I used to get excited about movies leaving stuff out of a book until I saw a movie script first hand. A script for 90 minute movie usually runs about 200 pages of fairly large print. Lots of white space. LOTR, my Ballentine paperback copy from the 60s anyway, runs closer to 1300 pages of print so small I can't read it without my glasses anymore. How could something not get left out?

Jackson deserves the Oscar because no one else could even have come as close to capturing the essense of the books as he did. Then there's his innovation in filming all three movies at once to maintain some kind of continuity. It took keeping 9 film crews running simultaneously with fiber optic links between them so Jackson could monitor what the assistant directors were doing. How the hell do you top that? Has any director come even close?

The movies may not be exactly what I would have expected, but dang it, they're good and the second one would be hard to beat in any action genre for all its minor flaws.