Clash of the Titans

It's up there with soccer and tennis as an international sport; it rivals horse racing and casino slots as a lure for bettors. The Oscar derby may highlight some movies shown only in America and, in a few categories, pictures only the makers' mothers care about. But ignorance and obscurity simply add to the suspense. That's one reason (the other is what's left of movie glamour) why, on March 25, a billion people will watch all or part of the 73rd presentation of awards by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—Oscar Night—to see which of the nominees announced last week will be picking up a statuette and thanking God and their accountant. Of those viewers, millions will have placed a small, friendly, tense wager on the outcome.

You need help, dear speculators in the far corners of the world. (For movies, you're in the corner; we Americans are in the center.) This year is a particular challenge: the nominations offer the battle of the epics (Gladiator vs. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) as well as the schizophrenic saga of the director with two movies (Steven Soderbergh, with Traffic and Erin Brockovich). Since nobody is an expert on this subject, we can blithely pass along bits of received wisdom and arcane Oscar lore so you will be better informed than your neighbor. To succeed in the Oscar sweepstakes, read the following with a scholar's acuity. Then take a list of the nominees, available from the Academy's useful website, www.oscar.com. Tack the list on a wall, blindfold yourself and start throwing darts.

To guess who's going to receive a prize, you must know who's giving it. The Academy Awards are simply presents that 5,500 movie people—about half of them actors, many of them well beyond middle age, almost all of them working in Hollywood—give themselves. If the awards go to good movies (like Shakespeare in Love), that's nice. If they go to terrific ones (like Platoon), that's a coincidence. If they go to great ones, that's a mistake. Consider Citizen Kane: Orson Welles' masterpiece lost in 1942 to How Green Was My Valley.

Then there's the history: seventy-two years of precedents that can be tracked like election results in Idaho or Israel. Well, not exactly. The Academy does not release its tabulations, even those a half-century old. So we cannot know, for example, how close the vote was two years ago between Saving Private Ryan and Shakespeare in Love; or whether the count was exactly tied in 1969 when Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand were both declared winners in the Best Actress category. By petitioning, Americans are allowed access to incriminating documents in government lockboxes. Can't there be a Freedom of Information Act ruling for Oscar ballots?

This year, according to awards exegete Tom O'Neil, Gladiator will win the Best Picture prize because it got the most nominations (12), and the film with the most nominations has won the top prize 16 of the past 17 years. Gladiator is also a familiar kind of Oscar (and critical) favorite: a movie that reminds us of the better movies they don't make any more. Thus The English Patient was a psychological spectacle in the David Lean tradition; Shakespeare in Love was a screwball romance with fancy English; Braveheart was a historical epic, like Hamlet or A Man for All Seasons but with more blood and lots less eloquence.

Ridley Scott's Gladiator glances back to the old sword-and-toga epics, and it's surely sturdier than the 1959 Ben-Hur (which won an unconscionable 11 Oscars). It has the fights and the fraught manhood while skipping the piety. DreamWorks, the film's distributor, knows how to market a movie to the Academy; it won last year with the smallish American Beauty. And the film boasts a strong, unsentimental performance from Russell Crowe.

Crowe is a fascinating character. Not exactly a box-office magnet (Gladiator is his only hit), he has movie-star swagger to go with his outsize movie-actor talent. He burrows into roles as different as the paunchy tobacco scientist in The Insider and the hostage rescuer in Proof of Life. He gives intelligent, sexy performances. The question is whether his gifts can overcome his rep as a hard-case—a rude womanizer and, by all accounts, a balky guy on a movie set.

That question may be answered on Oscar Night, when his main competition for Best Actor will be genial, witty, accomplished Tom Hanks—the anti-Crowe. He carried the desert-island drama Cast Away alone on his sunburned shoulders. And he would win, if winning hadn't become such a habit for him (two Oscars and four nominations in seven years). Tom must be running out of mantel space. Will the Academy take a vacation from Hanks, and take a fling with the Wild Man from New Zealand?

Back in the 1930s, at the apex of studio power, it was said that moguls commanded their thousands of employees (virtually every actor, director and technician was under studio contract) to vote for the company's favored films. That doesn't happen any more, but Oscar bettors should still know which studio released a nominated movie. Especially if that studio is Miramax Films.

This boutique outfit, based in New York City, has won a Best Picture nomination an amazing nine years in a row (two in 1998); the runner-up studio for consecutive years is DreamWorks, with three. Miramax films snared the top prize in two of the past four years: The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love. Now comes Chocolat, an English-language movie with a French accent and a Swedish director (Lasse Hallstrom), a negligible film whose greatest asset is its studio logo.

