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BEST ACTRESS DIANE LANE, UNFAITHFUL ''Best Actress is like most valuable player -- what person on that team carried the most weight to make it successful,'' he explains. ''Nicole Kidman will probably win, but Diane Lane deserves it more. Diane was most of her movie, and Nicole was a small part of hers.''

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN, CARLOS CUARON AND ALFONSO CUARON Any controversy about Gangs really being based on a book or My Big Fat Greek Wedding coming from a play didn't affect his voting. ''The voters don't really care about that,'' he says. The bigger problem was that he found nothing original about three of the nominees. Far From Heaven gets points for solid craftsmanship, but it's still a ''1950s retread.'' Gangs of New York felt like it was written by a committee of writers in New York and L.A. ''and got lost somewhere along Route 66,'' he says. ''And not only did My Big Fat Greek Wedding feel like a sitcom, it actually became a sitcom.'' However, he reminds us that the actors' branch is the largest and loves to reward its own for writing -- Emma Thompson, Billy Bob Thornton, and Matt Damon and Ben Affleck all have writing Oscars, which bodes well for Nia Vardalos. ''The two best-written scripts were Y Tu Mama Tambien and Talk to Her,'' says our scribe. ''Unfortunately, the Latino vote is minuscule, and these two will split it anyway.'' Nevertheless, he doesn't mind backing this lost cause.

BEST DIRECTOR ROMAN POLANSKI, THE PIANIST ''This year is very tricky because people have a warm spot for Scorsese, but no one I know liked the movie,'' he says. ''So the question becomes are people going to vote with their heads or their hearts. I'm voting with my head, which means Polanski gets my vote.'' The fact that Polanski is living in exile as a fugitive was not a factor. ''If you excluded all of the guys who have mistresses and fathered babies out of wedlock or who were kinky and dishonest, you wouldn't ever have five nominees.'' -- Josh Young

Originally posted Mar 21, 2003 Published in issue #701 Mar 21, 2003 Order article reprints
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