BEST SCREENPLAY (ORIGINAL)
Lisa Says: ''TALK TO HER''
Pedro Almodovar's audacious collage of moods and melodrama (that song! that dance! that silent movie!) is the definition of la originalidad.
Owen Says: ''FAR FROM HEAVEN''
Todd Haynes replicates the curlicued innocence -- and darkness -- of Douglas Sirk's '50s soap operas, but the deep beauty of his script is the way that it sprinkles Hollywood gloss over rivers of unspoken feeling.
BEST SCREENPLAY (ADAPTED)
Lisa says: ''ADAPTATION''
Charlie Kaufman takes the prize for his mega-meta tour de force,
turning Susan Orlean's lovely book about writing a book about orchids into a hilarious movie about the passion required to do anything worth doing.
Owen Says: ''ABOUT A BOY''
My vote would have gone to ''Adaptation'' -- that is, if Charlie Kaufman hadn't blown it with ''brother'' Donald Kaufman's failed conceptual leap of a last act. That leaves ''About a Boy,'' a pinpoint evocation of a cad who tries, touchingly and hilariously, to change his spots.
BEST DIRECTOR
Lisa Says: MARTIN SCORSESE
Not just because he damn well deserves it after all these years,
but also because ''Gangs of New York,'' so big, bold, and blemished, is above all a director's epic, and the man had the sand to stick to his vision.
Owen Says: ROB MARSHALL
Almodóvar's absurdist sexual anxiety is, to me, the emperor's old
hat, and Scorsese and Polanski are coasting on their legends. Marshall, no wizard but a happy carpenter, turns ''Chicago'' into pure ebullient flash.
BEST PICTURE
Lisa Says: ''THE PIANIST''
I'll march any day for ''The Two Towers.'' Still, Polanski's unflinching Holocaust drama, wrung from the director's own Polish history, has overtaken me, on second viewing, with its grave power and cinematic dignity.
Owen Says: ''CHICAGO''
A carnival of cynical joy. There's a reason a Broadway musical celebrated in 1975 for Bob Fosse's sexy slither has become the zeitgeist movie of 2002. More than just a tale of tabloid fame and all that jazz, it's a pageant of old-fashioned sizzle for a postfeminist world.
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