Sideways
Voters were once again faced with a couple of worthy biopics in 2005, as Martin Scorsese’s glossy The Aviator and Taylor Hackford’s Ray jostled for attention. They seemed to cancel each other out in the end; Million Dollar Baby walked away with Best Picture and a slew of other awards that congratulated Clint Eastwood and co. on a job well done in bringing their depressing sports drama to the screen. Yet, the project that lost out the most that year was Sideways, a movie packed with sharp dialogue and unlikable characters that proved too divisive for some but has actually stood the test of time.
Over two decades later, I reckon that general audiences are better at coping with unlikable characters in their comedies, but Sideways was released in a pre-Breaking Bad, pre-Succession world. A couple of selfish, immature men going on a road trip through wine country would easily be an 8-episode HBO series these days. We wouldn’t be able to get enough of Miles and Jack’s nonsense! And we would still not be drinking any fuckin Merlot.
Brokeback Mountain
Welp, we’ve hit what I consider to be “the big one” on this particular list. A travesty so wild that people were justifiably yelling about it for years. After winning Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director awards, Ang Lee’s incredible Brokeback Mountain seemed sure to grab Best Picture, too. And then it didn’t. To a gasp heard around the world, Crash won instead. Not the David Cronenberg car sex movie, of course. No, that would have been cool (if belated.) The heavy-handed and reductive Paul Haggis ensemble flick.
Look, maybe you love Crash. I’ve never met someone who does, but I guess anything’s possible. But Brokeback Mountain is not just one of the best films of the 2000s, or of the 21st century. It’s one of the best films of all time. It’s so good that you can even forget Randy Quaid is in it. What the hell were they thinking that year? Sweet lord.
Little Miss Sunshine
I know deep down in my heart and bowels that I’m about to make some people very cross, but I have to follow my own truth on this one: The Departed isn’t close to being the best Martin Scorsese movie. I mean, he’s made some great ones, hasn’t he? Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, After Hours. I could go on. It’s not that I don’t think a Scorsese movie should have won Best Picture. I just don’t think this should have been the one. The Departed is… fine. It’s fine. But it’s a remake of a better Chinese movie, and I stand by that. Andy Lau and Tony Leung are phenomenal in Infernal Affairs, a benchmark of Hong Kong crime cinema that is much more tightly paced than Scorsese’s less subtle, tonally messier version of the story.
The idea of a dark indie comedy going toe-to-toe with The Departed tickles me, even now. Little Miss Sunshine is such a strong ensemble movie, featuring a standout performance by Paul Dano (stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Tarantino) that hits deep in a way that Scorsese’s star-studded crime drama just doesn’t. Was it the “best” film of the year? Debatable, but the only movie that could have beaten Little Miss Sunshine in terms of awards contenders for me was Pan’s Labyrinth, which didn’t get nominated for Best Picture. So here we are.
