This week, in advance of the 2019 Oscars, Nick Davis is looking back at the Academy races of 20 years ago, spotlighting movies he’d never seen and what they teach us about those categories, then and now...

the surprise winner

Spotlight Movie: The Red Violin
One of the most exciting things that can happen on Oscar night is when a movie with no other nominations wins one of the “craft” or “technical” or “below-the-line” categories—three bad names for the races where very few contenders are celebrities. In a year like the current one, where the Best Picture nominees ran the table to a historic degree, and consuming most of the spots in every other race, we have even fewer prospects than usual to see this occur. I’d love to watch The Lighthouse win Cinematography or Ad Astra win Sound Mixing, both because they deserve these victories on merit and because it’s nice (but mostly false) to hope that Oscar voters make discerning judgments from category to category based on each discrete department of artistry.

The Red Violin’s Best Original Score trophy at the 1999 Oscars represented one of these glorious instances, and registered as a significant upset at the time...