Word: babel
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...Babel The Departed Letters from Iwo Jima Little Miss Sunshine The Queen...
...meant the producers). Iwo Jima slipped into the Dreamgirls slot. Only The Departed is an old-fashioned studio movie. Iwo Jima, released by Warner Bros., was made for a miniaturized $15 million. The other three entries were sponsored by the art-house subsidiaries of major companies: Paramount Vantage for Babel, Fox Searchlight for Sunshine, Disney's (not the Weinstein brothers') Miramax for The Queen. This verifies the trend last year, when four of the films nominated for Best Picture were "indies...
...Similarly, the list includes only one solid, medium-budget hit: The Departed, which has taken in more than a quarter-billion dollars worldwide. Among the more specialized fare, Babel, with its complicated structure and polylingual perversity, has totaled only about $24 million in North America but nearly $40 million abroad. Little Miss Sunshine, made for just $8 million, has grossed nearly $60 million at home and $30 million abroad; that's the kind of arithmetic that gets cheers from the Academy (and from Hollywood). The Queen couldn't have cost much more than Sunshine, and it has earned $72 million...
...what about the five films that were named finalists? The list includes many worthy films, no flat-out masterpieces. Each movie has a "yes, but" rider attached. We've already touched on the Iwo Jima problem. Babel? Grand and sprawling, but maybe too sprawling, and it still hasn't connected with American audiences. The Departed? All-star, well-made, but a gangster movie, and a remake - of the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs. (If you're wondering what the last famous film of its type was, and how many Oscars it received, the answers are Scarface and none.) Little Miss...
...thought all along was that Babel's toughest fight, like Crash's last year, would be to get nominated. Now that it has made the final five, it stands a decent chance of winning. So, even though former muscle-man Arnold Schwarzenegger pronounced it " Bar-bell" at last week's Golden Globes, the movie is now a smart-money long shot for the top prize. It could be the first time the Best Picture award went to a film that is mostly not in English, except for Rocky...