Simply the Best
Rod Dreher, Rich Lowry, John Podhoretz, Ann Coulter, and more vote for Best Picture.

Compiled by Kathryn Jean Lopez
March 24-25, 2001

Rod Dreher, columnist for the New York Post & film critic for Our Sunday Visitor, a national Catholic newsweekly
I wish I cared. The only one of this field I feel strongly about

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is Chocolat, a stupid and malicious brew of smug, anti-Christian bigotry from the snotty-tots at Miramax Films, who specialize in this stuff. I would sooner see Adam Sandler walk off with the Irving Thalberg award than have to endure Harvey Weinstein congratulating himself onstage for having the "courage" to put out such PC claptrap. Happily, Chocolat doesn't have a chance. The rest of the field contains some of the best films of 2000, but it's all relative: Think of the four best ballerinas in Galveston. Oh, okay, that's not entirely fair. Well, it is for Ridley Scott's Gladiator, a middling movie at best, one over-praised by conservatives (mea Maximus culpa), and Steven Soderbergh's Erin Brockovich left me cold. Much better was Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, one of the most visually enthralling films ever made; too bad the narrative was confounding as hell. Traffic was a thoroughly compelling exploration of the hydra-headed nature of the human sinfulness, and how it makes the drug war all but unwinnable. The technically impressive film kept me guessing throughout, and I marveled at the detail, nuance, and believability of its characters. However, the ending, which I won't reveal, was a moral cop-out, which deflated much of my enthusiasm for the movie. Still, Traffic was the best of a flawed lot, and one I think has a decent shot at winning. Early odds said Gladiator was a lock, but it seems to have stumbled in late balloting. My intuition tells me the Academy will reward Erin Brockovich with a best-actress statuette for Julia Roberts, will honor Crouching Tiger with best-foreign film and best-director prizes — all of which will free the pro-Soderbergh bloc to unite around Traffic for best picture.

Rich Lowry, editor, National Review
It didn't have the splashy special effects of Gladiator. It didn't have Julia Roberts dressing like a slut. It didn't have the exquisite political correctness of Chocolat. But You Can Count on Me was still the year's best picture. It featured the relationship of a brother and a sister — adults, in the late 20s or early 30s — who are reunited after a period of semi-estrangement. He's a sweet-tempered pot-smoking drifter who's come to visit, she's a diligent single mom making a determined go at middle-class respectability. It's a movie essentially about the love and difficulty between siblings, about the way jealousy and insecurity and laziness and circumstances frustrate our best intentions, and separate us from those we hold dearest. It's a story so bittersweet it hurts. Like last year's The Straight Story, You Can Count on Me is small bore and low key, but runs very, very deep. Too deep, of course, for the Academy to place it in the exalted ranks of such fare as Erin Brockovich, although a best-actress Oscar for Laura Linney — who played the sister — would be nice, compensating recognition for an amazing film.

John Podhoretz, columnist, New York Post
The movie that should win is not even nominated: It's the Taiwanese film Yi Yi, a gorgeous, funny, and moving family story set among the privileged classes in Taipei that's the most memorable cinematic experience I've had in years. Failing that, another movie in Chinese, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, should win and could, since it is nominated. It is not merely that Crouching Tiger is the best Chinese action movie ever made — which is saying a lot, as something like 10,000 have been produced in the past 30 years — but it's also a terrifically touching tale of two pairs of star-crossed lovers told in a tone of aching regret that conveys more stark emotion than anything else this year — except Yi Yi.

Andrew Stuttaford, NRO contributing editor
Well, in a poor year, it has to be Traffic, a selection made easier, if more unfair, by the fact that I have not seen two of the contenders. From the trailers, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon looks ridiculous. Its images of warriors running up walls would be the laughing stock of all but the nerdiest sci-fi convention, which is where, probably, they belong.

Previews of Chocolat, my second unwatched offering, give an impression of sappy sanctimony, a Babette's Feast for the Hersheys crowd, all wrapped up in Miramax middlebrow and guaranteed to drive the discerning viewer up the wall right alongside the folks from Crouching Tiger.

