this didn't deserve Best Picture

Rating: 5/10 (24 June 2005)

When "The English Patient" was in theaters, one of my mom's friends went to see it and was mildly disturbed by it, since it focuses on a man getting burned. My parents and I finally saw it about a year later. None of us could understand why this movie won nine Oscars. As far as we could tell, it was another case of using some historical event as the context for a love story (around the time when we saw it, "Titanic" was in the theaters, so that was eating at us a little). The story has Hana (Juliette Binoche), a French-Canadian nurse, helping surplice crash victim Almasy (Ralph Fiennes) in North Africa during WWII. Also with them is a man named Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe).
Granted, "The English Patient" wasn't an awful movie. It did look at WWII and how that was affecting various people. But the whole thing seemed a little overblown; the scene that really caught my eye was when Hana took a bath in the fountain. And maybe it was a little bit jarring to see Willem Dafoe in this kind of a movie, since I had just seen him in the god-awful "Speed 2". But really, how could this movie take home nine Oscars when "Shine" was also nominated?