Oscar Pre-Mortem.(predictions for the Academy Awards)

Often as I have commented on the stupidity of the Academy Awards, a periodic swift kick still seems indicated. This year, as every year, the nominations are food for vituperation. Perhaps, when Oscar Night rolls around, this column will help you laugh, lament, or conceivably even nod in approval with me. In such categories as Makeup or Sound, the choices may manage to be sound. For the others, I am less hopeful.

As you may recall, members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a whole vote only on Best Picture; on Best Foreign Picture only if they deigned to bestir themselves to catch such non-Hollywood products and signed the register. In other categories, it is only the practitioners who get to vote-directors on directing, actors on acting, cinematographers on cinematography, etc.-which strikes me as highly debatable: Wouldn't directors' votes on actors be just as valid as actors'?

But the biggest problem arises when a foreign film gets nominated in a category such as Art Direction, as this year, when Jean Rabasse has been recognized for his splendid work in Vatel. Chances are that few Hollywood art directors caught this film, and that even fewer can rise above chauvinism in the voting. That Harvey Weinstein of Miramax, as is his wont, re-edited the film-a euphemism for chopping it to bits-does not help its chances either.

In any case, the Academy's current nominations in the major categories leave much to be desired. For Best Picture, the nominees are the agreeable but bland Chocolat, which Miramax has been pushing with lavish hype (never underestimate the honey of freebees); Erin Brockovich, a good enough movie by current American standards; Gladiator, an overblown Roman epic in the hallowed De Mille tradition (twelve nominations!); Traffic, a not uninteresting movie about the drug war in Mexico and the U.S., derived from a British TV series; and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (ten nominations), which I hitherto avoided, but must now reluctantly advert to.

A Taiwanese, Chinese-language movie directed by Ang Lee (who gave us, among others, Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm), it is based on a Chinese novel adapted by two Chinese screenwriters and the American James Schamus. An amalgam of kung fu and magic realism, it is a marriage made in hell. Of all literary genres, I find magic realism the hardest to underrate; of all film genres, kung fu.

The story about a quasi-magic sword and quasi-human heroes and villains fighting over it-actually one hero, two heroines, plus one villainess who also dispenses poisoned darts-is just good enough for children, though it may not be bloody enough for them. The dialogue is not worth mentioning, and people corkscrewing vertically into the air or running up walls, or else jumping from building to building in what is more flying than leaping, does not make my heart leap up.

Not much chance for acting from the film's stick figures, but Zhang Ziyi, the ingenue, is pretty. There are striking landscapes and lavish interiors, expertly shot by Peter Pau. Otherwise, this is hardly deserving of the rare honor of a foreign film being nominated for Best Picture, even if the last time this happened, the picture-Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful-was even worse.