America's Actress: March 2000, contd

Continuing from yesterday's rewatches of March 2000, here are my first-timers from that same period. Among them is the first of the second of the year's releases to go on to Oscar glory.

That movie, of course, is Erin Brockovich, which opened before the Oscars for 1999 even aired and immediately had Julia Roberts as the Best Actress frontrunner for the next year's ceremony, momentum that never once slowed down. It was perfect, in a way: despite a Supporting Actress nomination for 1989's Steel Magnolias, her superstardom began with 1990's Pretty Woman, the 20th Century ending with her as our reigning rom-com box office queen, America's Sweetheart. It's only fitting that the 21st Century began with her being lauded not just as a genuine thespian, but as our Best Actress. (Sometimes I think, oh that all happened fast, but that's actually the typical timeline for breakthrough-to-Oscar for female movie stars - Emma Stone, Jennifer Lawrence, Grace Kelly...hell, Audrey Hepburn won for her debut!)

Here's where Erin Brockovich fell within the March 2000 landscape:

Killer Birthday: March 2000

March 2000. This was the month I turned eleven, and I feel like this was the birthday where I got a CD of Highlights from the Phantom of the Opera (with Claire Moore!) and a VHS of Yellow Submarine. I had awakened early in the morning, so there was time before school to listen to the whole CD; the VHS I saved for later.

I had only recently gotten into the Beatles, and I remember it had to be fifth or sixth grade because my introduction to them was through neither their music nor their movies but through a small paperback in our classroom's Take A Book, Leave A Book library: Beatles Diary, written by their chauffeur and road manager, Alf Bicknell. Odd that without any other context, I latched on to the story told in those pages. I was so into the Beatles that, for a project asking us to create an Egyptian-themed calendar, I did one with images of a band called The Scarabs, with, I believe, Anubis in place of Ringo.

While I was turning 11 and dreaming of a past I never experienced, here's what was happening at the movies...

Magic, Melancholy, and Wonder Boys: January/February 2000, contd

Continuing the beginning of the year 2000 and, already, we have our first Oscar winner of the year!

Wonder Boys was originally intended for end-of-year awards consideration in 1999. Getting it all together proved a challenge, though, and the release date was pushed back to February 2000, a surprising decision considering how firmly the November-December period had become Awards Season by that time. Critically acclaimed but met by audiences with a shrug, it came and went at the end of February. Such was the support within the film and critical communities, it was re-released in November, better suited for awards consideration. Indeed, it went on to be nominated for four Golden Globes (winning Best Original Song) and was among the National Board of Review's Top Ten Films of 2000, while star Michael Douglas was named Best Actor by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. 

But that would be a December 00/January 01 story. We're still in January and February 2000, and Wonder Boys was one release of many - all seen this year for my first time:

The Beginning of a New Age: January/February 2000

The year 2000 began with a genuine sense of history. Once the ball dropped and Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve continued without blackouts, internet outages, or planes falling from the sky (that wouldn't be for another 20 months), we celebrated as citizens of a New Millennium, laying the groundwork not just for the next century but the next ten centuries!

We started with eyewear

When the media spoke of the Y2K bug, a glitch that would convince the world's computer systems that the year had turned to Zero, it was in apocalyptic terms. Yet, in a sense, it did feel like Year Zero, in that there was a sense of renewal, of possibility. We were living in the future, Two Thousand! Even I, a fifth grader, ten years old, felt it. I seem to recall the slightest hitch in my breath when some joker turned the lights off just as the countdown hit "three....two...ONE...HAPPY NEW YEAR", but soon I was swept up in the emotion, in watching the people around me -  mom, Dad, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins - celebrate how we, they, had made it. There were people in the room who seemed to have seen it all: WWII, the moon landing, the Concorde, the internet at your fingertips, now marveling that they were part of this new era. My God, what would we do with this blank slate, this call to shape the world?

We would keep living, it turns out. The real opportunity to shape the 21st Century would not come until November (it was an election year!). Until then, we returned to work, to school, back to reading The Ballad of Lucy Whipple, to doing homework while watching Pepper Ann in the afternoon, to evenings with Dilbert and Malcolm in the Middle. 

