Will 2004 be Oscar year for Peter Jackson?

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

If you ever get the tour of Weta Workshop, make sure Richard Taylor is your guide. Not only is his booming enthusiasm for all the great stuff about the place infectious - in 10 minutes you've gazed into the amber eyes of Treebeard from Lord of the Rings, played Gulliver to a model sailing ship the size of a small car from Master and Commander, and poked at an eerily life-like dummy of Sam Neill from Perfect Strangers - Taylor will gladly show you his little golden friends.

They're both named Oscar and usually they sit in a glass cabinet on a small square of red carpet souvenired from outside the Academy Awards in 2002.

Taylor is happy to let guests handle the surprisingly heavy statuettes which still represent movie-making's highest honour. It's tempting to hoist the 3.8kg figures above your head in mock triumph and start thanking everyone you've ever met.

With other members of the LOTR production, Taylor has his name on two - for best visual effects and best make-up for the first film in the trilogy, The Fellowship of the Rings. The first film had four wins from 13 nominations, the second, The Two Towers, two from six. Both were nominated for best picture. But both times, the trilogy has only triumphed in the technical categories.

Peter Jackson has had his name on nominations four times - in his various roles as director, screenwriter and producer - but not yet had a reason to leave his seat in Los Angeles' Kodak Theatre.

Now as the finale arrives, so does the question: Can Jackson, along with his co-producers and co-writers which include partner Fran Walsh, get what many around the world see as his due?

You might think that would depend on the The Return of the King being a good film. Given the track records of its predecessors, that seems likely.

And this one would seem to have some other advantages - bigger battles, familiar characters in all sorts of mortal peril and a triumphant and happy ending.

There has been much speculation stateside that the 2004 Oscar ceremony will be Jackson's year.

He has some other advantages. With the academy awards shifting a month earlier from its usual late-March slot to late February, studios have less time to woo voters. Effectively, Jackson has the tailwind of all three movies.

Ensuring that happens, the project's Hollywood backers New Line Cinema started its Oscar campaign for Return of the King about the time it was clear The Two Towers wasn't going to be a frontrunner.

Last March the company hired Allan Mayer, the head of the entertainment division of Sitrick and Co, an American public relations firm which specialises in crisis management as a consultant.

Mayer worked as a troubleshooter on the campaign for A Beautiful Mind which won best picture among other awards a year ago despite controversy that it had sanitized the life of its subject, mathematician John Forbes Nash, and the backlash against its star Russell Crowe's behaviour towards a BBC producer at the earlier BAFTA awards.

New Line, which established itself on the Nightmare on Elm St series and other less-than-Oscar-worthy fare, would see a best picture award as vindication of the giant gamble it made to back Jackson making the three films simultaneously in faraway New Zealand.

Said Mayer in an interview earlier this year: "For a lot of studios, Oscar nominations have a huge economic importance. And for New Line, it's a big issue of pride - they bet the company on this movie."

However, in next year's Oscar race Jackson and his final movie face the usual drawbacks. It might be a successful adaptation of a hefty tome, but is a fantasy epic full of special effects and short on A-list stars. The biggest voting block in the Academy is actors, who tend to prefer films with big performances, not big films with small heroes.

Jackson isn't American, nor a sometime or former actor, which can help if you're up for best director - as Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson, and Ron Howard know.

Jackson is also someone who takes what he needs from Hollywood - like his gorilla-sized $34 million plus salary package for next film, a remake of King Kong - without feeling the need to be part of the place. And maybe the beard helps, but the perception of Jackson is that he's akin to the likes of Steven Spielberg or George Lucas - big screen populists whose box office tallies will always be inversely proportional to their Oscar counts.

Then there's the 2004 competition. The Return of the King won't be the only epic with literary credentials in likely contention. Likely nominees include Anthony Minghella's American Civil War drama Cold Mountain, Peter Weir's Russell Crowe-starring sea battle tale Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and Ed Zwick's Tom Cruise-starring, Taranaki-filmed The Last Samurai.

The strongest competition for best director might come from Clint Eastwood - his Mystic River is getting great reviews for its performances and he's a sentimental Hollywood favourite.

Winning an Oscar won't make Jackson a better film maker. But for stuffing himself into a tuxedo and turning up three years in a row, surely he deserves something ...


* It's a Lord of the Rings weekend at nzherald.co.nz. Join us throughout this weekend for updates from Wellington as the city prepares to host Monday's world premiere of Part 3 in the Rings trilogy: The Return of the King.

Herald Feature: Lord of the Rings

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