Saw "A Beatiful Mind" last night. Yeah, I gave in. People who I know who wouldn't have been into the movie still said it was a good movie. So I saw it.

And you know what? While it was a little better than I expected, it was still just Oscar Bait. Lots of crying, lots of emotional scenes, and lots of big dramatic music. Not to mention the always important speech at the end. There's always gotta be a speech. It's your prototypical big Hollywood Oscar flick- dramatic, well acted and told, but never moving into anything beyond that. Yeah, the scenes of John Nash and his paranoid fantasies were kind of cool and well done, but I couldn't help thinking about how much cooler it could have been. Like the movie needed a little touch of Lynchian surrealism. In fact, it would have been kind of cool if Ron Howard (who, actually, is a fine director and deserves the plaudits) handled all the normal, dramatic stuff, then handed it over to Lynch for the dream stuff? Or David Fincher, the guy who did "Fight Club?" That's what all those big Oscar movies lack, a hint of edginess. This movie could have been totally whacked out in bits, but never did because, well, it's an Oscar Bait movie.

In that way, it kind of reminded me of "Saving Private Ryan." "Ryan" was very well done in terms of straighforward, old fashioned, Hollywood movie making. In fact it was brilliant in that capacity, but the movie would have been so much better if it had just a twinge of Coppola's "Apocolypse Now" bad trip grooviness. But Spielberg just doesn't do that and so the movie just never quite took off. Put it another way, in ten years, people are still going to be talking about "Apococylpse Now" in revered tones. It'll still be a movie every college student will still watch after smoking half an eighth of kind green, convinced that somewhere in the movie lies the Meaning of Life. "Private Ryan," meanwhile, will be nothing more than a movie that gets trotted out on tv every Memorial Day as a movie we're supposed to watch because we're supposed to. In ten years, "Saving Private Ryan" will be seen as nothing more than a huge civics lesson.

Anyways, "A Beautiful Mind" is probably gonna take home a barrel full of Oscars. It's got Best Picture Winner all over it (see rule about uplifting movies about man overcoming handicaps always winning an Oscar. Which is fine, I guess, but not my favorite movie of the year. And Russell Crowe is damn good and will probably win for best Actor and probably deserves it. Crowe somehow manages to make you forget that he's a big, hunky Australian dude but instead a meek, fucked up, crazed out mathematician (albeit one with a lot more muscles than most). Which'll actually be a shame because then he'll win it two years in a row when there's no way in hell he should of won it for "Gladiator" and the reason why, like Tom Hanks, he'll never win one again. And Jennifer Connelly will probably win because she does what every Best Actress does when they win the award- a lot of crying, throwing things and looking sad and determined. She shouldn't, though, because that's pretty much what her role is- to be a long suffering wife and to cry a lot and throw things. That's not really much great acting as it is crying on cue a lot. And she doesn't take her clothes off, either, so that's points against her.

As for Ron Howard, he'll probably win too. It's his first nomination, he's a good director, by all accounts a really nice guy and was Richie Cunningham. The fact that Richie Cunnigham could win an Oscar is almost amazing as the fact that someone on BH 9'er did. Almost makes me want to root for him. But just wondering, how much directing skill does it take to have people walk around constantly crying and what not? Is that any more challenging that someone who filmed a three and a half hour epic movie that's already got a die-hard fan base waiting to eat you alive for any sort of screw up? And is it harder to direct someone throwing a glass against the wall in a really emotional way or directing battle scenes featuring thousands of people, half of them dressed up like elves or Orcs. Not to mention having the main character be smaller than a dwarf and constantly have to do tricks to convey it. Not to mention filming a whole sequence in a mine feature thousands of computer generated goblins and a balrog? In other words, go Peter Jackson.