Australia

Set against the scenic backdrop of pre-World War II Australia, Baz Luhrmann's romantic period adventure stars Nicole Kidman as an English aristocrat who inherits a sprawling ranch, and Hugh Jackman as the rough-and-tumble cattle driver who helps protect her property from greedy English cattle ...more

Stupendously awful on an epic scale, Australia shows how many ways a silly spin on a straightforwardly simple story can go fabulously wrong. Director/co-writer Baz Luhrmann may not have been able to figure out whether he was making a romantic comedy, a gritty Western, a treatise on racial tolerance, or a war-drama tearjerker. But he apparently decided that the one element this frustratingly misbegotten concoction desperately needed to hold it together was a whole lotta camp. That approach ...more

It may interest readers to know that, for certain prominent movie databases, it is the official editorial position that the genre of "epic" be applied sparingly -- and almost never for new movies. This makes enough sense if you think about it: the great equalizer of CGI has changed the playing field, and there's no longer a feeling of grandness in the casts of thousands and exotic locales that once made movies like The Ten Commandments and Lawrence of Arabia live up to their classification. That ...more

Australia
Nominee - 81st Oscars®:
Achievement in Costume Design