Gladiator: In Print Page 2

Roman Holiday
By Ty Burr
Entertainment Weekly 11/24/00

Thanks to the brains and brawn of Russell Crowe, Gladiator is victorious on tape and DVD.

The first blood-and-sandals epic to hit the screen in decades, Gladiator feels as it itâs hewn from the same blocks of travertine marble that build the Colosseum; in a nod to the gigantism of both ancient Rome and modern Hollywood, the heroâs even named Maximus. Such massiveness flirts with decadence, of course, and any star given to preening could have pulled the whole enterprise into the pit. But Russell Crowe, dead-eyed and brusque, always seems vaguely annoyed to discover himself in a movie -- heâs heir to Mitchum in this -- and he carries Gladiator on his beefy shoulders as the Imperial general who comes back from the nearly dead to achieve fame and a qualified revenge as the meanest gladiatorial sumbitch in the Valley of the Tiber.

It could have played like a Very Special Halloween Edition s of Raw Is War, and, true, such supporting characters as the effete, evil Emperor (Joaquin Phoenix), his headstrong sister (Connie Nielson) and the crusty old warrior (Oliver Reed) are straight out of the Conan playbook. But director Ridley Scott bears down on spectacle and on history, and the result is like watching a dancing elephant: You're astounded-- elated, even -- that something some immense can move so nimbly.

Does it work on TV? Surprisingly, yes -- although this is the rare case where, for a first-time viewing experience the full-screen VHS version may be preferable to the extremely letterboxed visuals of the DVD. While the two-disc package offers such extras as a history of gladiatorial games, a diary by the young actor who plays the emperor -in-waiting, and cutting-room-floor outtakes that, for once, are as good as anything in the film, you may feel like you're watching the movie itself through a helmet. If you missed Gladiator in the theaters, go for the tape. If youâre picking up the DVD -- consider buying a bigger television.
Both versions: A

© Copyright Entertainment Weekly, 2000.

It's Just a Lust for Learning
New Woman magazine
(UK August 2000)

Gladiator is a great introduction to ancient history, apparently. So now you can feel much better about that second er, 'educational' trip to watch Russell Crowe get sweaty in leather.

Dr Paula James, Classics lecturer with the Open University and author of Teach Yourself Roman says our current favourite film has interesting lessons to teach us about history, sex symbols and death. So we asked her a few questions of pressing academic interest...

NW: Did gladiators really look as good as Russell Crowe?
PJ: There's graffiti written on the wall's of Pompeii that refer's to them as heart-throbs. Also, to survive death was a very sexy thing in Roman times.

NW: Where they allowed to marry?
PJ: Only free citizens were allowed to marry. Gladiators weren't free but didn't want for lovers. There's a rumour that the emperor Commodus [played by Joaquin Phoenix] was actually fathered by a Gladiator.

NW: Did they have names like Wolf and Hunter?
PJ: We don't know their names.

NW: Was anything worn under those skimpy tunics?
PJ: Gladiators tended to wear more than the slaves they slaughtered in the stadium. I'm Sure they would have worn some basic clothing arrangement under there.

NW: Could any bloke become a gladiator if he wanted to?
PJ: Some free men did choose to go to gladiator school, but mostly they were slaves or prisoners of war.

NW: Whiffy work - would they have got a post-match shower?
PJ: Yes. They had running water and advanced sewage systems so it's fair to say that gladiators took baths.

Okay, have Russell washed and brought to our tent!

(Thanks to Bernie)

Gladiator - the £70m eliminator
by Tim Cooper
The London Evening Standard (April 11, 2000)

After the success of Sam Mendes's American Beauty at the Oscars and Baftas, a new British film is already being tipped to dominate next year's movie awards. A month before its release in America, Ridley Scott's £70 million epic, The Gladiator, is being acclaimed as "this year's Titanic".

The lavish three-hour extravaganza from Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks studios, shot mainly on Malta, will not open here until August,[sic] but preview audiences have been lavishing praise upon it. Set in the third century AD, it uses computer generated special effects and 30,000 extras to recreate the days of the Roman Empire, with a specially-built colosseum - the scene of much action and gore.

Australian actor Russell Crowe stars as Maximus, a general stripped of his rank and sold into slavery by Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) who has murdered his own father, Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris). Maximus becomes a gladiator and returns to Rome to take revenge.

