The 2003 Supporting Actress Smackdown is just 20 days away! If you're like "um... it's 2013" you should know that each month we look back at a particular Oscar race and debate it.
This month we're having a tenth anniversary party. For context before we get to the main event we're revisiting films. So far we've hit Finding Nemo, The Triplets of Belleville, The Fog of War, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Much Ado About Nothing, and Love Actually.
Let's meet our panelists for the main Supporting Actress event. They'll be sounding off soon enough on Renée, Holly, Marcia, Shohreh and Patty. For now we're asking them "What does 2003 mean to you?"
Guy Lodge
Johannesburg-born and London-based, Guy Lodge is a film critic for In Contention, Variety, The Observer, Time Out and anyone else who will listen. His book Jennifer Aniston: Her Glory, Her Struggle, Her Genius is awaiting completion and a remotely interested publisher. [Follow him on Twitter]
what 2003 means to me
a bittersweet transitional year for me: I turned 20 that February, which put me in a post-teenage funk of sorts, lost a close relative, and began making preparations to leave South Africa for good. So the film that defines it is, auspiciously if accidentally, the one I saw on my birthday. I'd wrangled free tickets to an Oscar preview of Far From Heaven: in Johannesburg, the chance to see a prestige release only three months after its US opening, as opposed to the usual nine, was quite a coup. It's a film about ending some things to begin others, which of course seemed way pertinent in my self-absorbed birthday melancholy. But the resonance, banal as it may or may not have been, sure lingered. It may be a 2002 film, but in my mind, that Connecticut russet is the colour of 2003.
Joe Reid
Joe is the entertainment editor at The Atlantic Wire, where he takes every opportunity to bring up the Oscars . He lives and loves and doesn't love in Brooklyn, New York, making him exactly the cliché you think he is. He thinks the trailer for The Hours is the second-greatest artistic achievement in history, behind only the film The Hours. [Follow him on Twitter]
what 2003 means to me
I got my first real post-collegiate job in 2003 and I was absolutely terrible at it, so the movies of the fall and winter of 2003 were a huge escape for me and stand out far more prominently in my mind than they should. I quit that job in January of '04 and promptly spent the next two weeks in a movie theater, watching all the Oscar-bait that had made it to Buffalo, in a series of double-features. In America and 21 Grams! Monster and The Station Agent! It was glorious.
Tim Robey
Tim has been reviewing films for the Daily Telegraph since 2000, alongside a few interviews and other bits and bobs. His writing is mostly here. His recommendations series is here. His twitter feed is here [Follow him on Twitter]
what 2003 means to me
2003 sticks out for me as the first year when I had lengthy online debates about the Oscar race. If you hunt around on the Telegraph site, these are actually archived, though I might hold off from supplying the link as it'll be a wee bit spoilery. To stay off anything we're going to be discussing, I was kind of only-just-OK with The Return of the King winning everything, even though I firmly believed (and still do) that it's the weakest of the trilogy. I just wished Master and Commander, way ahead of the pack, could have come out in a more propitious year: the only awards it ended up winning were the ones they somehow forgot to nominate RotK for (Cinematography and Sound Editing), which were the absolute least it deserved. I think I was wailing for weeks about Paul Bettany missing out on a Supporting Actor nomination, particularly when I couldn't see why any of the chosen five (Hounsou, Baldwin, Watanabe, Del Toro and, heaven help us, Robbins) were especially crying out for one. So it was a frustrating, near-miss kind of year: I couldn't totally get behind anything except the Charlize prize for Monster, and still wish Bill Murray had won.
Nick Davis
Nick is the author of the on-again, off-again, actress-obsessed website NicksFlickPicks, which he hopes is now on again. He is also a professor of film, English, and gender and sexuality studies at Northwestern University. [Follow him on Twitter]
what 2003 means to me
In cinematic terms, 2003 connotes for me a really wan roster of Hollywood releases, a really bad Cannes, and a really weird Oscars, featuring one super line-up in the acting races (the male leads) and three very puzzling ones. Granted, there wasn’t a lot to work with, given the paucity of great movies that weren’t documentaries, ’02 holdovers, or foreign imports well outside AMPAS’s tastes. Monster, Master and Commander, Spellbound, and The Weather Underground were easily my favorite movies to get nominations. Throw in Altman’s overlooked The Company, Campion’s unfairly maligned In the Cut, Linklater’s sweetly anarchic School of Rock, and Bob Dylan’s and Larry Charles’s deranged but appealing Masked and Anonymous, and I could basically chuck the rest of that year’s Oscar-eligible films.
Nathaniel R
Nathaniel is the founder of The Film Experience, a reknowned Oscar pundit, and the web's actressexual ringleader. Though he holds a BFA in illustration, he found his true calling when he started writing about the movies. [Follow him on Twitter but do not stalk him in New York City]
what 2003 means to me
Whenever I try to string my thoughts about this film year together it comes out nothing like the beautifully organic and rousing lighting of the beacons in Return of the King (best scene!) but closer to the shard-like grim incomprehensibility of 21 Grams, a film I quite loathe. I can't see this cinematic year clearly (I don't even remember The Barbarian Invasions which made my top ten list!) but I can hear it: Bill Murray's whisper, Daryl Hannah's whistling, Jude & Nicole's 'I will marry yeeeeew'ing, "A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow" but mostly the entire Kill Bill Vol 1. catfight between Black Mamba and Copperhead which my best friend still quotes incessantly ten years later. "your hair in a black stocking. And we have us a knife fight... When do you wanna die?!"
Brian Herrera (aka StinkyLulu)
Brian convened the first Supporting Actress Smackdown and hostessed more than thirty. He is a writer, teacher and scholar presently based in New Jersey, but forever rooted in New Mexico. [Follow him on Twitter]
what 2003 means to me
'StinkyLulu' was born in 2003. That was the year I started my first clumsy blog “StinkyLulu Sez” (appended to my earthlink email) to collect my haphazard thoughts on realitytv, movies and, well, pretty much whatever I could find to think about other than my own life. See, in 2003, I sorta skidded out of graduate school and into an existential panic. Thus finding myself at a serious personal and professional crossroads, what did I do? I went to the movies. All the time. Indeed, in 2003, I saw everything from 21 Grams to House of 1000 Corpses to Eddie Murphy's Haunted Mansion. Any movie flickering at any moviehouse within 50 miles? I saw it. And tallied it online. In a way, StinkyLulu’s 2003 debut kept me going (and not just to the movies). I often say, “StinkyLulu saved my life.” To which I might add, “And it all started in 2003.”
Your turn, readers...
What does 2003 Mean to You? And have you voted on this month's smackdown yet? Remember to send your ballots in... (here's how if you missed it)