'The Hot Chick,' Reconsidered

Best Actress/Best Supporting Actress: This one is easy. Nicole Kidman gets the handicap vote or the "My left nose" award. And Julianne Moore is nominated in two categories. So, they'll give Kidman Best Actress and Moore Best Supporting and nobody will complain.

Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen: "Gangs of New York" will win to compensate for the fact that it's in the wrong category. The film is based on a book called "Gangs of New York" by Herbert Asbury, but apparently the Adapted Screenplay category was already filled up.

Annette Insdorf is the author of "Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust." She is also the director of undergraduate film studies at Columbia University

Since the Holocaust has become a cinematic genre by now, "The Pianist" certainly deserves the Oscar for best Holocaust film of 2002. I regret that I had to submit my manuscript for the updated third edition of "Indelible Shadows" by late 2001, as this powerful drama should have been among the 170 new titles I added since l989!

Playing a victimized Polish Jew, Adrien Brody is superb at conveying the basic realities of wartime hunger, thirst, fear and dependence. His finely understated performance is matched by Roman Polanski's muted directing style: unlike his celebrated and "edgy" films from "Knife in the Water" to "Chinatown," "The Pianist" has a classical sobriety.

The best foreign-language Holocaust film of 2002 was "Nowhere in Africa," which has a good chance of winning the Oscar. It follows a Jewish family uprooted from Europe to colonial Kenya. All the characters are sharply drawn, and all of them grow through their relationships in the African landscape.