The movie also stars Derek Jacobi and Oliver Reed - who died during filming - in performances hailed as "magnificent". After his death, Reed's head was superimposed on to a body double to complete his part as a gladiator trainer. The extra two minutes of film cost £2 million. The spectacular scenes in which Crowe fights with tigers in the colosseum also use computer trickery - courtesy of Scott's Sheppertonbased company, The Mill - because the actor was not prepared to get into the ring with real animals. The movie is likely to elevate Crowe, nominated for an Oscar for The Insider, to superstardom - the role was originally earmarked for Tom Cruise.

Liz Smith of the New York Post predicts: "Next year at Oscar time there's a good chance we will be inundated with talk about Gladiator. In terms of success, it could be the Titanic of 2001." She added: "Nothing like it has been seen since Mel Gibson's Braveheart."

Rave reviews are also being filed on internet sites. Filmink reports that Crowe "manages to upstage an awesome cast in an awesome movie with an awesome budget". Another site, STST, pays tribute to the "fire, brimstone and fury" of Scott's action scenes, adding: "What could have been just a gormless action movie with a big budget is transformed by Crowe's presence into an amazing epic."

The reviewer also predicts that the film will finally elevate Joaquin Phoenix to stardom after spending his career in the shadow of his late brother River, and that Reed's erratic career would have been revived by his impressive performance.

The critics are also unanimous in predicting a revival in the reputation of Scott, whose previous films include Alien and Blade Runner, almost a decade after his last big hit Thelma & Louise.

The 62-year-old British director, who started out on the Sixties TV series Z Cars is currently making Hannibal, the long-awaited sequel to The Silence Of The Lambs, starring Anthony Hopkins and Julianne Moore.

Blood, Sweat and Men in Skirts
By Garth Pearce
The London Sunday Times (April 2, 2000)

A triumphant return for the Roman epic

Gladiator had all the makings of a flop. Not just any flop, but a big-budget, high-profile, blood-on-the-carpet failure. Let's start with the trailer, drenched with hype: "The general who became a slave ... the slave who became a gladiator ... the gladiator who defied an empire ..." Okay, we've got the picture. An epic set in Rome but really made in Hollywood, with all the accompanying cut-out characters and clich*s.

Then there's the director, the veteran Ridley Scott, without a hit in years, a ragtag cast of has-beens and no big star in sight. Oliver Reed even died on the job after a marathon drinking session and the film's ending had to be changed. But friends, Romans ... this film is such a thumping success that it even restores faith in togas, sandals and chariots.

Gladiator is irresistible: battles, power struggles, murder, treachery and some stunning special effects make it one of the most eagerly anticipated films of the year. Already, before the first official reviews, the reaction from the grass roots is nothing short of ecstatic. The army of film devotees who attend secret previews across America and post their reactions on the internet have gone into overdrive, calling Gladiator "awesome, a true epic". Others draw comparisons with Saving Private Ryan, claiming that "Scott has done for the historical period what Spielberg did for the second world war". Harry Knowles, who runs the best-known film-review website, Ain't It Cool, has also given his approval. "This is the Ridley Scott that we fanboys and girls drool over," he says. "Gladiator is a great cool film."

The omens could hardly be better, all the more so for a film that represents a rare triumph of Hollywood judgment over fashion. Big-budget Roman epics were once the most celebrated films of their age, whose grand spectacle, studios hoped, would see off the fledgling medium of television. Ben-Hur, released in 1959, won 11 Oscars; Spartacus, a year later, carved Stanley Kubrick's reputation as a director of brilliance. Then, in 1963, came Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Nearly a year in the making and, at the time, the most expensive film ever produced, it was as lavish as it was ambitious. But its enormous loss at the box office spread fear throughout the industry, burying the grand historical epic for almost four decades.

Against this background, the men who decided to dig up the Roman remains for Gladiator were taking a huge risk, and without their close studio links and consistent track record in producing box-office hits, it is doubtful that the film would ever have been made. The producer, Douglas Wick, has just turned the children's book Stuart Little into a $140m hit starring Geena Davis, while the executive producer, Walter Parkes, oversaw the success of American Beauty, Saving Private Ryan and The Mask of Zorro. Parkes is also the co-head of DreamWorks pictures, jointly owned by Steven Spielberg, who stumped up much of the film's finance. "We just felt, instinctively, that at the start of a new century it was time to go back nearly 2,000 years and tell a great story," says Parkes. "But it was still a risky business. My heart was in my mouth until I started seeing some of the results."

