oscar run xvi: troy (wolfgang petersen, 2004)

The Affair of the Necklace. 102 Dalmatians. Angels & Insects. Maverick. A Handful of Dust. How many of these films do you remember watching? How many of them do you remember at all? I saw one of them, myself, and have heard of almost all of the others. It's not exactly a list of memorable classic films, though, is it?

These are all films of the past several years that garnered one and only one Oscar nomination, for Best Costume Design. They are proof that there are better ways to find good movies than to obsessively watch all the Oscar nominees.

Troy has been nominated for an Oscar this year. For Best Costume Design. It's worse than Maverick. And it's 2 hours and 43 minutes long. Two hours and 43 minutes of my life that I won't have back.

Comments

[Charlie Bertsch]

And to think that Kim and I really enjoyed. One's discernment must go soft out here in the desert.

[Steven]

I felt like I was watching a bad 50s sword-and-sandals epic, and I didn't care much for the originals. My ratings on a scale of ten:

Spartacus: 10
Gladiator: 6
Troy: 4

[Charlie Bertsch]

Ahh, I see. We like that sort of epic. We liked Troy because it was over-the-top in precisely that 50s sword-and-sandal epic way.

[Steven]

There's no arguing with subjective responses ... you guys liked it, I didn't, those are statements of fact. I don't agree that Troy was over the top ... Brad Pitt, for instance, has been over the top in movies like 12 Monkeys and Snatch, but there's none of that lunacy here, and while Troy is perhaps more obvious about its homoeroticism than its 50s' counterparts, it's still more sniggering than actual, or Achilles and Patroclus would have had sex on camera.

But, and my bad if I'm misreading what you're suggesting, there is to my mind a vast difference between the qualities of Spartacus and Troy. The latter will be remembered, if at all, for the pretty actors, and that's about it. Spartacus was a great movie when it was made, it's a great movie now, and it will be a great movie in the future. It's very much of its time, to be sure ... the liberal moralizing, the Red Scare undercurrents, its pussyfooting around the homosexuality. But the action scenes are clearly staged (not true of Troy), the screenplay is among the most intelligent of all the sword-and-sandal epics, and the acting? On the one hand you've got Peter O'Toole surrounded by pretty people and some bad actors (Diane Kruger gets to be both) ... on the other hand, you've got Kirk Douglas and Lawrence Olivier and Jean Simmons and Charles Laughton and Peter Ustinov (who won an Oscar for his performance) and Tony Curtis (who is fine despite his inappropriate accent).

Spartacus has its flaws, that perhaps show up more clearly with the distance time provides. Troy might have those kinds of flaws, too, but I dare say we'll never know, because 45 years from now, no one will be watching Troy, any more than people today watch Demetrius and the Gladiators. They'll still be watching Spartacus, though.