2. Million Dollar Baby Wins Four Oscars, Including Best Picture and Best Director
With 2004 being the best year that Oscar had seen in a long time, I suppose the Academy felt the need to balance out the yin and the yang by giving us the worst year Oscar has seen in a long time. The 2005 Oscars weren’t all bad. In fact, several great decisions were made that night. As the technical categories progressed, we saw Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator cleaning up pretty well. It even went on to claim Best Supporting Actress for Cate Blanchett. Original Screenplay went to the great Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Adapted Screenplay went to the wonderful Sideways. However, when we started getting to the other top categories, things went terribly wrong.
First off, Morgan Freeman, an actor I love in nearly everything he’s ever done, took Best Supporting Actor for a role that was very much beneath him. In fact, throughout Million Dollar Baby, he’s basically doing an impression of Clint Eastwood by putting on a ridiculous low, gravelly voice, and yet, the Academy decided to give him Best Supporting Actor for it. The best way to figure this is that they either wanted to make up for not having given him the Oscar for Driving Miss Daisy, or they thought that perhaps he might never get another nomination again, so best to award him now before it’s too late. Either way, there were far better performances in the category, including Thomas Hayden Church in Sideways and Alan Alda in The Aviator.
When it comes to Hillary Swank winning Best Actress, she wasn’t a terrible choice, but she doesn’t really do anything special in the film. That year, my vote would more than likely have gone to Kate Winslet for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, an outstanding performance that left a much bigger impact. As for Clint Eastwood taking Best Director, it’s the most understandable of the film’s four Oscars. The direction is well done, but again, there were better candidates in Martin Scorsese (The Aviator) and Alexander Payne (Sideways).
At this point, the ceremony was heading for an alarming crash ending, and that’s exactly what we got when Million Dollar Baby was announced as Best Picture of the Year. When I saw the film back in 2004, I was aghast that the Academy would give it their top prize. Re-watching it this week, for the first time in ten years, my original opinion hasn’t changed much. The first two-thirds of the film are basically your standard underdog boxing movie, packed to the brim with clichés, while the final act is so unbelievable and so filled with melodrama that even soap opera stars would blush at it. I think it’s widely acknowledged that this is the worst choice for Best Picture in the last ten years.
Looking back over the other nominees for Best Picture that year, we find great films like Sideways and The Aviator (sadly, the Academy had completely failed to nominate the great Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for the top prize), either of which would have been a far better choice to represent the year. Instead, they selected a generic boxing film that has already been long forgotten. But what makes it an even stranger choice on their part was that The Aviator had won the Producers Guild award that year, giving it the edge for Best Picture, while Million Dollar Baby had only won the Directors Guild award, giving it the edge for the corresponding Oscar that did indeed go to Eastwood. On top of that, the HFPA gave Best Drama to The Aviator and Best Musical/Comedy to Sideways, while the BFCA and SAG gave Sideways their top honors (Best Picture and Best Ensemble, respectively). All this is to say that it seems the Academy went way out of their way to choose a bad film for their top prize. In the end, they pushed two great films aside to grab from the bottom of the Best Picture barrel, resulting in one of their worst decisions of all time.