Perhaps the best decision about the $103m film was to make it as far from Hollywood as possible. Rome was built in Malta; battles in Germania were staged in Surrey; arenas were constructed in Morocco. Wicks and Parkes also put their faith in Britain's Ridley Scott, despite failures with his 1990s epic-scale films 1492: Conquest of Paradise and GI Jane.

Scott, whose more successful enterprises include Blade Runner, Alien and Thelma & Louise, is very much his own man. More significantly, at 62 years old, he was among the few who could recall the excitement of watching Spartacus and Ben-Hur at the local Gaumont. With these in mind, he overlooked the young stars of today and turned instead to an older generation of actors whose experience and charisma he felt would carry the project forward. Apart from Reed, who was 61, there's David Hemmings, 58, Derek Jacobi, 61, and Richard Harris, 70 this year. Scott dubbed them "the four horsemen of the Apocalypse" and prepared for high spirits. He also ignored glitzy male leads to cast New Zealand-born Russell Crowe, 35, then something of an unknown quantity, as his gladiator hero. "He's ferocious, a great actor and looks as if he will kick down walls to get what he wants," says Scott. "Can you think of an American star around the same age who could do it more convincingly?"

Scott was clearly not unnerved by his gang of big drinkers. "I stopped worrying about such things years ago," he says. "I have had too many disappointments to get myself stressed out. I needed guys who could act. But they were as good as gold on the drinking, apart from Ollie, who had his moments, particularly after six o'clock. Whatever went down the night before, they could all deliver the next morning."

Finally, the script remained to be sorted out. The original effort by David Franzoni, who had previously bored for America with another slave epic, Amistad, was torn to shreds by the actors, leaving little more than 35 pages of material. "That wasn't going to make much of a movie," admits Crowe, so a rapid reconstruction job took place around the central story.

The Roman General Maximus (Crowe) dreams of home after once again leading legions to victory in battle. But the dying emperor, Marcus Aurelius (Harris), wants him to assume power in Rome because he fears for its future with his son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) at the helm. Commodus finds out, murders his father and orders the execution of Maximus, who escapes death but is too late to save his wife and child. He is forced into slavery and trains as a gladiator under the instruction of Proximo (Reed) in provincial arenas, where his fame grows. Finally, he returns to Rome, intent on avenging the murder of his family.

Amid all the rapid rewriting, there had to be more changes when Reed died in Malta on May 2 last year, three weeks short of completing shooting. "I had seen Ollie as a man for all seasons and his character was going to escape," says Scott. "But we had to examine the jigsaw puzzle of the plot and use a body double, with computer graphics, to see that he also died on screen. The only reason Ollie would be pissed off is that he did not finish the movie. But he popped off, flat on his back in a pub, and would regard that as not a bad way to go."

Gladiator may occasionally appear to be like Death Wish in sandals, but the sheer scope of the film wins through. For purists, it may be less frustrating than many other Hollywood versions of history. It is set in AD180, when the real Commodus did indeed become emperor, at the age of 18. Whereas the story is squeezed into three years, with the addition of the fictional General Maximus, Commodus actually reigned for 12 years. He also survived his sister, Lucilla, after ordering her execution at the discovery of a plot to assassinate him.

His obsession with gladiatorial games at the Colosseum and a life of luxury and debauchery - he was said to have a harem of 300 women and 300 young boys - is certainly true. It is recorded that he would descend to the floor of the amphitheatre to kill wounded wild animals; he would also regularly deliver the coup de grÅce to injured gladiators too weak to fight back. He was eventually murdered by strangulation at the hands of the athlete Narcissus, after senate seniors felt that their future was threatened by his bloodthirsty megalomania.

For the film, ancient Rome was rebuilt by 300 labourers over a 19-week period; it includes a slice of the Colosseum, whose audience of 2,000 extras was enhanced by computer graphics to replicate a crowd of 35,000. But no computer could add tigers in the arena. Four of them, raised in captivity, were used as Crowe's character battles with a gladiator champion. It brought risks. A stunt man, fighting in a richly decorated helmet, momentarily lost sight of a tiger and was swiped hard across the back. "One stupid thing," says Crowe, "is that I got a memo from a studio person warning me not to play soccer in my spare time because I might get hurt. I sent a note back, saying: 'I am wrestling with four tigers, but I can't play a game of soccer?' I just wonder what they're thinking about half the time."

