Russell Baillie: Oscars could be battle of the epics

COMMENT

What to make of Peter Jackson's Bafta wins yesterday? Not so much his win for best picture, but his loss - Oscar rival Peter Weir taking the best director prize for Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

Weir is Australian and his leading man was Russell Crowe - who wasn't nominated and is unlikely to ever darken the Bafta podium again after that business with the BBC producer two years ago - in a film about serving in the Royal Navy.

The British prize might be explained by the sort of thinking which had Ricky Gervais telling his American Golden Globe audience last month:"I'm from a little place called England. We used to run the world before you."

But it also suggests that the 19th-century naval epic could be even closer competition than first thought for Return of the King among Oscar voters.

The nautical epic took four Baftas from its seven nominations.

Return of the King took four out of 12 and added a fifth with its win in the public-vote most popular category.

In the Oscars, King has 11 nominations and Master has 10, with both figuring in best picture and best director categories but with no acting nods.

What was apparent from the two films' wins yesterday was that Bafta voters tended to vote for Master (and a few others) in those technical categories where it could be argued the King nominees' work couldn't really be separated from the earlier films in the trilogy.

A theory on the Bafta vote: Jackson got his just reward for best picture but his work as director can't be separated from the other two films.

He already has a best director Bafta for Fellowship of the Ring, which also won best picture in 2002.

As well, in the categories of production design, costume design, make-up and hair, either Master or its high-seas comedy cohort Pirates of the Caribbean pipped the Lord of the Rings crafts people.

The Return of the King did win the best special effects prize.

But the competition in the category wasn't that strong and the scale of those in the final of the trilogy is markedly higher than the previous two.

It must have been especially satisfying for Jackson and his co-writers, partner Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens, to finally take home a major prize for their adapted screenplay. A third of it at least.

But if the Oscar voters are of a similar mindset to members of the British Academy, then it could well be that The Return of the King wins best picture without sweeping the board.

Or that a picture starring a New Zealand-born actor - funnily enough another sailing Russell - pips Jackson's trilogy at the finishing line.