Snort:

This is not to say that Return of the King will sweep the board on Oscar night. The film registers a spectacular duck in the acting honours, perhaps because its inhabitants are regarded as heroic archetypes as opposed to flesh-and-blood characters.

Or perhaps because the movies feature some of the most horrifically terrible acting I've ever seen in a major motion picture. Liv Tyler looks like she's always thinking VERY, VERY HARD about her next line; Elijah Wood wandered through the first two movies looking for all the world like he's got the worst case of constipation in his life and is trying to cure it by walking very, very slowly from one end of New Zealand to the other; and Viggo Mortensen is the Joe Millionaire of Middle Earth.

Actually, I'd love to see a conversation between Viggo and Joe Millionare (the original one, of course, not the lightweight from the second series):

"Uh, do you like cheese?"

"Um, yeah, I like cheese."

"Do you want to, uh, go eat some cheese?"

"Yeah, I'll eat some cheese."

"Cool."

"Yeah."

Speaking order doesn't really matter...