What the Nominees Were: The Aviator, Finding Neverland, Million Dollar Baby, Ray, Sideways
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the most obvious one! For that matter, Mean Girls is a better movie than The Aviator.
What Did Win: Million Dollar Baby
How It’s Aged: It’s a good movie. Gruesome and unpleasant, but an excellent acting showcase for both Clint Eastwood and Hilary Swank.
How It’s Aged: It’s a good movie. Gruesome and unpleasant, but an excellent acting showcase for both Clint Eastwood and Hilary Swank.
What Should’ve Won: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
How Hard Was the Decision: Sideways is almost equally great, and it was very hard choosing between the two. But ultimately, I think Endless Sunshine might be my favorite of the 21st century, so I should certainly award it the prize for the best movie of 2004.
How Hard Was the Decision: Sideways is almost equally great, and it was very hard choosing between the two. But ultimately, I think Endless Sunshine might be my favorite of the 21st century, so I should certainly award it the prize for the best movie of 2004.
Director: Michel Gondry
Writer: Charlie Kaufman, from a story by Kaufman, Gondry and Pierre Bismuth
Writer: Charlie Kaufman, from a story by Kaufman, Gondry and Pierre Bismuth
Stars: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, Tom Wilkinson
The Story: Joel Barish pays a company called Lacuna to erase his memories of a painful relationship with a girl named Clementine, but in the middle of the process he starts to rebel and tries to flee the wave of annihilation making its way through his memories.
Any Nominations or Wins: Just two: It won Original Screenplay and lost Best Actress for Winslet. It’s insane that Carrey didn’t get a nomination. The Academy really hates him.
Why It Didn’t Win: Too weird, I guess? In a year full of weak nominations, the failure to nominate this movie has to be remembered among the Academy’s greatest marks of shame.
Why It Didn’t Win: Too weird, I guess? In a year full of weak nominations, the failure to nominate this movie has to be remembered among the Academy’s greatest marks of shame.
Why It Should Have Won:
- Michel Gondry won the right to direct this after making some brilliant music videos (check out “The Hardest Button to Button”) and he went afterwards on to make some very good movies (I’m a big fan of Be Kind Rewind) but nothing that matched this. The imagination that fueled the music videos is on display when he creates a giant table for grown-Carrey to hide beneath as he relives his small childhood.
- Why does the Academy hate Jim Carrey so much? He’s never gotten so much as a nomination despite deserving wins for The Truman Show and this. Is it because he got his start in such anti-intellectual fare as Ace Ventura, or is it a certain quality of guilelessness he can have that the Academy finds either disturbing or disingenuous? Either way, their bias is a mark against them, not him.
- Like Memento this is a puzzle box movie where you let out a big “Ah-ha!” when you figure out the order the scenes are happening in, realizing we begin with a flashforward, not a flashback. Some of Charlie Kaufman’s other scripts were too clever by half, but in this one he found the perfect balance of genuine emotion with mind-bending brilliance.
- Kaufman and Gondry pack the screen with dazzling imagination as the memories are deleted (starting with the spines of books), but there are also great visuals that have nothing to do with the deletions. As Taylor Swift would later realize, snow at the beach is always an arresting image.
- This may be the only chance I get to praise the always great Kirsten Dunst, who is both funny and heartbreaking here as an assistant with a crush on the head scientist, and who gets to deliver the title line, though she accidentally credits it to Pope Alexander, rather than Alexander Pope.
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