The question is: does American Beauty still work? Dealing with questions of personal identity and fulfillment, it touched on themes that were common in other films of the year. It wrapped these ideas in a glossy concept with a tidy runtime that made them slightly more accessible than the oddball Being John Malkovich or the heavy length of PTA’s Magnolia. It’s well acted from top to bottom, not wasting a performance from Spacey and Bening as the leads to Scott Bakula as the other neighbor. It’s discordant score is groundbreaking, echoing themes that would become dominant in the work of Diasterpiece (It Follows) and Mica Levi (Jackie and Under The Skin). The cinematography is helmed by Conrad Hall, a previous winner for 1970’s Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid and a leading visual composer for many of the best films of the late 60’s’ New Hollywood’ period. The content of American Beauty and the craftspeople responsible are of high caliber that holds up to this day - and if you accept that, the question turns to the politics of Oscar campaigns.

Within any award season, the campaigning is paramount to the final result. American Beauty featured performers who were hungry for wins. It had a director in Mendes who owned his movie from page to screen; and a narrative around Mendes at a forefront of a ‘Youth Movement’ with fellow directors Paul Thomas Anderson and Spike Jonze in the nominee field. It’s hard to look at The Cider House Rules as a nominee that holds up well; having recently shepherded Shakespeare In Love to a wealth of nominations and a Best Picture win, it seems like a Harvey Weinstein backlash that The Cider House Rules walks away empty handed (but also, it’s hard to spot the CiderHeads out there holding up their case for it’s continued esteem). Being backed by a young studio looking for a win, Dreamworks marched out the American Beauty team to any and every media experience they could, and this market saturation really stuck with Oscar voters and movie fans.

Besides the arguments of American Beauty as a subpar work of art compared to the innovations of The Matrix or Magnolia, or it being the result of a broken campaign system, a frequent knock against it is how frivolous it feels. The events of history weren’t kind to American Beauty; by late 2001, upper middle class disaffection seemed inessential in a world shocked by the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Immediately meaningful artwork tended to focus on films whose sentiment echoed heroics and the steadfast resolution of the American spirit. The complexities and imperfections of modern American life are still mostly avoided by Oscar voters, with Alexander Payne’s The Descendants being the next movie that closest echoes that unflinching look at unsatisfied family life. It’s unflattering anthropology of the pre-housing crisis bourgeois - a way of American life all at once so far gone and yet in need of cinematic preservation.