The Fantastic Oscars

Lord of the Rings will not will Best Picture tomorrow. History is against it. Consider some past Academy winners: Annie Hall, 1977; Deer Hunter, 1978; Kramer vs. Kramer, 1979; Ordinary People, 1980; Terms of Endearment, 1983; Unforgiven, 1992; The English Patient, 1996; American Beauty, 1999; and A Beautiful Mind, 2001. Now consider some famous Best Picture nominees who did not win the coveted statuette: Star Wars, 1977; Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981; The Fugitive, 1993, and, of course, Lord of the Rings, 2001, and Lord of the Rings, 2002. Which category do you think Lord of the Rings, 2003, fits into?

The Academy likes angst and suffering. It likes depictions of people caught in difficult circumstances who muddle by and survive somehow, but who do not typify a clear-cut or traditional moral lesson. It frowns upon simple (simplistic, it would say) depictions of, for example, loyalty, friendship, or heroism. Everything is tempered, qualified, equivocal—because this is, after all, the real world, and in the real world, relationships are equivocal. Lord of the Rings is a fantasy, and the traits shown by our heroes—Sam’s loyalty, Aragorn’s bravery, Arwen’s fidelity—are, indeed, fantastic in every sense of the word, and almost nowhere found except in fiction.

Lord of the Rings shows a world where virtue are lived, quests noble, wars just, friendships dependable, evil real, and good triumphant. I cannot think of a set of values more at odds with Hollywood, which frowns on them as “fantasy”. Hollywood does not mind taking flights of fancy when it shows romance or sex—Ada and Inman meet just a few times and yet spend years and endure more hardships than most of today’s divorcing couples just to be together again—but shrinks from engaging seriously with an aspiration to an enchanted world, to higher causes than ourselves, to virtues that elevate and ennoble, to anything and everything that Lord of the Rings celebrates.

It is precisely the courage in Lord of the Rings to depict such a world that at once challenges, inspires, and calls to us and simultaneously earns it the label “fantasy” and ensures that it will not take Oscar home. How sad that virtue has become fantasy, and fantasy scorned as low art. Few finer works of art have yet graced the screen, and Hollywood’s pretense otherwise is, truly, fantastic.