More important than the special effects and sets, though, are the cast, who perform superbly. It is a fitting end for Reed, who had not been in a decent role for years. The man who drank whisky by the pint is full of bullish determination as he trains gladiators and selfishly selects the ones who will make him the most money. Harris, with grey hair almost at shoulder length, brings authority to his scenes with Crowe and Phoenix, while Hemmings is prepared to camp it up as a bizarre, bloated master of ceremonies.

Meanwhile, Crowe appears to relish the physicality of his role, shedding the 48lb he had gained to play the lead role in The Insider. As Maximus, before doing battle he stoops to rub his hands in the dirt, almost as if earthing himself. "It was also a signal that he was going to fight," says Crowe. "It was like, 'Max is back, folks. He's going to kick some ass.' "

So is this film.

(Thanks to Marjory)

Killer Role for Crowe
By Jeannie Williams
USA TODAY (4/4/00)

His general-turned-gladiator has just dispatched, bloodily, a pack of challengers. And Crowe's portrayal is about to join the line of famed so-called sandal stars: Spartacus, Ben-Hur and now Maximus.

It's a happy turn for Crowe, most recently an Oscar nominee as the tobacco fighter of "The Insider". He's a very different kind of warrior in the DreamWorks saga opening May 5. Back in hunk mode, this 36-year-old from Down Under proves his star quality again in a historically based tale that offers intimate, grown-up relationships along with sword-wielding testosterone.

A sneak screening by "Talk" magazine, which features Crowe on its May cover, also revealed top performances by Joaquin Phoenix, who puts on a Brit accent as the decadent Emperor Commodus; Connie Nielsen ("Mission to Mars") as his sister, Lucilla, who loves Maximus; and Richard Harris as the dying Marcus Aurelius, father of Commodus.

The arena was entertainment for the Romans, who didn't have multiplexes. We also have the WWF, but, says DreamWorks' Jeffrey Katzenberg, 'they're not tough compared to this!' He's still floating from "American Beauty's" Oscars, noting that he last was with a company that won best picture in 1983 (Paramount's "Terms of Endearment"). With "Gladiator" facing little opposition to kick off the summer season,'the movie gods have given us a nice date.'

"Talk" editor Tina Brown told him, 'You're going to be back there next year (at the Oscars) with this!'

Crowe is unattached at present; "Talk"tries to get him on the record about his love life, unsuccessfully. He has a band called 30 Odd Foot of Grunts. He's lead singer, guitarist and songwriter and writes most when he's heartbroken. He has been prolific lately and says, yes, he has had his heart broken 'by many things. The death of a good cow, that will really knock me out.' That would be on his cattle farm north of Sydney.

I was relieved that nothing bad happens to animals; a scene with three tigers is digital and uses a puppet.

There's plenty of human carnage; "Gladiator" is R-rated for the intense violence. Talk notes that Hells Angels were imported from L.A. to play Germanic barbarians in the opening battle.

Nielsen was among those delighted that three tiger cubs were born during the shoot. But all were saddened by the death of Oliver Reed. Scott patched together a final scene for him from outtakes.

(Thanks to Thalya)

"Gladiator" revives classic genre after 40-years
By Nigel Hunt
Reuters (March 28, 2000)
(Photo thanks to Dan Shadrake)

The people who brought you World War II now think you are ready for really ancient history -- the Roman Empire. And, even though they are leaving out the orgies, they may be on to something.

DreamWorks Pictures, which triumphantly revived the World War II genre with "Saving Private Ryan," is dusting off another classic movie genre after a nearly 40-year hiatus: the epic of ancient Rome.

In early May, the studio founded by Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg will release its recreation of that violent era, "Gladiator," starring New Zealand-born Oscar nominee Russell Crowe.

"In the last 15 to 20 years of movies, many of the most successful ones have been about rediscovery of classic genres either through modern writing or even more importantly digital technology," said the film's executive producer Walter Parks.

The movie returns the spotlight to ancient Rome, building on a tradition created by such classics as "Ben Hur" (1927 and 1959), "Spartacus" (1960) and "Cleopatra" (1962).

Crowe, Oscar-nominated for his role as a paunchy former tobacco executive in "The Insider," plays heroic Roman General Maximus, reduced to the lowly status of gladiator-slave as the loser in a titanic political struggle.

Like Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) in "Saving Private Ryan," he yearns to return to a life of domestic bliss. Unlike Miller, his dream is shattered early in the movie after political foes butcher his wife and 8-year-old son, leaving him with only a desire for vengeance to fuel his fight for survival.

