it got shunted off into another category.
Ender's game has by far one of the LEAST bogus physics of a Sci Fi book.
The vast majority of SciFi has FTL travel, whereas the Ender's series space travel relies strictly on relativity.
FTL communications (ansible in Ender's) is less bogus than FTL travel (e.g. 'warp speed', 'hyperspace')
The unofficial
It is kind of OT, but I can't help noticing that even Hollywood outsorces A LOT of production.
;-) diminishes, and who can't protect their turf against invaders (not that they are orks and goblins or evil).
LOTR was made in NZ; most of movies and shows that depict Seattle are actually made in Vancouver, BC (for example, Highlander the series). Some others are made in the other parts of Canada.
I do also know from a struggling animator friend about outsorcing of the cartoon making to South Korea etc.
American creative workers look more and more like the elves whose power (technological edge
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Yeah, right. You're one of those pretentious "movie soundtrack" guys.
I heard people humming the Fellowship theme as we came out of the theaters. Same thing happened with the Rohan theme coming out of Two Towers, and the Gondor theme from Return of the King. You're smoking crack. From the Charge of the Rohirrim to the rising crescendo of the lighting of Gondor's beacons to the creeping thing of Gollum, the soundtracks were genius.
Tell us what exactly was wrong about the "embarrassing use of wood flute?" How pretentious.
Well i'd be happy with anything that wasn't The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. I managed to drag myself all the way through the first trilogy and definitely wasn't impressed, but i gave up half-way through the first book of the second trilogy when it became aparent that it was going to be as lackluster as the first trilogy. Covenant was too whiney and annoying to be a good hero, and too pathetic to be a good anti-hero. Of course the fact that the first thing he does is rape a girl because he can't restrain his "manly urges" didn't really endear him to me.
Mirror of Her Dreams on the other hand was very good, wouldn't mind seeing a movie of that one, although there are other books i would nominate first.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I've seen all the nominated films.
Mystic River and American Splendor were clearly better adaptations than Return. And the Annie Lennox song was crap, and worse, not relevant to the film. The Mighty Wind song, sung on the show in character, was cute, but the Triplets of Belleville theme was the best.
Master and Commander, Lost in Translation, and Mystic River were all better films than Return. Only Seabiscuit was inferior. Of course the wins for Return were for the whole trilogy. Rings as a whole deserves high praise. Master and Commander is a better action/adventure film than Return. It's also far better than Gladiator, the other Crowe genre film that won Best Picture.
As an emsemble film, Return neither received nor deserved any acting nominations.
I'm in complete agreement with the technical awards. Return probably would have won Cinematography if it had been nominated, over the more deserving M&C.
It's...Lord of the Rings... -waves hands as if the answer is obvious- -pauses- Ok, I LOVE this movie, and I don't think the last two got enough credit. First off, now RotK is in the same hall of fame as the likes of Ben-Hur and it's the first Fantasy film to achieve the honor of best picture in the Academy Awards. I was really happy for Peter Jackson and the rest of the creative staff behind the project because I felt they sorely deserved it. And I chose to express this happiness by yelling. So? What's the big deal?
Citizen Kane is largely considered to have lost due to political reasons rather than artistic ones. Hearst drove himself to the point of bankruptcy in trying to crush the film paying theaters not to show it and managed to pay off or otherwise influence enough voters to keep the film from winning.
That said a lot of Oscars are political and judged more on the basis of fickle opinions of people with poor taste than anything. Box office gross also plays a disturbingly large role. When you get down to it the Academy Awards are prestigious in name only having long ago lost any actual indication of a film's merit. In Stanley Kubrick's entire career the only Oscar he ever won was for Special Effects on 2001 despite the quality of his films.
Why are they flooding ROTK with Oscars? I mean, they should have *at least* given the prizes to LOTR The Movie, not its lame last part. Or, alternatively, to Fellowship of the Ring since it was hands down the best of the lot.
I know it's a bit late into the thread to be posting, but I'll share for those interested an interesting experience I had when watching ROTK in theatres (which I just watched again today, wow!) I feel that this experience is interesting enough to be worth sharing, so read on if you have a moment :)
Last semester at Cornell University, i was the lead of the Computer Science subgroup of a small team of engineers attempting to design and build a snakelike robotic arm. The C.S. team had gotten everything we needed for our demonstration done (it was the end of the semester) so I decided to take the team out to see ROTK. The head of the team didn't care for this, as the other two subgroups (EE and MechE) were not nearly done getting the prototype ready to be demonstrated, and had expected us to help pick up slack.