And people went right back to the movies. Indeed, some went the very first day of this New Millennium....

The Year 2000: An Introduction

The Turn of the Century is a phrase that, growing up, I knew referred to that blurry period between the Gilded Age and WWI. Working with people born after 2001 humbles one into realizing, somewhere between the reminiscences of Y2K paranoia and Daria, that for many, and soon many more, the Turn of the Century occurred just 25 years ago. And I was part of it!

With the gravity of that realization, I decided my look at the year 2000 would be different from other retrospectives. I lived through it! I watched many of the hits either in theaters that year or on VHS (ha!) the year after! And what I didn't see, I certainly knew about thanks to daily conversation, TV spots, newspaper reviews, and subsequent pop culture references. So, instead of the usual 65-80 films, I watched 122, doing my best to watch in the order of their release (the only exception: January releases, which I sprinkled throughout because...well, I'm not sure why I did that, but that's how it worked out). I had my friends on Instagram vote on what I should prioritize. And I decided to spend two months talking about it.

Sunday, I'll discuss the films released in January and February 2000 that I was already acquainted with; Monday, I'll discuss the films released in January and February 2000 that I saw for the first time. And it will continue in that pattern until September, when I take a look at that year's Oscar race category by category (well...ten categories, at any rate), culminating in my personal picks for the best of the year.

By the way, these are the 122 films:

28 Days

102 Dalmatians

Almost Famous

American Psycho

The Art of War

Autumn in New York

Bamboozled

Battlefield Earth

Beau travail

The Beach

Bedazzled

Before Night Falls

Best in Show

Big Momma's House

Billy Elliot

Boiler Room

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2

The Boondock Saints

Bounce

Bring It On

The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy

But I’m a Cheerleader

Cast Away

Cecil B. Demented

The Cell

Center Stage

Charlie's Angels

Chicken Run

Chocolat

Chuck & Buck

Chunhyang

The Contender

Coyote Ugly

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Croupier

Dancer in the Dark

Disney's The Kid

Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas

Dr. T and the Women

Dracula 2000

Drowning Mona

Dude, Where's My Car?

Duets

The Emperor's New Groove

Erin Brockovich

Eye of the Beholder

Fantasia 2000

The Fantasticks

Final Destination

Finding Forrester

Get Carter

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

Girlfight

Gladiator

Gone in 60 Seconds

Hamlet

Hanging Up

High Fidelity

Hollow Man

The House of Mirth

The In Crowd

Isn’t She Great

Judy Berlin

Keeping the Faith

The Last September

The Legend of Bagger Vance

Love & Basketball

Love’s Labour’s Lost

Malèna

Me, Myself & Irene

Meet the Parents

Men of Honor

Miss Congeniality

Mission: Impossible II

Mission to Mars

Next Friday

The Ninth Gate

Nurse Betty

The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Paragraph 175

The Patriot

Pay It Forward

The Perfect Storm

Pitch Black

Pollock

Psycho Beach Party

Quills

Ratcatcher

Red Planet

Remember the Titans

The Replacements

Requiem for a Dream

Return To Me

The Road to El Dorado

Road Trip

Romeo Must Die

Rules of Engagement

Scary Movie

Scream 3

Shadow of the Vampire

Shaft

Shanghai Noon

Shower

Small Time Crooks

Snatch

Space Cowboys

State and Main

Sunshine

Thirteen Days

Traffic

U-571

Unbreakable

Urban Legends: Final Cut

Vatel

The Virgin Suicides

What Lies Beneath

What Women Want

Wonder Boys

X-Men

Yi Yi

You Can Count on Me

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The 98th Academy Awards will be held on March 15, 2026. Every year I try to predict who the nominees will be in Best Picture, Best Director, the Acting categories, and the Writing categories. Sometimes I'm pretty good, often I'm horrendous, but it's fun to do and also works as a list of anticipatory titles for the coming year.

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