I know that even if you've never thought of getting any closer to the movie industry than the candy counter at the nearest multiplex, at some point in your life, maybe more recently than you'd care to admit, you were looking in the mirror and you sussed out who you'd thank, who you'd purposely omit, what message you'd serve up to the alleged one billion viewers of the annual Oscar telecast when you were honored by your generous, generous peers while in your creative prime for earning millions while baring the most sensitive extremities of your so-sensitive heart. Tough luck. Tell the shrink.

But what are Oscars good for beyond daydreams? The Oscars are most important for two things: earning a broadcast license fee that finances most of the Motion Picture Academy's activities through the year, and for boosting the "quote" for nominees and winners. Oh, then there's the parties and arguments and betting pools among the general public, few of whom will have seen more than one or two of the nominated pictures, at the very, very most. Occasionally, the Academy offers a brief nod in the general direction of where art may have been committed during the previous year. I can't help but be cynical, despite a roster of nominees for 2001 that does a decent job of distinguishing accomplishment from sentiment.

This year's producer of the television show, Laura Ziskin, is a distinguished Hollywood veteran who's been dividing her time this winter with the post-production of May's "Spider-Man" movie. Like every unsullied new producer of the telecast who came before, she's avowed that the show will be more about movies than about television production numbers, more about quality than emotional manipulation.

Among major nominees, "A Beautiful Mind" is about the only film I find insufferable. Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman's weird, simplistic take on what constitutes genius and mental illness is tolerable mostly for the sultry, compassionate presence of Jennifer Connelly and the lucid photography of Roger Deakins. (Deakins was nominated instead for his black-and-white images in the Coen brothers' spectral comedy of alienation, "The Man Who Wasn't There.")

"Lord of the Rings" may be the oddsmakers' favorite, but if there's going to be a true sweep this year, I'd like to see it be for an intimate epic instead of a story of what someone recently described as "small men with large, hairy feet." I'm talking about Robert Altman's "Gosford Park," a wry riff on staid Agatha Christie plotting, but mostly, a knowing variation on Jean Renoir's sublime, sorrowful tragicomedy of class differences, "The Rules of the Game." Altman turned 77 a couple of weeks ago. After more than fifty years in and out of the business, he's turned out another film recognizably his own, yet also a subversion of the English country manor genre of films which satisfies with its comedy, thrills, Englishness and orneriness. Quality, breaking new ground, and capping off a career that has never bowed to Hollywood norms? Four or five wins for "Gosford Park" would startle me, but it would also be very pleasant. That would be so much more satisfying than a 2003 Life Achievement Award for a director who just keeps living.

The politics and the mathematics of the secret-ballot choices of the 6,000 members of the Academy will always remain inscrutable. Beyond the factors that nominations are chosen by members who work in a specific craft, and the awards are voted by the entire membership, which is, predominantly, composed of actors, any other speculation is odds-making just shy of outright guessing. But the awards never change American movies, let alone cin-e-mah. Other forces make that happen. Despite credits and public reputation, people in the industry know who's responsible for good work. And even if audiences don't discover films like Altman's fellow septuagenarian Agnes Varda's remarkable digital video essay, "The Gleaners and I," or a jittery visual delight like Canada's foreign language nominee, "Une crab dans le tete," other filmmakers do. (No shiny idea is lost on an industry of thieving magpies.) But wouldn't it be wonderfully absurd to give a run of awards to a director whose career and life can't be changed no matter how much you bow in his direction? He didn't have his first success (with "M*A*S*H") until he was 44, as he is fond of reminding you.

When you talk to Altman, declamations about how he's always beaten those who wronged him alternate with favored analogies and metaphors, and he has a ready comparison between the Hollywood factory and the artisanal filmmaker. "[The movie industry is] in the running-shoe business," he says, warming to a familiar song. "There's billions of 'em. I never see anybody without running shoes on and there's no two pair that are alike. That's why I say they all mimic each other. I say I make gloves, they sell shoes."

Altman has never hidden his love of actresses and his love of intoxication. Movie love? Nope, the love of real-life infatuation and intoxication. Why? "Because I understand it! It's the truth. I think most of our art comes from that source. You look at painters, they're sitting up there in their barn, they put their life inside of that, no matter how long it takes. I think it's all to ease the pain."

There weren't too many painful Oscar nominations this year. "Ghost World," one of my favorites, was nominated for only Best Adapted Screenplay, a salute from one of the more intelligent wings of the Academy. Writers tend to nominate more eccentric material, including the only nod for the chokingly pretentious "The Royal Tenenbaums"; as well as for the painstakingly structured "Gosford Park" and the painstakingly deconstructed "Memento." Among nominations that I miss are one for Billy Bob Thornton, who pursued two radically different forms of minimalist, gestural acting in "The Man Who Wasn't There" and "Monster's Ball," and was breathtakingly fine in both roles. The Academy showed its middle-to-no-brow sensibilities in the new Animated Feature Film category, which nominated Disney's "Monsters, Inc." and DreamWorks' "Shrek" for two of its three citations, while filling the last with Nickelodeon's forgettable kidpic "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius" rather than Richard Linklater's dreamy, personal, even visionary "Waking Life," which broke ground technically and also in terms of regional filmmaking. So much for good intentions. Tilda Swinton was superb in the luminous, if sour "The Deep End," but she failed to get an acting nomination, as did the actors in Fred Schepisi's grand, refined "Last Orders." Perhaps generational shifts are happening when Michael Caine fails to be noticed for one of his most refined pieces of screen acting in at least a decade.

