The Supporting Actress Smackdown of 2005 is just a week away so get your votes in! Before we get there it's time for more context of that year in showbiz history. Ready?
Great Big Box Office Hits:
Franchises of multiple kinds dominated the box office with Harry Potter 4, Star Wars Episode 3, and the launches of Chronicles of Narnia and Chris Nolan's Batman trilogy as half of the top ten list that year. Other huge hits were the romantic comedy Hitch, the Brangelina pairing of Mr & Mrs Smith, the remakes Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, War of the Worlds, and King Kong, and the comedies Wedding Crashers and Meet the Fockers.
Oscar's Best Picture Nominees:
In the mid-Aughts the Oscars were veering away from big hits in their Best Picture lineups (to eventually rule-changing results) but Brokeback Mountain was the most successful of the lot with $178 million globally...
Sadly and infamously it lost the Oscar to Crash which was weirdly regularly painted in the media as the "popular" movie, despite it being literally half as successful as Brokeback at the box office, both domestically and abroad. Munich, like Crash, was a modest hit. The other nominees, Capote and Good Night and Good Luck, were more critical darlings than popular.
But what would have been nominated in a ten-wide Best Picture field?
The biopics Walk the Line (5 nominations) and Cinderella Man (3 nominations) would likely have made it as they were both hits from Oscar's favourite genre and both received the key Film Editing nomination. The Constant Gardener (4 nominations) also received an Editing nod (Editing usually hews much closer to Best Picture than it did that particular annum). But after those three it's a lot harder to read. What would have been the final two nominees? Memoirs of a Geisha received 6 nominations and King Kong 4 but neither of them scored in any of the 'big eight' categories. Pride & Prejudice was beautifully rendered and nabbed 4 nominations but people didn't seem to appreciate it as much back then as they should have. A History of Violence and Hustle & Flow were both critical darlings that received two nominations but they were quite edgy for AMPAS at the time in one of that organization's stuffiest decades. Woody Allen's Match Point had comeback buzz but only received 1 nomination... was it running 6th-7th place in Supporting Actress and Director (?) and, if so, maybe Best Picture wasn't so far off? March of the Penguins was a huge populist hit... but no documentary has ever been up for Best Picture even in expanded field years.
WHICH FILMS DO YOU THINK IT WOULD HAVE BEEN?
Films That Endured (in some way) That Were Neither Oscar Nominees Nor Blockbusters:
2005 is too recent to play this particular game. Films that might eventually qualify for staying power include The 40 Year Old Virgin, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and the documentary Grizzly Man. If you're accounting for foreign titles Kung Fu Hustle and 2046 are arguably the key titles (at the moment at least... but who knows what another 10 years will do to perceptions of this film year).
Nathaniel's Top Ten of 2005
- Brokeback Mountain
- A History of Violence
- Pride & Prejudice
- Caché
- Me and You and Everyone We Know
- The New World
- Wallace & Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit
- Kings and Queen
- Brothers
- Good Night, and Good Luck.
The last title there was up higher in its year but I barely remember anything about it (!) A rewatch is surely necessary. On the other hand a recent screening of Capote suggests I greatly underestimated it in 2005.
Magazine Covers for Context...
(You can click to enlarge)
Frequent cover stars were Jessica Alba, Scarlett Johansson, Kanye West, 50 Cent, Reese Witherspoon, Vince Vaugh, Nicole Kidman, Tom Brady, Charlize Theron, various Desperate Housewives and Lost and Star Wars stars. Magazines were obsessed with celebrity couplings including Renée Zellwegger's shortlived nuptials, Tom Cruise & Katie Holmes noisy romance, and most consistently for the entire year, the Jennifer Aniston / Brad Pitt/ Angelina Jolie triangle and fallout.
Mix Tape (Select Hits of '05):
"We Belong Together" by Mariah Carey was the best-selling single of the year. Other key hits included "Hollaback Girl" by Gwen Stefani, "Mr Brightside" by the Killers, "Since U Been Gone" (and basically everything else) by Kelly Clarkson, "Gold Digger" by Kanye, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" by Green Day, "Hung Up" by Madonna, "Don't Cha" by the Pussycat Dolls, "Candy Shop" by 50 Cent, "My Humps" by The Black Eyed Peas, "Fix You" by Coldplay, "You're Beautiful" by James Blunt, and "Lose Control" by Missy Elliott.
TV: Departing Everybody Loves Raymond and arriving Lost won the top Emmy Awards though a good deal of the television buzz that year centered around huge freshman hit Desperate Housewives which became the second series (after Golden Girls in the 1980s) to nab three leading actress nominations in a single year. The lead acting prizes went to Tony Shalhoub (Monk), Felicity Huffman (Desperate Housewives), James Spader (Boston Legal), Patricia Arquette (Medium), Geoffrey Rush (The Life and Death of Peter Sellers), and S Epatha Merkerson (Lackawanna Blues). Also premiering that year but too late for those particular Emmy Awards were Grey's Anatomy (which never left the air thereafter), Weeds (Showtime), Kathy Griffin My Life on the D List (Bravo), The Colbert Report (Comedy Central), and Dancing with the Stars (ABC).
Ending their television runs in 2005 were two-time Emmy champ Everybody Loves Raymond, former Emmy champ NYPD Blue, HBO's expensive flop Carnivale, and their much beloved family drama hit Six Feet Under.
Literature: Playwright Harold Pinter won the Nobel for his body of work. Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell won the Hugo. New buzzy books or best-sellers included Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, Zadie Smith's On Beauty, Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief, David McCullough's 1776, John Grogan's Marley & Me, and Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Stage: Doubt (which won the Pulitzer for Drama) and Spamalot! won Best Play and Best Musical respectively at the Tony Awards. The also-rans in the top categories were clearly the excellent Pillowman (which won 2 Tonys) and the transcendent Light in the Piazza (which won 6 Tonys and should have taken the top prize, too).
Showtunes to Go:
Here's Sara Ramirez singing the best song from Spamalot! "Whatever Happened to My Part?"
It might as well double as the anthem of all actors who have so much more to show then their careers and roles often let them. To think Sara became a Tony winning star singing this and then never got cast in a movie musical and instead spent the next decade plus on Grey's Anatomy.