ONE IGNOBLE ROMAN

The focus of his hatred is Emperor Commodus, played by Joaquin Phoenix, who seizes the throne by murdering his own father, Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris), and ordering the execution of Maximus and his family.

Both characters are based on historical figures. Marcus Aurelius, who ruled the Roman empire from A.D. 161 to 180, was a distinguished Stoic philosopher who recorded his views on life in his "Meditations." Commodus, who ruled from 180 to 192, is known as a mad tyrant who was eventually murdered.

Crowe, whose character in the movie was mentored and treated like a son by Marcus Aurelius, said he used the emperor's writings as the backbone of Maximus.

"If he is your teacher then you are going to be full of his teachings," he said, adding that lines from the movie such as "the time for honoring yourself will soon be at an end" were taken from "Meditations."

Stoics such as Marcus Aurelius taught that hardship and adversity should be endured with fortitude and Crowe's character certainly puts this philosophy to the test, losing his status, family and freedom early in the movie.

In the movie, Commodus is portrayed as a man emotionally wounded by a neglectful father who never believed in him and who clings for security to his sister Lucilla, played by Danish actress Connie Nielsen.

"I always wanted him to be sympathetic. The idea of a madman has limitations in terms of how interesting can you keep that for how long," director Ridley Scott said.

Crowe said that when he was approached for the role he was attracted by the concept, not the initial script, which had to be extensively reworked.

SLICK AND CYNICAL

"It (the original script) was too modern, too cynical. It had gags about advertising in it. It just didn't make sense to go to that place with such a facile set of dialogue and scenes. What this was about was a leap of faith," Crowe said.

The movie, believed to have cost around $100 million to make, is a joint production by DreamWorks and Universal Pictures. It captures ancient Rome's love of violence, but not its passion for sex.

"I didn't want any orgies because orgies are boring," said Scott, nominated for an Oscar for "Thelma & Louise," whose other credits include science fiction classics "Alien" and "Blade Runner."

The R-rated movie may face criticism from some about the amount and level of violence, which emulates recent blockbusters such as "Saving Private Ryan" and "Braveheart."

"If you are going to present this world and try to do it with a certain emotional legitimacy, then you are stuck with the level of violence that we portrayed," Parks said.

The movie lost one of its cast during filming when Oliver Reed died of a heart attack last May at 61. Reed, who played Proximo, a former gladiator who had won his freedom, had shot 90 percent of his scenes before his death and the film is dedicated to his memory.

Reuters/Variety

The Glory of Rome Revisited
The Hollywood Reporter

The greatest challenge of Ridley Scott's eagerly awaited epic "Gladiator" was to recreate the grandeur that was Rome without bankrupting the studio - which happened the last time Hollywood revisited the golden age on this scale, for "Cleopatra" (1963). Hence, production designer Arthur Max (ãSevenä) opted to build only a portion of Rome's ancient Coliseum at the Mediterranean Film Studios on the island of Malta. But rather than just filling in the rest with computer graphics, which would be expensive, Max and Scott decided to shoot as much as possible in-camera. "We couldn't afford to build the whole thing, so we built a huge J-shaped section of the first tier, and some fragmentary elements, like the opposite entry and the opposite box, then cheated the reverses by flopping the negative," Max says. "It was a big savings and required a lot of mental agility on Ridley's part, directing left-to-right, fight-to-left. For the reverse angles, the actors literally had to be carrying their sword and shield in their opposite hands so their weapons would be on the proper side when we flopped the film."

Max, a theater veteran who had previously worked with Scott on dozens of commercials before serving as his production designer on "G.I. Jane," battled the weather and the location's isolation to recreate the Coliseum in all its glory. "We were in the middle of the Mediterranean during the worst winter of the decade, and we had to actually have all the materials and equipment we needed brought to the island," Max says. "Working on an island has its challenges. But despite the remoteness of the location and the adverse conditions, we triumphed."

Scott had previously shot sequences for his 1996 film "White Squall" at Mediterranean Film Studios, which is famous for its watertank facility - two enormous pools surrounded by ruined Romanesque barracks that had been built of limestone by the British Army for its campaign against Napoleon in 1803.

"The wind in Malta was blowing sand all the time and aged this soft limestone well beyond its 200 years, and I thought if we could put our Coliseum in the middle of one of the parade grounds, we could dovetail our set with all that existing real architecture," Scott says. "Arthur and I got the original signed plans of the architect from the city, then we made an enormous scale model of the actual site, and we started to play chess with pieces of model to see how our additions would fit within the structure that we had. That jigsaw puzzle worked great. I think we saved ourselves a lot of money by doing that. We never could have built all of that. It was just too big."

