Yes, the Oscars are a huge, overblown, self-serving exercise by a huge, bloated, self-congratulatory industry. Fine.

And yes, Peter Jackson deserves winning those Oscars for delivering a very impressive, though flawed, adaptation of the LOTR trilogy...better than anyone (okay, ALMOST anyone) might have expected.

As for Titanic, what that was was a superb recreation of a huge ship sinking...combined with a perfectly dreadful and unconvincing soap opera love story that, if I may quote the teenage girls of my town...just SUCKED! Oh, but the teenage girls mostly loved it, didn't they? That's Hollywood for you. They wouldn't have sold a quarter as many tickets without that stupid F***king love story, would they? (sigh) I remember when historical movies felt it was enough just to tell the real story (as in "A Night To Remember")...but we live in the Age of Excess now.

We should all be quite thankful that Peter Jackson did as fine a job on LOTR as he did. Good for him. Imagine how bad it could have been! Just imagine. We were all very lucky to get a fantasy trilogy that good from the movies.

- LH