Lord of the Rings Takes the Oscars
Apparently The Lord of the Rings won every single award for which it was nominated. Despite my well-known concerns and grave with the adaptation, it will be an eternal monument as an incredibly well-realised visual rendition of a magnificent opus. Jackson captured the look of Middle Earth as none of us dared hope he would. From henceforth and forevermore I will read the books with his landscapes, his Riders, his buildings, his towers and many of his characters (not all, but many). My concerns are with his script, with his take, with his emphasis: never with the way he painted Tolkien’s great work onto the silver screen.
The mere making of the films demands recognition: for the first time in history, a trilogy has been filmed all at once, rather than piecemeal. The attention paid to atmosphere and detail was incredible: I recall a tale that the set for the Chamber of Mazarbul had shreds of parchment written with the Cirth Daeron scattered about itself—and that those shreds meant something. No camera ever focused on them; the effort of their preparation could be said to have been wasted—but they lent atmosphere to the actors, atmosphere that enabled them to better play their parts.
Jackson’s work was imperfect, but it far exceeded anything anyone might reasonably have hoped for. He surpassed what might have been expected, and has earned the right to hold his head high amongst our cinematic greats. To be brutally honest, I do not believe that he will ever reach or surpass the mark thus set—but that mark is graven in a fiery line which shall burn for decades to come.
I only hope that I live until the next interpretation of Tolkien’s works, the interpretation that weds visual excellence with narrative perfection to produce the film equivalent of Tolkien’s corpus.