Erin Brockovich, meanwhile, is little more than movie of the week polemic, a dim trial-lawyer hagiography elevated by its stars into a big-screen adventure. It would have been better to have heard the story on NPR, the best medium for left-wing fiction, as it is easy to combine listening to the radio with the performance of everyday household chores.

Gladiator, by contrast, was worth the trip to the cinema. Ridley Scott gives audiences an escapist epic of slaughter, betrayal, and revenge as well as an astonishingly good early battle sequence. Too much fun to win the Oscar, it is marred by a maudlin conclusion, and not enough decadence. As a sword-and-sandals epic it also suffers by comparison with last year's Titus, a remarkable film scripted by William Shakespeare, a talented writer who may go far.

That leaves Traffic as my choice, but it is by default. Contrary to the hype, this movie has little more to say about the failed drug war than does any early episode of Miami Vice. Worse, the Michael Douglas segment is a crude morality tale that could have been scripted by the DEA. Nevertheless, the film is redeemed by the imaginative power of the portion shot in Mexico and a staggeringly effective performance by Benicio Del Toro.

Next year, hopefully, we will have a better selection, one, perhaps, that is even worth seeing in full.

Thomas Hibbs, professor of philosophy at Boston College & author of Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from the Exorcist to Seinfeld
The weakest of the five films is Chocolat, whose chief attraction is the sympathetic newcomer (Juliette Binoche) to a small, pious French town. When she opens a chocolate shop during Lent, the battle lines are drawn between an ascetical, masculine church and the subtle, feminine celebration of delight in the senses. Chocolat starts out as a critique of Catholic oppression but manages in the end to unite everyone under the banner of toleration. It's the French revolution fought with Hershey kisses instead of the guillotine.

A better story line can be found in Erin Brockovich, the true story of Erin's victorious fight on behalf of a California town suffering the devastating medical costs of contaminated water. It offers something rare in recent Oscar-nominated films: the depiction of an ordinary, if vulgar, American who beats the odds and achieves justice by combining diligence, ingenuity — and the use of great cleavage.

While reasonably entertaining, neither of these films comes close to achieving greatness. By contrast, Traffic, a gripping, complex tale of the futility of America's war on drugs, aspires to greatness. The film, which deftly balances multiple plot lines, is visually compelling; the interweaving of documentary-style filming into the central plot, even the use of subtitles for the Mexican settings, gives the picture a remarkably rich texture. As a dark, tortured Mexican cop, Benicio del Toro (nominated for best-supporting actor) turns in a compelling performance. But Traffic is hardly flawless. Catherine Zeta Jones's character undergoes an inexplicable transformation from La Jolla trophy wife to tough-gal negotiator. The film is also unable to resist the temptation to preach. When Michael Douglas's character quits as drug czar to help his daughter recover from her own addiction, the film points us in the direction of treatment and legalization rather than punitive law enforcement.

Gladiator, a much less complex and much more hopeful tale than Traffic, is a wartime story of heroism and nobility in the tradition of Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan. The result is impressive, even if the twists in the plot necessary to place Maximus (Russell Crowe), a former general turned slave warrior, face to face in the Coliseum with his nemesis, the emperor, strain credulity.

One of the problems with modern warfare is that the arena for the exercise and recognition of individual valor shrinks in proportion to the advances in the technology of war. It is striking that both Gladiator and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon feature hand-to-hand combat. Tiger is more artistically sophisticated than its competitors. Both Gladiator and Tiger are captivating dramas featuring noble warriors. But Tiger subtly intimates deeper truths: how one can lose by winning or win by losing and how ideals worth dying for inspire lives worth living.

