Jim Karpen Tips

A great site for the Oscars

March 2001

The New York Times might not be your idea of a site that would offer up something fun, but in fact their special section on the Oscars is filled with information and charm. If you're a fan of movies, check it out at http://www.nytimes.com/pages/movies/oscars.

The site is filled with content about the movies, actors, actresses, and the awards ceremony itself. You can read about "Gladiator" Russell Crowe's "special brand of masculinity" and about the tendency of recipients to "cry, whine, exhort, excoriate, joke, and thank at copious length" in their acceptance speeches.

One of the links on the main page takes you to a page that lists all of the 2001 Academy Award nominees in all categories. For most of the films there's a link to the review or feature that appeared in the Times.

You can also access lists of all the past Oscar winners back to the beginning in the 1920s. You can select a category--picture, actor, actress, supporting actor, supporting actress--and the site will return a page listing, for example, all the films that have won best picture. And in every case in which the film was reviewed by the Times, there's a link to the review. It's fun to see reviews dating back to as early as the 1920s.

You can also choose to view past winners by decade. Pick the 1960s, for example, and it will return a page that shows all the winners in the above categories during that decade (with best picture ranging from "Ben-Hur" in 1960 to "Oliver!" In 1969.)

Fun features include a couple contests. Predictably, one of the contests invites you to predict the winner in all of the categories. If you do well on that, you can win a DVD player. Another is a trivia contest that invites you to answer a series of questions, such as "What is the only family to win awards in three consecutive generations?" (Choose from Barrymore, Fonda, Dern, and Huston.) And "Who is the only man to receive nominations for actor and supporting actor for a single performance?" (Choose from Walter Brennan, Barry Fitzgerald, Claude Rains, and Robert Donat.)

If you have the most correct answers, you will be eligible to win a $50 gift certificate to a theater near you. A new quiz is being posted each week through March 20.

There are also links to trailers for the nominated movies and to a small selection of photos from this year's nominees as well as from the past. And there are forums in which you can discuss the nominees.

If you follow a link to content from the Times, such as a review, you may be asked to register, but registration is free.