The year whose name inspired Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic masterpiece was, indeed, an odyssey. A bounty of movies which released and TV series which debuted or continued the previous year, and then lived on through awards season, would become hits and mainstays of the new millennium: Gladiator, Traffic, Billy Elliot, Cast Away, Almost Famous, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Sopranos, The West Wing, ER, Sex and the City, Frasier, and Will & Grace, among many others.
It was a year that promised creativity and exciting, new ideas.
In real life, the latter part of the year was the opposite, as we know.
But, for now, let’s bask in this abundance of gripping stories — and two historic victories. On Sunday, January 21, 2001Benicio del Toro, won a Golden Globe, honored with the Best Supporting Actor statuette for his work in Traffic.

Ang Lee, meanwhile, became the first Asian filmmaker to win two Golden Globes  – Best Director and Best Foreign Language Film (now Best Non-English Language Film) for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which notably also became the first film from Taiwan to be so honored. (Hong Kong’s Chen Kaige was the first Asian director to win a Golden Globe – Farewell My Concubine, 1994)
An intense drama focused on all the aspects of the drug trade, Traffic was a hot movie of the season, especially after the Golden Globes. It held the attention of moviegoers both in the United States and abroad, with a final box office take of over $207 million, coming on only a $46 million budget.

Directed by Steven Soderbergh (double-nominated for Best Director, as part of five nominations for Traffic and four for Erin Brockovich), Traffic featured an impressive Latino cast: Luis Guzmán, Jacob Vargas, Tomas Milian, and Benjamin Bratt, among others. The portorriqueño-born Benicio Monserrate Rafael del Toro Sánchez shone as a Mexican border policeman torn apart in a cauldron of chaos and corruption.
Six years later, del Toro would work again with Soderbergh as Che Guevara in Che, a unique biopic whose two parts, The Argentine and Guerrilla, won del Toro the prize of Best Actor at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon started out in Cannes, too. Debuting out of competition in 2000, Lee’s movie literally brought the audience to its feet. From the festival onward, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, starring Chow Yun-Fat, Michelle Yeoh, and Zhang Ziyi, cut a swath through international markets, introducing the wuxia genre to broader audiences with great commercial success — a groundbreaking first for a film wholly in Chinese.
And it was enthusiastically embraced by the Golden Globes, with composer Tan Dun also receiving a nomination for Best Original Score to go alongside the movie’s aforementioned two awards.
“To me filmmaking is adventurous,” Lee shared with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in October 2000. “The enigmatic paradox of life’s essence, you know. The yin and yang — you need both or you don’t know how to keep the balance.”