Besieged by screening copies and Hollywood propaganda, Bruce Feirstein reports from LA on the Oscar handicaps:

The conventional wisdom out here is that despite the all-out effort from Miramax to promote Cold Mountain, the Best Picture award this year will go to the final installment of The Lord of the Rings. But on the other hand, I wouldn t put it past the beautiful minds in Hollywood to start an old-fashioned smear campaign something to the effect that the film producers glossed over the fact that Aragorn was, in actuality, a homophobic bipolar anti-Semite. Not that anybody at Miramax would ever stoop to such a thing, of course.

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