The Sure Thing: Best Actress, 2000

If you were betting in your Oscars pool in 2000 and picked anyone but Julia Roberts to win Best Actress, you'd look like quite the dummy. No win in any category this year was as certain as hers.

There was only one major awards body that made no mention of Roberts: the New York Film Critics Circle. Eventual nominee Laura Linney won Best Actress for You Can Count on Me, with The House of Mirth's Gillian Anderson and Dancer in the Dark's Björk as runner-ups, and eventual Best Actress Oscar nominee Ellen Burstyn among the runner-ups for Supporting Actress for Requiem for a Dream. Otherwise, Roberts ran through awards season like General Sherman: the BAFTAs, the Golden Globes, the SAG Awards, the LA Film Critics, the National Board of Review, the Critics Choice Awards, the Blockbuster Entertainment Awards, the MTV Movie Awards, the Teen Choice Awards, and on and on and on until the night of the Oscars:

Had I a ballot, here's how I would rank them:

The March of Inevitability: Best Supporting Actor, 2000

Was there any beating Benicio del Toro for Best Supporting Actor?

Realistically, probably not. From the moment people started seeing Traffic, the name was on the trophy, with critics like Kenneth Turan immediately singling him out as the film's best performance. Come awards time, he collected a haul of hosannas from the Golden Globes, BAFTAs, LA Film Critics, National Society of Film Critics, and the Screen Actors Guild. His SAG win was particularly miraculous, considering they bumped him up to the Lead Actor category, suggesting that the industry was eager to award that performance no matter where it was placed (it's also indicative of the lack of a real frontrunner in Lead Actor throughout the season).

As tends to be the case with Best Supporting Actor, the Oscar Five was a done deal for a while. The BAFTAs nominated Billy Elliot's Gary Lewis and Gladiator's Oliver Reed, but those were very British decisions: Lewis's performance wasn't a standout here the way young discovery Jamie Bell or previous Oscar nominee Julie Walters were, while, as Inside Oscar 2 describes it, the idea of anyone else nominating Reed, who died during that film's production and whose performance was "completed" with the use of CGI, was too morbid to consider. Some critics' groups, including NYFCC and NSFC, made mention of Fred Willard's hilarious turn in Best in Show, but always as an also-ran, not the winner. And The Contender's villain Gary Oldman filled the SAG slot left vacant by Del Toro's promotion, but his public feud with the film's director Rod Lurie and distributor DreamWorks, plus his reported insistence that he campaign as Lead, left a sour taste in many Academy members' mouths, even if the performance is that film's best.

So no, there was no disrupting the quintet of Del Toro, Oldman's co-star Jeff Bridges, surprise possible upset Willem Dafoe of Shadow of the Vampire, early favorite Albert Finney of Erin Brockovich, and the acclaimed Joaquin Phoenix of Gladiator. And there was no disrupting Del Toro's march to Oscar victory:

Here's how I'd rank them, had I a ballot:

No Scares This Halloween: October 2000

October is always one of the happiest times of the year. Even in Florida, one felt the change of seasons, maybe not in weather, but in decor! Pumpkins and witches, bats and ghosts, cobwebs and skulls at every house, on every classroom door, at every supermarket; horror marathons, all month long, on the TV; spooky specials, whether they be another "Treehouse of Horror" from The Simpsons or Cartoon Network's annual rerun of The Halloween Tree (though I think this was eventually taken over as a tradition by ABC Family, later Freeform). Ah, Halloween: that special time of year!

My family adores Halloween, none more so than my father, who loved helping us execute costumes and makeup from scratch. In high school, I spent not a penny when transforming into Raoul Duke - Dad loaned me sunglasses, a Hawaiian shirt, and a visor, then soldered a cigarette holder with cigarette at his garage workbench. Legendary is the time we came back from trick-or-treating with Mom to find Dad as a redneck zombie: face painted completely white, red smearing at his lips and neck, a noose around his neck his hiking flannels and hat completing the effect. Oh, yes, this was a big deal holiday for us.

The problem is, I cannot remember which costume I wore this Halloween. I have perfect recall of the Halloweens of Kindergarten through third grade and the ones of high school, but 4th-8th I can only remember four costumes, and I have no idea when I did each one. I don't think I even have pictures. The best I can figure is, I know for a fact I saw The Emperor's New Groove with my friend Tony in December, and I'm pretty sure the two of us went trick-or-treating together twice in this period, and I was The Phantom of the Opera one time and Charlie Chaplin the other, so I must have been one of those. Unless, of course, this was a year when Halloween fell during rehearsals for The Wizard of Oz, in which I played the Scarecrow, and the reason I can't remember the costume is that I was already in costume, while singing and dancing, though October would have been too early for a dress rehearsal. 

Anyway, the movies of October were not so spooky.