LotR Named Film of the Year
Staff Reporter

LOS ANGELES (Reuters): The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was named best picture of the year as the American Film Institute (AFI) on Saturday night chose its first batch of winners in a new Hollywood awards stop on the road to the Oscars next March.

Elijah Wood, who played Frodo the Hobbit, was at the three-hour show telecast nationally by CBS, but few other of the night's big stars joined him.

Billed as Hollywood's first significant awards show of the year and seeking to grab attention from the better known Golden Globes, the AFI awards got off to a shaky start and to backstage jokes that it should have been renamed "The MIA Awards".

Sissy Spacek was named AFI's actress of the year for her searing performance as the angry, grieving mother in In The Bedroom. Denzel Washington was named best actor for his work as the rogue cop in Training Day.

Spacek, one of the few major stars who attended the ceremony at the posh Beverly Hills Hotel, declared "What a wonderful honour".

Washington was missing, as was Robert Altman, named best director for his film attacking the British class system, Gosford Park.

Samuel L Jackson, who accepted the award for Washington, joked, "You can find (Altman's) and Denzel's awards at my house."

Nevertheless, it is better to win than to lose and the awards to Spacek, Washington and Lord of the Rings give them big boosts as Hollywood heads into a series of award primaries that lead up to show business' biggest election, the Oscars.

But Robert Shaye, executive producer of the New Zealand-filmed Lord of the Rings declined to speculate too much about his film's chance of being named best film of the year at the Oscars.

"I am a little superstitious. If you look at something too hard it just slips away," he told reporters back stage. But later he quipped, "Well. I am a member of the Academy and I am going to vote for it."

The AFI awards, given to both films and television programmes, come just two weeks before the show that used to traditionally start the awards season - the more exuberant and better-attended Golden Globes, which are handed out on January 20 by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.