re you as tired today as I am? If you care at all about the movies, then you've got to be. No self-respecting fan of the cinema ever gets to bed before midnight on Oscar Sunday. Trust me, I know. Ever since I was a kid, I would spend the weeks before Oscar night hitting the local theaters so I could fill in the blanks of nominated performanced I had not yet seen, and then spend those post-Oscar Mondays stumbling around woozy. I imagine that I'll go on like this until the day I die.
So you can see that I take the Oscars seriously—and personally. This year, I approached them even more personally than ever before. How could I not? I've loved The Lord of the Rings since the moment I first discovered it as a young teenager. Until I left those teen years behind and became too busy earning a living to continue doing so, I'd reread Tolkien's trilogy at least once a year, dipping back in to reread my favorite passages even more often than that. My paperback editions of the trilogy's three volumes (and The Hobbit, too) were falling apart. These were more than just books for me. They were touchstones.
As the years passed, my hopes would be frustrated by the many failed attempts to bring this epic vision to the screen. And even worse than that, I'd occasionally have to suffer the misguided attempts that actually did get made, only to remind me of how far short they fell from the vision of the books. I was coming to terms with the fact that I just might have to accept that The Lord of the Rings was unfilmable. But when it was announced that Peter Jackson would be transforming the books into films, I finally had a valid reason to hope. I loved the skewed vision he displayed in Meet the Feebles and Dead Alive. And I suspected that for Jackson, this would be more than just another assignment. I felt that he was one of us, and saw this as a mission. And when I saw the first of the three films, I was stunned. He had succeeded where others had failed, and had brought my childhood dreams to life.
Perhaps for someone not as Oscar-focused, that achievement alone would have been enough. But last night, Jackson and his crew faced the final test, one in which I felt emotionally invested—what would the members of the Academy think? They'd already snubbed Ian McKellan back when he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Would the Academy decide to snub the trilogy as a whole?
The Academy finally honors the F word
Science fiction, fantasy and horror films and performances are hardly ever recognized come Oscar time. Yes, Signourney Weaver received a nomination for Aliens, and a few other performers—Cliff Robertson, Jeff Bridges, and the aforementioned McKellan among them—have received nods, but these are rare, and only nominations at that. The trophies themselves remain tantilizingly out of reach. It's been a long dry spell since 1931, when Fredric March won an Oscar for his performance in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The buzz was on Peter Jackson's side. But would that buzz prove to be prophetic? Or would Jackson suffer the fate of other recent front runners, such as Howard Dean? I worried as I watched Sean Penn and Tim Robbins walked off with their well-deserved trophies for Mystic River. And when Sofia Coppola picked up the gold for her adaptation of Lost in Translation, I also felt a strange twinge of fear. Both of these films were worthy opponents, and in any other year I would have been happy to see them win for Best Picture. But not this year. This year, I wanted Peter Jackson to strike a blow for all of us.
As it turned out, Oscar did more than smile on The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King—it allowed the film to win in every category in which it had been nominated. In fact, no film in the history of the Academy had ever garnered more gold, because it tied the record that until then had been jointly held by Titanic and Ben-Hur for the most Oscars won by a single movie.
In one of Peter Jackson's many acceptance speeches last night, he thanked voters for being brave enough to look past the F word—fantasy—to see the drama beneath, something that many of us had feared the Academy would not have the courage to do. After all, both Star Wars and E.T. the Extraterrestrial had seen their chances fade in the light of more "realistic" competition. But this year proved different. This year, fantasy was finally told that, yes, you, too, can do great things. Perhaps it's childish to so value the validation of others. But after a lifetime of Oscar-indoctrination, this was a horse race that mattered to me.
I hope that this win signals a change in how Hollywood perceives films of the fantastic. We here all know that they are more than just FX-laden flights of fancy, that science fiction, fantasy and horror films can possess all the power, depth and meaning of more down-to-earth fare. In my optimistic heart, this is more than just a win for a single picture, but rather an indicator that other such visions will not be dismissed out of hand in the future.
Come back next year, when we'll touch base while suffering from yet another Oscar hangover.
Scott Edelman started his trek to the editor-in-chief position at Science
Fiction Weekly decades ago, when he began working as an assistant editor at
Marvel Comics. Between these two positions, this four-time Hugo Award nominee in
the category of Best Editor was the founding editor of the
award-winning magazine Science Fiction Age, in addition to editing
Sci-Fi Universe, Sci-Fi Flix and Satellite Orbit. Currently, he also edits SCI
FI, the official magazine of the SCI FI Channel. His most recent short story appears in the new anthology Men Writing Science Fiction as Women, edited by Mike Resnick.