Before the movie I spent a lot of time on the phone explaining to them why their feedback control system would never work (they had 2 DOF for feedback and acceptable operation, but 3 degrees that had to be independently controlled, lest the robot break). I was very pessimistic and was just happy to be done with my part of the project (perhaps not the best attitude to have).
So we went in and watched the movie. I was simply blown away by the movie and its underlying themes. I laughed, cried, and even sat in shock as the Riders of Rohan swept down the field of battle, as Eyowin killed the Witch-King, and as Gandolf and Frodo left the fellowship. I even didn't mind sitting an extra hour to watch all the loose ends tied up, to see the new stories that had just begun.
After the movie it was past midnight, however the film had given me such a deep sense of hope and courage... it was as if seeing what epic struggles ordinary people went through on the screen made me realize that I too didn't have to give up, even if the problem seemed to be impossible.
Filled with an intense sense of strength and optimism, our group took my car down to the lab where the rest of the group had been working in our absence. When I got there, they were all just sitting there looking unhappy - the microcontroller board was fried. The movie, however, had changed how I felt about things so much that I went from thinking the task was impossible with a microcontroller, to thinking it just might work if we did a few things right. Using various tricks I'd learned in my electronics class, I quickly announced that we could do everything we wanted provided we could get a few parts. I drew up on the board a quick schematic of a parallel-port controlled robot, and got the team to work. I felt like Steve Jobs, promising the impossible and yet somehow managing to get people to go along with it... Objections of "that's impossible" became excited assertions of "we can do this!"
It was an amazing feeling, driving a team all through the night on an impossible quest... We ended up getting a lot done that night but not quite enough to get it to work. We did make some kick-butt digital to analog converters from some resistors we'd managed to "borrow" from sources undisclosed, among other things.
The point of this post isn't the project I worked on, but rather the tremendous power that stories have. I thank Tolkien and Jackson and all those who made this experience possible. This story sounds ridiculous, but none of it is exaggerated.
After the film, my roommate who was on the team asked me "Do you think anyone will ever have adventures like that?" It's not the kind of thing he'd usually say, but it's hard to think anyone could come out of the theatre unimpressed with the epic nature of the stories. It is my sincere hope that the courage, honor, bravery that was shown in the film will be shown by real people in my lifetime. The movies are great at showing the weaknesses of mankind, but it is the strengths in spite of those weaknesses that give me hope even though times seem to be getting dimmer each day.
People can and will debate which of
Some visual effects for The Two Toweres were done with Maya running on KDE (Linux?). Screehshots are here.
http://exile.ru/182/182061202.html
Never buy a dwarf with learning difficulties. It's not big and it's not clever.
It's a shame that the third film didn't get a nomination for cinematography (neither did TTT, but FOTR won for it). Same goes for one of the actor awards. I find it very hard to believe that of all three films, none of the Fellowship nor Saruman nor any of the other characters deserved a nod. Had any single one of those 3 categories had a LotR nomination, I think we would have seen a higher Oscar count.
I personally think it's great news for everyone (except the big name actors.) Star-appeal is not important to me -- story-appeal is. As long as the actors portraying the story are competent (and so many actors are these days,) it always takes a well-written story to successfully entertain us. Sure, a new breakthrough in special effects will draw us, but that's fleeting (witness "The Matrix" vs. "The Sequel").
I'm obviously ignoring the obvious sex appeal that some actors and actresses bring to the screen here, but that, too, is fleeting. And again there is always a fresh crop of appealing 20-somethings poised to grab the brass ring if it ever swings their way.
John
My suspicion is that after FOTR's win, the cinematographers in the Academy got the Extended DVD of FOTR, which showed how digital grading was used on pretty much every scene. "That's not real cinematography!" they cried, and shut out the subsequent two films.
Just a theory...
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Am I the only one who is sick and tired of the standard "blockbuster" films getting Best Picture while more unique, original (and lower-budget) films get shafted year after year?
Why does LOTR deserve best picture over Master and Commander, Lost in Translation, or dare I say (even though it wasn't nominated) The Last Samurai? Because it had a bigger budget and was hyped more?
I stopped watching or caring about the academy awards when Gladiator (the hyped big-budget movie of 2000) beat Crouching Tiger and Chocolat for best picture. Either of those movies deserved best picture ten times more then Gladiator.
Let the big budget films have best actor/actress if they actually earned it (Crowe did in Gladiator). But it seems like they are automatically destined to get Best Picture -- which annoys the hell out of me. Though I realize I'm in the minority and probably begging to get modded flamebait by speaking out against LOTR on /.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.