Max, who originally studied to be an architect, then abandoned the field because he didn't have the patience to build real buildings, enjoyed the challenge of recreating ancient Rome not in a day, but over several months: "How many people get the chance to build ... the Coliseum in its original form?" he asks. "We had to bend it a bit to make it fit into the site, but the detail and the basic layout are absolutely correct. We were very accurate - I would say obsessively accurate."

- Additional reporting by Douglas Bankston

A new villain rides into Tinseltown: the Internet
By Barry Koltnow
Orange County Register (March 23, 2000)

Middle Eastern terrorists are off the hook. The Nazis are off the hook. Even the butler is off the hook. There is a new villain in Hollywood, and it goes by the name of the Internet.

Wherever you go in this town, people are pointing accusatory fingers at the new technology.

There was the infamous Oscar nomination incident, in which Internet movie maven Harry Knowles of the Ain't It Cool News Web site allegedly hacked into the computer at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and revealed the list of nominees before the official announcement.

As it turned out, he hacked into the wrong computer, and his list was close but no cigar. Still, a lot of people in Hollywood were very unhappy with Harry and his Internet friends.

Many filmmakers have been wringing their hands with Internet-related woes for the last year or so -- specifically over Web leaks about scripts and test audience responses -- and that is not likely to abate. In fact, it is only going to get more intense.

Just last week, I met with British director Ridley Scott, and no sooner had we sat down to talk in his Century Plaza hotel suite than he accused the Internet of a heinous crime.

Scott said the Internet was used as the weapon of choice in a crime perpetrated against his new film, Gladiator, which stars Russell Crowe as a Roman general who becomes a slave and then returns to power through his prowess in the Coliseum against lions and tigers and gladiators.

Oh my.

The movie does not open until May 5, and already it is the talk of the summer movie season. Young men in my office are drooling with anticipation. And this is even before the studio marketing machine has been rolled into position. I wondered aloud how this kind of buzz could possibly have been generated without studio involvement.

``It's the Internet,'' Scott said with an exaggerated sigh of resignation.

``I previewed this film in San Diego and, before I got back to Los Angeles that night, there already were four reviews of the movie on the bloody Internet. Fortunately, the reviews were great, but they could have been bad, and that would have been disastrous.

`IT IS A TOOL'

``Look, movies cost a lot of money these days, and previews are all about finding out when the film is firing and when it is misfiring. It is a tool; part of the corrective process. It is not a premiere.

``What's going to happen is that either previews will be discontinued altogether and we'll lose a valuable tool, or the studios will create their own Internet sites in Texas somewhere, and they'll be writing great reviews of their own movies.''

The studios better hurry. I think the Internet is leaving Hollywood in the dust.

This week, the Net will once again thumb its collective nose at the Hollywood establishment when it releases the winners of the ``Anti-Awards.'' These awards, honoring the best and worst of last year's films and performances, will be announced two days before the Oscars.

The Anti-Awards were created last year by computer whizzes Steven Horn and Nick Nunziata and are expected to be an annual event. Internet users will vote on the nominees in 37 categories. Those nominees were chosen by the Anti-Academy, which is made up of representatives from 30 Internet movie sites.

Although many of the standard Oscar categories are included, what I like most about these awards are the more imaginative categories, which include best death scene, best trailer, best on-screen chemistry, best horror film, most underrated film and biggest disappointment (expected to be a torrid competition between Star Wars: Episode One and Eyes Wide Shut).

VILLAINS?

Having complimented the Anti-Awards, let me now explain what bothers me about them. Although they're intended to be fun and fan-friendly, and the Oscars could certainly use an injection of fun and fan-friendliness, I'm concerned about the power these Internet sites are wielding.

I am not prepared to call them villains at this point, but I do worry, as a movie fan, that the muscle these on-line people are flexing far outweighs their qualifications to judge films. I am concerned that these people don't even go to the movies, and therefore don't know what they're talking about.

I don't believe that a majority of the people running and logging onto these Web sites venture out of the house very often, in fear of straying far from their source of power, the computer.

I doubt whether most of the people who are voting on-line know much about the crop of last year's films, except what they learned on the Internet, from other computer geeks who don't go to movies but merely repeat gossip they've heard on the Internet.

To all these people, I have one thing to say: Gladiator is very cool, and I actually saw it.