HOW COULD THAT HAPPEN?!

Rating: 4/10 (6 April 2001)

Initially, I didn't want to comment on Gladiator` at all, but now, as it won so many Oscars, I think I should:
How could that happen?! How could Hollywood sink so low and nominate this monstrous combination of pure commercial thinking and perverse blood lust for twelve Academy Awards, especially Best Actor and Supporting Actor (???), Best Writing, Best Director, Best Music and  Best Picture? Or is the Best Picture nomination only a result of the number of other nominations?
It really hurts seeing how the American audience ignored the terrible way history is treated in Hollywood. Ridley Scott commercialized the Ancient Rome so obviously that one might believe he meant it ironically. But the movie is deadly serious (as is Oscar-winning actor` Russell Crowe who moves his face I think three times during the whole film!), so we are really supposed to believe that Maximus the Gladiator was Christian and hoped to meet his family again in the Hereafter. The whole story is so dumb that even eight-year old children should say they are too old for such nonsense.
It is no argument pro Ridley Scott that he gave a second birth to the genre of the sandal movie`. The real Roman movies were historically more accurate, more intelligent and not so overloaded with glaring computer-animated visual backgrounds. Those were movies. Gladiator` is more like a videogame. An absolute disgrace happened on March 25th. It showed how poor in quality pictures the year 2000 was.