Dude's Future? On Web, He Could Look Up Mitchum
By Marc Santora
February 12, 2003

Benjamin Curtis, 22, an aspiring actor, is famous as the guy from the Dell computer commercials who says, "Dude, you're gettin' a Dell!"

Let's recap: Mr. Curtis was arrested on February 9 for attempting to buy marijuana and was charged only with possession. He plans to focus on his acting and wants to outgrow the Dell Dude image. Now, what's the Mitchum connection?

...when Mr. Curtis was arrested..., the two actors were wed by weed.

History lesson: Mitchum was arrested in 1948 for marijuana possession. This happened while "attending a party at the home of a Hollywood starlet, Lila Leeds..." According to Marc Santora, "the involvement of Ms. Leeds lent a whiff of the indiscreet," since Mitchum was married at the time. This was no aspiring actor being arrested, though: "Mitchum was 31 and already well established at the time of his arrest, having been nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actor for his role in The Story of G.I. Joe in 1945."

When Mr. Santora asked David Thomson whether Mr. Curtis' brush with the police would "doom the Dell dude," he replied in the negative, but also offered the caveat that all rests now on his follow-up: "he is obviously going to have to do a lot more than go to prison, or at least go to prison for something a lot more substantial, to find his way into our hearts."

My initial reaction after finding about the arrest was that the dude would at least get some "street cred," but now I'm getting second thoughts about that. After all, who isn't doing pot these days?

Why Isn't Talk to Her Nominated for the Foreign-Language Oscar?
By June Thomas
February 11, 2003

Not only Talk to Her; as I pointed out earlier, Y Tu Mamá También was also left out of the competition in the Foreign Language category. (A sad situation, if you ask me. It would have snared Mexico its latest Oscar since... well, Mexico has never won, so that would make it since always.) So why didn't they make the cut?

Because they weren't submitted for nomination. Each country can only enter one film into the best foreign-language film competition, and this year the Spanish nominating committee gave the nod to Mondays in the Sun, a gritty drama about unemployment. Y Tu Mamá También is ineligible because its June 2001 Mexican premiere was too early to qualify for this year's foreign-language Oscar competition, but its U.S. release date of March 2002 makes it eligible for consideration in all other categories.

Well, at least they were nominated elsewhere. But all this talk about "nominating committees" and original premiere dates only showcases all the red tape behind an Academy Award nod. (Lorenza Muñoz summed it better in the title of her recent LA Times article Bewildering Foreign Policy.) Still, if you want to play the game, you have to stick to the rules. And who would deny the Oscars are just another game?

Why Is Gangs of New York Nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar?
By Julia Turner
February 12, 2003

Interesting... I would have thought that, being nominally "suggested" by Herbert Asbury's book, this movie should have been filed under "Adapted Screenplay." As it turns out, Gangs was added to the Original Screenplay nominations since the Academy determined that most of the screenplay was an original creation of the writers.

[Jay Cocks, one of film's three credited writers] says Asbury's book, which [he] and Scorcese discovered in the late '70s, served primarily as an introduction to the history of the draft riots. The writers borrowed only a few particularly pungent gang names (including the Dead Rabbits and the Plug Uglies), the sketchy outlines of two key characters (Bill the Butcher and Monk McGinn), and Asbury's "great title" from the book. The rest, he says, was original, with guidance from about 50 historical sources.

Maybe this explains why, despite being as wildly divergent from its original source as it was, Adaptation was lumped with all the other, uh, adaptations nominated this year.