Re-picking the 2005 Academy Awards winners 

• Focus Features
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The Academy Awards are once again upon us, and once again, cinephiles of all kinds will spend the evening of the ceremony and several days afterward complaining about the worthiness of the winners. It's a frustrating experience, because deep down, we understand that it takes time to appreciate the art that's truly great, or to free ourselves from narratives like "which actor is due for their lifetime achievement award," or "what movie happens to have people responding because of a specific cultural moment."

Recently, I undertook a project to look back at my Top 10 list for 2005, to see how my perspectives have changed with a 20-year-distance, and what other movies might deserve to be there. In that spirit, and because predicting the winners of this year's awards feels like a tacit endorsement of the system, I thought it would be interesting to look back on the 2005 Oscars winners (for the 2004 movie year), and see what might be worth re-considering.

• Searchlight Pictures
• Paul Giamatti, Sideways

Best Actor – Winner: Jamie Foxx, Ray. Look, we all know by now that doing an impression of a famous person is a fast lane to an Oscar win, and everyone was duly impressed by Foxx acting and playing piano as Ray Charles. But was it truly great work, or simply fodder for the impending parody of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story? The year's best male lead performance was one that wasn't even nominated: Paul Giamatti's would-be writer/wine snob Miles Raymond in Sideways. The movie earned several nominations and an Adapted Screenplay win, but Giamatti remained inexplicably ignored.

• Fine Line Features
• Imelda Staunton, Vera Drake

Best Actress – Winner: Hilary Swank, Million Dollar Baby. Clint Eastwood's boxing drama was the big winner of that year (as we'll see below), and Swank's second Oscar-winning performance was perfectly solid. But 2004 was an absolutely stacked year for great female lead performances, many of which weren't even among the nominees. For me, this would be an extremely close call between two of the other nominees: Imelda Staunton in Vera Drake as the titular part-time abortionist in 1950s London, and Kate Winslet as the free-spirited Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Give the edge to Staunton, capturing a complex character with an utter lack of judgment. As far as those left out of the nominees, Julie Delpy in Before Sunset was just one of the reasons why that sequel was unexpectedly remarkable.

• Searchlight Pictures
• Sandra Oh, Sideways

Best Supporting Actress – Winner: Cate Blanchett, The Aviator. Hey look, it's another celebrity impersonation! Blanchett's version of Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's Howard Hughes biopic was a bit more challenging than mere mimicry, and she was hardly competing against a killer field of nominees. Still, I'd be inclined to honor one of Giamatti's Sideways co-stars. Virginia Madsen was nominated as waitress Maya, but Sandra Oh's terrific work as winery worker Stephanie could just as easily have been under consideration, and would have been a worthy winner.

• Warner Bros Pictures
• Morgan Freeman, Million Dollar Baby

Best Supporting Actor – Morgan Freeman, Million Dollar Baby. It would be easy enough to put this down as one of those aforementioned "career recognition/make up for a previous mistake" Oscars, as Freeman could have and (probably should have) won at least a couple of trophies for earlier work like Street Smart, Glory and The Shawshank Redemption. In this case, however, I think they actually got it right. As tempting as it is for me to name Thomas Haden Church in Sideways to make it nearly a clean sweep, Freeman is indeed fantastic as the veteran boxing coach.

Best Director/Best Picture – Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby. Eastwood already had a much-deserved directing Oscar in hand (for Unforgiven, one of the true masterpieces of the 1990s), so this doesn't really qualify as a "career recognition" win. It also wasn't the best directing work of 2004, not when that year included the heartbreakingly beautiful, mind-blowing achievement of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Charlie Kaufman's Oscar-winning script might have been the understandable focus, but Michel Gondry's sense for unsettling imagery turned this tale of people voluntarily having painful memories erased into a love story that was also a horror story about how much the joy and pain in our lives is inextricable. It shouldn't have taken 20 years for Eternal Sunshine's glories to be evident, but maybe this is the kind of re-do we should consider every year.