THE OSCARS: Irish nominees include Enya for her song from Lord of the Rings and two animated short films With 13 nominations, one film may rule them all at this year's Oscars, writes Michael Dwyer, Film Correspondent
The nominations for the 74th Academy Awards, announced in Los Angeles yesterday, marked a triumph for the New Zealand film-maker, Peter Jackson, as The Fellowship of the Ring, the first film in his $300 million trilogy based on The Lord of the Rings, swept the board with 13 nominations.
Only two films have received more nominations in the history of the Oscars - All About Eve in 1950 and Titanic in 1997, each of which received 14 nominations.
In the best year for Irish nominees in the Oscars since In the Name of the Father collected seven nominations in 1993, the singer-songwriter, Enya, was nominated with her songwriting partners, Nicky and Roma Ryan, for best original film song with May It Be, from The Fellowship of the Ring. The Florida-based production sound mixer, Peter J Devlin, who is from Belfast, was nominated for best sound for Pearl Harbor. And in a remarkable achievement for a country with such a relatively small animation industry, Irish productions took two of the five nominations for best animated short film for Cathal Gaffney's Give Up Yer Auld Sins and Ruairi Robinson's Fifty Percent Gray.
The two Irish short films face formidable competition from Pixar, the hi-tech US computer animation company, which is nominated for the short film, For the Birds, now on release in Ireland with Monsters, Inc. In the best song category, Enya is nominated along with Sting's Until from Kate & Leopold, Paul McCartney's title song from Vanilla Sky, Diane Warren's There You'll Be from Pearl Harbor, and Randy Newman's If I Didn't Have You from Monsters, Inc.
Following The Fellowship of the Ring in the overall nominations were A Beautiful Mind, dealing with schizophrenic mathematician, John Forbes Nash Jr, who won the Nobel Prize, and the exuberant Australian musical, Moulin Rouge, with eight nominations each. Moulin Rouge became the first live action musical to be nominated for best picture since All That Jazz in 1979, and it was a major surprise that its director, Baz Luhrmann, failed to be nominated as best director. However, as a co-producer of the film, Luhrmann is eligible for the film's best picture award, and his wife, Catherine Martin, received two nominations for her costume design and art direction on Moulin Rouge.
In a remarkably good year for Australians and New Zealanders, Nicole Kidman was nominated as best actress for Moulin Rouge, while Russell Crowe, who won the best actor Oscar last year for Gladiator, was nominated for the third consecutive year, for A Beautiful Mind. British actors did exceptionally well, taking eight of the 20 acting nominations, with Judi Dench and Kate Winslet both nominated for playing the same character, the novelist Iris Murdoch, at different ages in Iris.
Joining The Fellowship of the Ring, Moulin Rouge and A Beautiful Mind on the short-list for best picture are Robert Altman's Gosford Park, a social satire set in 1932 over a weekend at an English country house, and the low-budget family drama, In the Bedroom, the first film directed by actor Todd Field, which received five nominations.
The 76-year-old Altman, who has never won an Oscar, is joined in the nominations for best director by the former child actor, Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind), Peter Jackson (The Fellowship of the Ring), David Lynch (Mulholland Drive) and Ridley Scott (Black Hawk Down). Gosford Park received seven nominations in all, including one to the director's son, Stephen Altman, for art direction.
In the history of the Oscars, only six black men and women have won Oscars for acting, but this year three are nominated for leading roles, and for the first time two are among the five short-listed for best actor - Denzel Washington for Training Day and Will Smith, who plays Muhammad Ali in Ali.
The other contenders in this category are Sean Penn as a mentally disabled man in I Am Sam, and the English actor, Tom Wilkinson as a bereaved American father in In the Bedroom, along with Russell Crowe for A Beautiful Mind.
The black actress, Halle Berry, gets her first nomination in the best actress category for Monster's Ball, and she is joined there by Judi Dench, who secures her fourth nomination in five years for Iris, Renee Zellweger for the title role in Bridget Jones's Diary, Nicole Kidman for Moulin Rouge, and the favourite, Sissy Spacek, who won the Oscar for Coal Miner's Daughter in 1980, for In the Bedroom.
Two former Oscar winners are back in contention for best supporting actor: Jon Voight as the sports broadcaster Howard Cosell in Ali and Ben Kingsley as a psychopathic criminal in Sexy Beast. Nominated in the same category are Ethan Hawke for Training Day, Jim Broadbent for Iris, and the only acting nominee from The Fellowship of the Ring, Ian McKellen.
Two of the Gosford Park cast are on the short-list for best supporting actress: Maggie Smith, who has won two Oscars, and Helen Mirren, and the other contenders are another former winner, Marisa Tomei (In the Bedroom), Kate Winslet (Iris) and Jennifer Connelly (A Beautiful Mind).
As ever, the short-list for best foreign-language film yielded the most surprises, with the dark horse from Argentina, Son of the Bride, taking a place at the expense of last year's Palme d'Or winner at Cannes, the Italian drama, The Son's Room. Completing the line-up are the French hit Amelie, which received five Oscar nominations in all, along with the Indian epic, Lagaan, the Norwegian entry, Elling, and the Bosnian anti-war satire, No Man's Land.
One of the upsets in the nominations was the failure of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the biggest box-office hit of last year, to fare better than three nominations in technical categories: art direction, costume design and musical score. John Williams, who composed the score, took a second nomination in the same category for his music on AI: Artificial Intelligence. Directed by Steven Spielberg, AI took just one other nomination, for best visual effects, while other films that failed to make as big an impact as had been expected included Ali (two acting nominations), Mulholland Drive (one nomination, for best director) and The Man Who Wasn't There (a nomination for cinematography).
There are three nominees in the new category of best animated feature: Monsters, Inc., Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, and Shrek, which also collected a nomination for best screenplay adapted from another source. In an unusually open year for nominations, the Hollywood studios spent hundreds of millions of dollars on promoting their productions, and DreamWorks, which staged one of the most expensive campaigns for Shrek, will be disappointed that it did not make the short-list for best picture.
Now that the different categories have been narrowed down, the film companies are expected to spend many more millions of dollars in campaigning for their films to take home the prestigious Oscars. The only people assured of leaving the ceremony with Oscars in their hands are Robert Redford and Sidney Poitier: both of them will be presented with honorary awards.