The top headlines made by the 74th Academy Awards, hosted by Whoopi Goldberg on Mar. 4, 2002, were that Denzel Washington had joined Sidney Poitier as the only Black winners of the Best Actor prize (for Training Day), and that Halle Berry had become the first Black woman to take home Best Actress (for Monster’s Ball). Those historic successes, consequently, helped overshadow one of the most wrongheaded outcomes in the production’s history—which also, in a strange twist, gave birth to one of its most touching moments.
Going into the show, the frontrunner was ostensibly The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the first installment in Peter Jackson’s fantasy trilogy, which netted a pack-leading 13 nominations. It would net four statuettes (including for cinematography), but Best Picture would have to wait until The Lord of the Rings; The Return of the King.
Instead, the evening largely belonged to A Beautiful Mind, whose eight nominations were tied for second-most with Moulin Rouge!, and whose true-life tale of unlikely triumph in the face of hardship—concerning Nobel Laureate mathematician John Nash (Russell Crowe), who suffered from schizophrenic delusions—proved to be catnip for voters. The film won four trophies: for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay (Akiva Goldsman), Best Supporting Actress (Jennifer Connelly) and Best Director (Ron Howard).
A Beautiful Mind was a middling prestige drama in 2001 and its reputation hasn’t improved with age. Yet it’s the last of those four victories that, at the time, felt so egregious. A lifelong Hollywood veteran, Howard was, and remains, a sturdy craftsman capable of handling a wide variety of gargantuan and intimate films, and Best Director was the type of career-accomplishment accolade the Academy loves to give out to favorite sons and daughters.
That practice, however clumsy, is long-standing and far from intolerable; better, after all, to have the medium’s titans receive an award at some point rather than never at all. What was objectionable, though, was that Howard came out on top in a year in which he was clearly the worst of the five candidates in the running—and to such a degree that, in the telecast’s highlight, two of his fellow legendary nominees had to console themselves over their loss.
Howard’s work on A Beautiful Mind wasn’t the equal of Ridley Scott’s on Black Hawk Down or Jackson’s on The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and it was demonstrably inferior to Robert Altman’s on Gosford Park and David Lynch’s on Mulholland Drive. In particular, the latter two are highlights of their director’s respective canons (Lynch’s film may be the best film of the 21st century), and Howard’s win thus couldn’t help but elicit considerable groans from cinephiles.
It also disappointed both Altman and Lynch, two legitimate giants of the medium, who were in attendance that evening—and when the camera cut to them in the aftermath of their defeat, it caught a brief but unforgettable glimpse of the duo comforting each other with a hug.
Both of them iconoclasts who were/are most comfortable operating outside the system, Altman and Lynch’s smiles are the sort that mask resignation, although they also appear to express love and admiration for each other. Their fleeting interaction comes across as a candid snapshot of two auteurs who recognize that, though they’ve been let inside Hollywood’s (figurative and literal) doors, they’ll remain forever outsiders, especially when pitted against the likes of a middle-of-the-road mainstream golden child like Howard. It’s a three-second vision of solidarity that resounds with warmth, sorrow, understanding, and grace, and it’s made all the more poignant by the fact that neither great ever took home a competitive Oscar.
The Academy, per tradition, hopelessly bungled the Best Director category that night—and Lynch and Altman’s embrace remains an enduring reminder that the awards body rarely knows true artistry when it sees it.
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