Best Picture: A Masterpiece

Rating: Null/10 (28 February 2005)

"Million Dollar Baby", winner of 4 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actor is in a word...extraordinary. It is a motion picture as beautiful and rare as a precious gem.
Clint Eastwood crafted a masterpiece with deep characters and a brilliant, moving story. The film centers a around a grizzled old fight trainer and gym owner, Frankie Dunn (Eastwood), his sidekick, Eddie "Scrap Iron" Dupris (Morgan Freeman), and an aspiring female boxer, Maggie (Hilary Swank). The characters teach us that even though life can be hard dreams are worth pursuing because if we're lucky we all get one chance at achieving our dreams. We learn that no matter what happens to us, we're better off if we can say we had our shot.
Hilary Swank gave a stunning performance as Maggie and dazzles on the screen. Her work in this film is a lesson in acting and earned her, at the young age of 30, a second Academy Award win for Best Actress. She improves upon her Academy Award winning performance in "Boys Don't Cry" (1999).
Morgan Freeman earned his first Academy Award, as Best Supporting Actor for his turn as a hardened, hard luck, wise old former boxer who manages Frankie's gym and looks after some of the boxing hopefuls who train there.
Early in the fall of 2004 when critics began to zero in on which films and performances were Oscar contenders, "Million Dollar Baby" was barely on their radar screen. That's because the film had been planned for a 2005 release and was not available early in the fall. Eastwood only began shooting the film in June of 2004, which would ordinarily be too late in the year for a film to be available for release that same year. But Eastwood filmed the movie in only 37 days. The beautiful screenplay by Paul Haggis needed no rewriting, and most scenes were filmed in one take. When studio execs at Warner Bros., which released the film, saw an early rough copy in the early fall, they were so impressed that they rushed the film so that it could be released in time to qualify for the 2004 Academy Awards.
Once it appeared, the critical acclaim for "Million Dollar Baby" was enormous. A.O. Scott of the New York Times marveled at the subtle beauty of the film and lauded its director, Clint Eastwood. He called it a masterpiece and proclaimed it the best film released by a Hollywood studio in 2004. Scott compared it to the classic films of Hollywood's heyday when pictures were in black and white. The popular critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times stated in his review, "Million Dollar Baby is a masterpiece, pure and simple, deep and true." The film was instantly thrust into the running for the Best Picture Oscar and the buzz surrounding it began to grow.
After a brilliantly timed, modest Oscar campaign which included a limited December release and a nationwide release the weekend after the Academy Award nominations were announced, the film gained momentum so that by the time the Academy Awards show aired only a month later, "Million Dollar Baby" had become the new front runner for Best Picture. Early on, the front runner had been "The Aviator" (2004), the Howard Hughes biopic, directed by Martin Scorcese, which had captured the Golden Globe for best Drama Picture. "The Aviator" also garnered 11 Academy Award nominations compared to 7 for "Million Dollar Baby."
Among the film's 7 Academy Award nominations was a surprising acting nomination for Clint Eastwood. He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for what many critics hailed as the best acting performance of his fifty year career.
"Million Dollar Baby" also brought Eastwood a second Academy Award win for Best Director, for a film many critics believed to be his best work. He had won the Academy Award for Best Director previously for "The Unforgiven" (1992), which also took home an Oscar for Best Picture.
"Million Dollar Baby" is the best film to win the Oscar for Best Picture in the '00s.