"Lord of the Rings," the only movie in the running that could be longer than the Oscar show, has the potential for draining all suspense out of the drama, given the Academy's penchant for giving it all up for smash-hit epics--think "Titanic" and "Gladiator." Yawn. It'll be so much more entertaining if the deadweight statuettes are handed out to as wide a range of films as were nominated.

Miramax is spending its promotional dollars on several films, notably the performances of Judi Dench and Kate Winslet in "Iris," playing two versions of the writer Iris Murdoch, and for Jean-Pierre Jeunet's vigorous whimsy in "Amelie." Their greatest chance is where the greatest expenditure is going in trade ads in Variety, the Hollywood reporter and Screen international, as well as the Times of New York and L.A.: Sissy Spacek as the grieving mother in Todd Field's austere, moving, "In the Bedroom." That movie presents another face of grief, and another nomination, perhaps the performance that startled me most last year: Marisa Tomei's turn as another sorrowing survivor. There are few moments that have taken my breath as much as her work with Tom Wilkinson in a single scene in "In the Bedroom," where neither of their characters can find the words to speak, only the expressions that demonstrate a void that can never, ever be filled again. That's the kind of subtlety that garners nominations, if not winners.

In contrast, I'm a great admirer of the mad exuberance of Baz Luhrmann's "Moulin Rouge," which got a raft of technical nominations as well as consideration as best picture. Similarly, the calculatedly disorienting "Black Hawk Down" was recognized for its substantial achievement in technical categories. While Ridley Scott is competing as Best Director for that film, Luhrmann is not, with the "visionary" slot being given over to David Lynch for his lurid and idiosyncratic "Mulholland Drive."

It's the big, bad performances that get noticed. A likely winner is Ben Kingsley's Mephistolean grandiloquence as a petty thug who thinks he's a Shakespearean bad guy in "Sexy Beast," and I wouldn't bet against Denzel Washington for his outrageous playing of a contemptible cop in "Training Day." While Sean Penn plays a damaged character in "I Am Sam," and the Academy loves to honor actors who play drunks and the mentally disadvantaged, a good man and great actor playing gleeful evil against type? Sounds like a sweep to me.

Altman's the best example of an unsentimental journeyman who'll be there for the party on Hollywood Boulevard Sunday night. Don't think, just do. "What patterns I find in what I've done is when I'm talking about it. And different people, I go to answer a question and it all becomes a little clearer to me in retrospect. But otherwise, I'm thinking about what's next."

During that particular conversation, he said, laughing, "As I say, I don't think there's anybody who's had better luck than I have. I don't have one single complaint in the world." I tried to draw him out in the similarities between "Cookie's Fortune" and the work of the cinema's great humanist, Jean Renoir, a director whose work he was preparing to forage for "Gosford Park."

"All these tags are beyond me," he growled. Well, I joked, I guess it's your job to do the work, and the job of the journalists is to put your art in a shoe box.

I could almost hear a smirk down the phone line. "Yeah, to put my gloves in a shoe box."

Also by Ray Pride

TIP OF THE WEEK
In its twenty-first incarnation, the Women in the Director's Chair International Film and Video Festival presents 117 new video and film works, from twenty-two different countries.
(2002-03-14)

TIP OF THE WEEK
F. W. Murnau's 1927 masterpiece is one of the singular accomplishments of cinema, a stunning symbolic love story, perhaps the last great silent film.
(2002-03-07)

LETTING GO
Giovanni is a psychiatrist in a small town in Italy. His life is good, his home is care-worn and lovely, his wife loves him, his teenage son and daughter are a source of pride. Is his a life of bourgeois complacency? Or is it middle-class contentment? Whatever the case, the portrait of familial intimacy portrayed in Nanni Moretti's masterful, sorrowful "The Son's Room" is achingly tender.
(2002-02-21)

SCOLD WAR
"Hart's War" is many things, none of them memorable or really even very good. First and foremost, I suppose, is that it's a World War II picture about integrity entering the marketplace after September 11. Or perhaps, in monetary terms for perennial underdog studio MGM, is that it's a Bruce Willis is-he-a-good-guy, is-he-a-bad-guy hard-ass action story that cuts together nicely as a thirty-second television spot.
(2002-02-14)

AUTUMNAL CRAFT
(2002-02-07)

SPRUNG
(2002-02-07)

UNSEASONED
(2002-01-31)

A THOUSAND WORDS
(2002-01-31)

SLUSH LIFE
(2002-01-24)

SCARY MOVIE
(2002-01-24)

FIRE FROM ABOVE
(2002-01-17)

LISTING CRAFT
(2002-01-10)