The Oscars happened last night. Ho hum. Gladiator won best picture. Ho hum, big suprise. Rather than ramble on about how Gladiator was good, but not best picture good, I’ll speak about Steven Soderberg’s win for best director, which, I felt was well deserved. Now, I’m going to admit, I haven’t seen most of the movies nominated this year, but I did see Traffic and I felt that it was superbly directed. I was extremely impressed. I feel for Ang Lee, however, since he was probably also deserving of the award. From what I’ve heard about Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky (director of Pi) was also deserving, and he wasn’t even nominated (thats what you get for making a brilliant but relentlessly brutal film).
Since I probably won’t get around to doing a year 2000 movie roundup until August (like I did last year), I’m going to link to Widgett’s, which is entertaining and honest and a good read. He makes the point that the year 2000 wasn’t as bad as everyone made it out to be, and overall, I think he might be correct. But 2000 had 2 things going against it: a slow start (first impressions count) and even with the strong ending, the year still wasn’t nearly as strong as 1999…