Chocolat is the story of a smug, sleepy town invaded by a charismatic outsider who feeds the villagers sweets and makes them do crazy things. To speak metaphorically, the town is Los Angeles; the outsider is Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein; and what could be nuttier than voting Chocolat a nomination for the year's best film? The movie is at best a trifle, and at most a tribute to Weinstein, a man who knows that Hollywood is the art of the sell. He can feed the Academy voters anything and have them say Mmm-mmm, good!

It's possible that Chocolat touched the soft center of Oscar's heart. And who are we to dismiss any movie with an appearance by the heartthrob of two millennia, Johnny Depp? Still, we suspect that inclusion of the film testifies only to the Academy members' belief that each year attention must be paid to a Miramax film, of whatever quality or heft. It's like tithing.

Chocolat won't win the top prize, but it may snag a Best Supporting Actress award for Judi Dench, who has been nominated three of the past four years and won for her cameo as Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love, especially since the two strongest competitors, Kate Hudson and Frances McDormand, are from a shared film—as mother and muse, respectively, in the Age of Rock memoir Almost Famous.

This year, Soderbergh became the first person in Academy history to receive two Best Director nominations for films that were nominated for Best Picture. Both are social-problem films: Erin Brockovich is about poisoned water (and colorful brassieres), Traffic deals with the drug trade between Mexico and the U.S.

Oscar handicappers are already debating whether one Soderbergh film will cancel out the other—or reinforce it. The betting is that Traffic, as the more recent film, and far more ambitious, has a swell shot at the top spot. What's guaranteed is that Erin will get at least one award: a Best Actress statuette for Julia Roberts' showy, blowsy, smug, applause-truckling, wildly self-aggrandizing performance (which, by the way, we didn't much care for). Roberts will beat out the estimable Laura Linney, who won critics' prizes as the single mom in the indie drama You Can Count on Me.

Traffic is also likely to get an acting Oscar: Benicio Del Toro for Best Supporting Actor. Del Toro, who plays a conflicted Mexican cop who trails a case to California, will defeat Willem Dafoe, as a poignantly funny man-bat in Shadow of the Vampire, and Joaquin Phoenix, whose performance as the envious Roman aristocrat in Gladiator will get him bigger roles but not an Oscar, yet. Del Toro has three arguments in his favor. One: he's quite good in the film. Two: he's the hottie du jour, sleepily sensual and muy macho, with a touch of the Method. Three: he's the standard bearer for a dozen or so superb actors in Traffic; Del Toro was the only one nominated.

While one man (Soderdergh) was nominated for two films, one film (Crouching Tiger) was nominated as Best Film twice—once in the main category, the other in the Foreign Language Film niche. Ang Lee's Mandarin masterpiece of martial artistry (officially a Taiwanese entry) will win the "lesser" prize, the one in which films from every country but the U.S. compete as equal. The movie is something of a critical and popular phenomenon in North America; it is already the all-time top-grossing foreign language film, with $60 million in the till so far and hopes of reaching $100 million.

But Crouching Tiger's list of challengers could be burlier. Among the films submitted by their home industries but not selected for the top five slots by the Academy screening committee were some highly esteemed works: Hong Kong's In the Mood for Love, Iran's A Time for Drunken Horses, South Korea's Chunhyang, Sweden's Songs from the Second Floor and Thailand's 6ixtynin9. In their place are the Czech Republic's Divided We Fall (a barren couple named Mary and Joseph take in a Jewish refugee during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia) and Mexico's Amores Parros/Life's a Bitch (a car crash brings together five people from radically different backgrounds; sounds as if it should be called Traffic). But life will be a bitch only for the four runners-up. The Croucher will stand tall here.

Winning Best Picture will be tougher. No foreign-language film has ever done it —though it would be nice to think that, once every 73 years, the Academy could acknowledge that the year's best film was in a language other than English. It also received no nominations in the acting categories, but that omission didn't stop Braveheart or The Last Emperor from winning Best Picture. More important, Crouching Tiger fulfills every Academy mandate for epic entertainment: a big story, beautiful stars, sweeping vistas (it's got as much desert as Lawrence of Arabia and more forests than Gump), strong roles for women in a time when those are both a rarity and a plus. One other thing: it has some of the most enthralling scenes of motion and emotion ever put on film.

Alas for its fans, most of the movie's assets are also possessed by Gladiator, which is in English. The arguments for Ang Lee's Chinese film reinforce the ones for Ridley Scott's Anglo-American one. Traffic could best them both, if the Academy wants to reward modern, jagged, serious entertainment. But if the members are thinking old and epic, it will probably be old West (ancient Rome), not old East (Qing dynasty). In other words: if the winner can be Crouching Tiger, it will be Gladiator.

The one thing we're sure of is our own opinion in this year's Oscar horse race. If Glad wins, we'll crouch. If Crouch wins, we'll be glad.