Sam Karnick, editor in chief of American Outlook
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tends to reward earnestness and platitudinous messages of liberation, rather than quality, which should have the producers of Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and Chocolat feeling very optimistic about getting their hands on the little naked man (and I don't mean Mark Wahlberg as Dirk Diggler). Gladiator, another nominated film, has the requisite earnestness but lacks the necessary vapidity; it is too thoughtful and pessimistic to garner an Oscar. But if the Academy should decide to shock us all and grant the award based solely on merit, the honor must go to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Based on a 1930s Chinese pulp-fiction series, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon elevates its source material into something sublimely meaningful and mysterious. It champions unfashionable notions such as honor and loyalty, especially in its parallel love stories centering on the need to balance personal affections and public duty. And by refusing to provide easy answers, Ang Lee's film displays greater psychological depth and moral complexity than any other movie of recent years. It would be a welcome change for the Academy to recognize that by honoring Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as the year's best film.

Ann Coulter, NRO contributing editor & syndicated columnist
If the Academy Awards represented a sincere quest to locate the best movie of the year, the clear winner would be Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.  For the 37th straight year.  Without having actually seen any of the movies nominated for an award this year, I can state categorically that none of them will surpass Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece.

That's why all these ceaseless Hollywood-awards ceremonies are so excruciatingly insipid.  As Woody Allen proposed, How about: "Best Fascist Dictator — Adolf Hitler"? 

The basic plot of Dr. Strangelove is that an American general, enraged by the fluoridation of the water, unilaterally launches a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, thus setting off the Soviets' Doomsday Machine, which blows up the world in the last scene.  The Soviets built their Doomsday machine to keep up with the Americans whom they believed were nervously building their own Doomsday machine: "We read about it in the New York Times," the Soviet diplomat explains.

Like Shakespeare and the Bible, Dr. Strangelove is a font of memorable phrases.  Yeah sure, everybody knows the classics — "I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence";  "You'll have to answer to the Coca-Cola Company"; and, "You can't fight in here. This is the War Room!" 

But, really, every line is great.  Gradually the less-conspicuous Strangelove lines seep into your vocabulary and become part of the lexicon:

"I smell a big fat commie rat."

"The redcoats are coming!"

"The premier man of the people, but he is also a man, if you know what I mean."

These are paraphrases.  Alas, I don't have a copy of the script.  I'd restate more of the plot and dialogue, but writing about a great movie is like writing about a poem:   Didn't the poet say it better? 

One question that has always intrigued me is whether Dr. Strangelove's cult status is strictly a conservative phenomenon. I include movie references in only one out of every dozen columns or so. But it's always the same movie.  Do liberals obsessively recite lines from Dr. Strangelove, too?  Could this be, finally, a common bond that we share with our liberal friends? 

Admittedly, they might not like Peter Sellers's parody of Adlai Stevenson as the hapless, milquetoast, Carteresque president.  Or the (off-screen) Soviet premier being portrayed as a drunken Russian who must always be asked by the president to turn the music down.  But Dr. Strangelove is, after all, a movie about a Bircher setting off a nuclear war.  Liberals ought to like that.

Alas no.  When it comes to nuclear war, liberals sound like the punch line to a feminist joke. ("That's not funny!")   Remember, Dr. Strangelove is a comedy.  Peter Sellers plays three different parts (only because he fell off the bomb during filming, injured himself, and was unable to play four). Here are some real-life quotes from movie reviews of Dr. Strangelove in the past few years:

"… a forceful reminder that somewhere in the human spirit lurks the mad impulse and the means to blow up the world."

"… a cautionary tale of an ideological war from which there is no return, a message still relevant today."

"… the image of nuclear holocaust just a button and a madman away still haunts us."

"… scary … "

Please.  If we can't laugh about nuclear annihilation, what can we laugh about?

These are the people who wanted to stock cyanide pills at college-health centers in case of nuclear attack.  When President Ronald Reagan warmed up a radio mike once by saying, "In five minutes, we begin bombing," liberals solemnly manufactured posters showcasing the quote superimposed over a sinister-looking Reagan … at five minutes to noon!  I don't know if any liberals bought the posters, but conservatives couldn't stock them fast enough.  

Dr. Strangelove is most likely the funniest movie ever made.  Stop worrying and learn to love the bomb.