Saved By The Bell: The Envelope, Please

Thank you, thank you.

Wow. I've always wanted to be the guy who hands out one of the Academy Awards, but I never thought I'd get the chance. An ESPY, maybe, although even that would be unlikely for somebody whose sportswriting career consisted mostly of writing up water polo stories for the university daily.

Yet here I am, set to give out the award for Best Picture. I guess I'm just lucky that all of this year's nominated films have to do with sports. Well, that and I won that trivia contest on the radio. I knew that being one of the nine people who saw Shaquille O'Neal's acting debut in Blue Chips would pay off one day.

Anyway, this year's selection of nominated films represents a wide selection of the wonderful aspects of the sports world today. As we watched these stories unfold on the silver screen, they made us laugh, cry and well cry some more.

Without further adieu, here are your nominees for Best Picture.

Chocolat

Reginald Vel Johnson, TV's lovable Carl Winslow, makes the leap from television sitcoms to his first feature role. In Chocolat, he plays Shawn Kemp, a 330-pound power forward who struggles with his eating problems and his confinement to the Portland Trail Blazers bench. He also cannot spell the foods he loves so much because, like so many NBA players today, he made the leap to the pros before he finished school. Of course, that was back when he could leap.

Don Cheadle co-stars as Bonzi Wells, the unfortunate teammate Kemp devours during a hunger attack at halftime of a Nuggets game. "Mmmmm, nuggets…"

Slouching Tigers, Season Drags On

Ang Lee directs a timeless fable that takes place in Detroit in the years of the Yankee dynasty. The disappearance of a magical bat, symbolic of the Tigers' ability to hit in previous years, accompanies skyrocketing salaries in Major League Baseball. Chow Yun Fat masterfully portrays the part of Bud Selig, the baseball commissioner who is unable to use the sweeping powers the owners granted him to remedy the salary situation.

Slouching Tiger represents a special effects masterpiece, as computer animation creates the illusion that the Tigers' season--along with those of almost every other baseball team in the lower half of the salary list--is something other than boring and futile.

Erin Jockovich

In Erin Jockovich, Julia Roberts is an unemployed, single mother who stumbles upon Pacific Gas & Electric's conspiracy to poison the residents of a nearby town. A desperate collegiate football team decides that she is so good at kicking beaurocratic booty that she deserves a shot at kicking field goals as well.

She goes on to hit 72 percent of her attempts and leads her team to the 2002 Ivy League championship. Erin Jockovich co-stars Tim Murphy as "Coach."

Gladiator

In a postmodern spin on the traditional sword-and-sandal epic, Russell Crowe stars as Roger Clemens, a Yankee pitcher who has completely lost his mind. He now believes that he is Rogerius Clemensius, heir to the Roman throne, and has been cheated out of succession by Mets catcher Mike Piazza. Armed with nothing but a 98 m.p.h. fastball and a fragment of a broken bat, he vows to exact revenge. Both drama and hilarity ensue.

Traffic

Director Steven Soderbergh gives us a brilliant series of intertwining vignettes about the performance-enhancing drug trade in the Sydney Olympics. Benicio Del Toro is a conflicted, street-smart International Olympic Committee official who tries and fails to deal with the problem. Catherine Zeta-Jones is an Olympic gymnast who loses her gold medal after testing positive for banned substances found in common vitamin supplements. Michael Douglas is IOC Chair Juan Antonio Samaranch, who is too busy accepting bribes from various cities that want the games to fix anything..

The envelope, please... And the winner is… Almost Famous, the story of the XFL's complete and utter failure? How is that possible?

Oh, wait. The Oscars are on ABC this year, and the XFL was NBC's attempt to cut into the popularity of the NFL after it failed to snag the television rights. Monday Night Football is on ABC. It all makes sense.

I always knew the Oscars were rigged.