Good Things Come In Groups of THREE

Well… it’s over.

The 76th Annual Academy Awards have officially wrapped and it is a clean sweep:

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) took ALL 11 of its nominations home. That makes it the 3rd film in history to win 11 awards, tying up with Titanic (1997) and Ben Hur (1959) for the most Oscar wins of any one movie. It also became the first film since The Last Emperor to win all of its nominations straight up.

My ‘Thank You’ to the Academy is simply for the fact that they chose at last to honor the Trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien, and perhaps most importantly, the genre of Fantasy with a Best Picture Award.

In other fascinating movie news: The Passion of the Christ raked in $23.6 million in its first day, and nearly $3 million in special pre-screenings on Monday and Tuesday were added to that to bring it up to $26.6 million. That is the new benchmark for February, the best opening day for a non-weekend, non-holiday week and the 3rd highest Wednesday opening ever along with being the 9th highest opening day ever. The film was predicted by box office analysts to gain about $110 million for it’s 5 day run, but early estimates put it at $117.5 million. Thus, The Passion ended up with something around $76 million for its opening weekend. At this rate it is slated to become Mel Gibson’s highest grossing film ever. The last movie he was in you may remember was Signs, which ended up grosssing a total of $228 million in its entire run.

Arbitrary monetary numbers, awards, pitiful little people doling out little honorary trophies to each other – it has been a good day for the movies.