Where Dreams are Born // Haley Joel Osment

Over the past seven years, Haley has been nominated for over 30 awards and has come away with 20 of them. These awards range from winning Breakthrough Male Performance at the MTV Movie Awards in 2000 to the highly accredited Oscars where he was nominated for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. Most of these awards and nominations come from Osment's last three big motion pictures: The Sixth Sense, Pay it Forward, and A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

One of the most memorable years for Osment was, of course, the year he was a part of one of the biggest and best blockbuster hits of all time, The Sixth Sense. After lasting many weeks in the number one spot at the box office, and even more in the top ten, it was beginning to look like an obvious award contender, not to mention a classic. When the time came for the Oscar nominations to be released, ironically enough, it was nominated for SIX Academy Awards, with Haley being nominated for the Best Supporting Actor. In my opinion, Haley had easily deserved his nomination, compared to the other contenders who were good all good actors, but nothing could compare to Haley's performance in The Sixth Sense.

The votes were in; Haley lost to Michael Caine from The Cider House Rules. How could this happen? I really don't have a single clue, but it really showed the true Academy's position and their seemingly endless biased decisions. I also believe Michael Caine felt the same way when he won the award. He knew Haley was just as deserving, if not more deserving, for the award. So Caine paid his own tribute to Haley during his speech while he accepted the award, as it should have been, and I give much credit to Mr. Caine for that and his performance.

Pay It Forward brought Haley one more nomination and one more win to add to his rightly deserved resume. These two were the Blockbuster Entertainment Award and a nomination for the Young Artist Award. Pay It Forward became another step in the right direction for Haley, and afterwards, brought him to his latest masterpiece in his hopefully ongoing career, A.I. Although being a huge fan of A.I. myself, I have to honestly say it was not as widely accepted across the US as well as his previous films, The Sixth Sense and Pay It Forward. At least, not widely recognized until it came time for the annual Saturn Awards presented by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films. After the release of this year's award winners, I have to say these guys really know their stuff. Four of these awards went to A.I., and one of these four went to Osment. He won the same award he won for The Sixth Sense, Best Younger Actor. The Oscars, however, completely disregarded A.I., what a surprise. After six nominations and not one award to The Sixth Sense, it was inevitable they wouldn't justly reward A.I. as one of the best films of the year.

Some people tell me "Jeeze, Joe, you're crazy and even overly obsessed with these three Osment movies and mainly movies in general". Well, those people are right, and I plan to keep it this way in the quest to spread my never-ending knowledge ;-). Now that I'm done rambling, I hope this has changed some of your views on Haley, his movies, and hopefully even the Academy of Motion Pictures (their many evil ways).