Familiar faces should rule at 76th Academy Awards

Nostalgia and the desire to reward past work and performances — combined with the merit of current work — will lead to well-known actors and actresses winning this year's Academy Awards, according to Don Staples.

Staples, a UNT professor of radio, television and film and a well-known film historian, has predicted Oscar winners with 85 percent accuracy for the past 33 years. Winners of the 76th Academy Awards will be announced Feb. 29, with the ceremony televised by ABC.

Staples' skill in predicting Oscar winners is a combination of gut feelings, his Hollywood connections and background, and his willingness to set aside his own personal preferences.

Because 2003 was a "very good year" for high-quality movies, the films nominated for the top awards include small, independent films with lesser-known actors and actresses, and larger, more publicized films that were box-office hits, he says.

"The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences stresses that it gives awards for top quality, but in the back of everyone's mind, making money counts, too," Staples says.

Popularity and the need to give an award for recent past work will result in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King being named Best Picture and its director, Peter Jackson, being named Best Director, he says.

He points out that the awards will be given not just for Return of the King, but for the other two films based on J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy — 2001's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and 2002's The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Both films made more than $300 million at the box office, though Return of the King has surpassed them both.

"It's time to reward Peter Jackson and for the whole series to be given Best Picture in the form of Return of the King winning Best Picture," Staples says. "Often, sequels don't do as well as the original movie, but in this case, the last movie in the trilogy was the best."

Return of the King, like fellow Best Picture nominees Seabiscuit and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, has no acting nominations. But Staples doesn't think lack of acting nominations will hurt Return of the King's chances.

"The actors will be rewarded with Peter Jackson's win as Best Director, since he will receive the award for directing them," he says. "However, Viggo Mortensen should have been nominated for Best Actor."

Although all of the acting nominations include little-known names, come Fe. 29, the familiar faces will take home the acting awards, Staples says.

He says Renée Zellweger, nominated last year for Best Actress for Chicago and in 2002 for Bridget Jones' Diary, is a shoo-in this year for Best Supporting Actress in Cold Mountain.

"She's done so many good performances in the past, and it's her time to win," he says. "Some critics raved that Cold Mountain really didn't get going until she was on the screen. She did a magnificent job."

The Best Supporting Actor award should go to another familiar face – Alec Baldwin for The Cooler, he says.

"He gets credit for not trying to be the hero anymore and for playing the part of the antagonist in this film. He also gets credit for not being the star of the movie," Staples says.

Baldwin's biggest competition should be another proven actor – Tim Robbins for Mystic River. But Baldwin should win because "he's a popular Hollywood person, while Tim Robbins is more popular in New York," Staples says.

Nostalgia should give Diane Keaton a Best Actress win for Something's Gotta Give, he predicts.

"The academy members tend to be slightly older and remember when she won Best Actress for Annie Hall in 1977. They're thinking that, 35 years later, she is still acting, and she carried Something's Gotta Give beautifully," Staples says. "Academy members were glad to see Annie Hall again."

However, voters may reward "a dramatic performance against type" by giving Best Actress to Charlize Theron for Monster, he says.

"Often, the academy notices beautiful actresses who go ugly for roles," Staples says, noting that Nicole Kidman did just that to play novelist Virginia Woolf in The Hours last year and won Best Actress.

Staples says the Best Actor race is between Johnny Depp for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Bill Murray for Lost in Translation and Sean Penn for Mystic River.

He predicts Bill Murray will win the Oscar for being a comedic actor who did a serious role.

"He has also paid his dues in Hollywood and is liked by everyone," he says. "Johnny Depp is my second choice. He took a bland character and made it into a memorable one, but Oscars aren't often given to comedic performances."

Sean Penn's purely dramatic role, while praised, has also been criticized as overacting, Staples notes, adding that the actions of Penn's character in Mystic River will hurt his chances.

"Villains rarely win acting awards," he says.

Staples notes some omissions among this year's nominees — namely Cold Mountain for Best Picture; its director, Anthony Minghella, for Best Director; Nicole Kidman for Best Actress for Cold Mountain and the film's screenplay for Best Adapted Screenplay.

"When I read the book, I thought it would be the most difficult book to transfer to film, but it was done beautifully," he says. "I think the fact that Cold Mountain was shot in Romania, by a British director and starring mostly non-American actors, accounts for the snub. It's a movie set during the Civil War, so Academy voters may have felt that it should have had more of an American connection."

BY NANCY KOLSTI nkolsti@unt.edu

Other featured articles in this issue

• $1 million gift to help fund construction of new UNT athletic center
• UNT launches e-Campus web site
• UNT to host annual law conference March 1-2
• Faculty and staff can vote now for 2004 UNT Homecoming theme
• UNT students, alumna win Rotary Scholarships
• Cowboy historian to speak to Friends of the UNT Libraries
• UNT professor finds that women's civic clubs led to suffrage movement in Texas
• Totten named to National Commission on Libraries and Information Science

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