On the eve of the 74th annual
award celebration of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the
Hollywood hills were alive with the sound of discordant music. Indeed, I can’t
remember a year when the competition was so overloaded with negativity, mostly
directed at the alleged sins of omission in the loosely biographical
A Beautiful Mind . One would have
thought we were in the midst of a Presidential campaign, particularly when some
journalists virtually demanded that academy voters redress the shameful history
of discrimination against African-American movie performers by voting in Denzel
Washington as best actor and Halle Berry as best actress. (Poor Will Smith was
considered out of the running for his Ali .)
Contributing to the unusual tension of the evening was the academy’s
decision to shift the proceedings to a new venue in a Hollywood shopping mall
on the very year that 9/11 dictated security precautions reportedly more
stringent than those applied to President Bush’s visit to perilous Peru. This
played havoc with the small businesses in the Hollywood area, not to mention
the hordes of celebrity-worshipers accustomed to sleeping overnight on or near
the public bleachers so as to get a closer look at the begowned and bejeweled
deities passing by. There was also a comical scrambling for tickets to an
auditorium with 900 fewer seats than last year’s. Another source of incipient
panic was the difficulty anticipated by invited partygoers to pass easily from
one post-Oscar bash to another, not to mention the virtual impossibility of
uninvited people with the requisite chutzpah to crash their way in for free
drinks.
For me, the Oscars are simply a televised spectacle signifying that
2001 is over at last and that, as a consequence, we can begin thinking about
the movies of 2002 more seriously. At least that’s what went through my mind as
I prepared the refreshments for my vigil in front of the television set.
Nothing I had anticipated from my years of Oscar-watching prepared me, however,
for the explosive emotionalism that lay in store. The proceedings went on too
long, as usual-well past midnight-but the technical slickness of the spectacle
made the evening much more bearable than usual. For a time, I thought the
academy had followed my suggestion, indeed my heartfelt plea, that the
nominated songs be eliminated from the show, at least as spaced-out production
numbers. The academy didn’t go that far, but it did group all the nominated
songs together in a single medley that made the overall musical mediocrity more
bearable.
In its first award, for best
supporting actress, the academy ran true to form in honoring Jennifer Connelly
from A Beautiful Mind with what I
have designated as the Eva Marie Saint award. Ms. Saint won in 1954 as best
supporting actress in On the Waterfront
for what would normally be considered a lead role as Marlon Brando’s love
interest. Since then, producers have been cheating like mad in assigning lower
categories to female performers to steal an easy Oscar win for the publicity
department.
Readers of the column may recall that I advised them in a previous
contemplation of the Oscars to keep an eye on the film editing award, which I
described as an “adhesive” category that said more about the voters’ attitudes
toward the picture than about the little-understood technical process itself.
At the time, I thought the contest was between A Beautiful Mind and The Lord
of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring ; hence, whichever of the two
nominated films won for editing could be on its way to a sweep. So what wins? Black Hawk Down . Not to worry, I said to
myself; this only means that the voters are going to spread the awards around.
As it turned out, The Lord of the Rings was
limited to four minor technical awards for cinematography, original score,
makeup and visual effects, while A
Beautiful Mind walked off with four major awards: adapted screenplay,
director, supporting actress and ultimately best picture. Many Hollywood
observers and some unofficial polls of academy voters had made The Lord of the Rings a virtual shoo-in.
Besides, its 13 nominations made it a strong favorite through tradition.
But the voters weren’t buying. The real tip-off was the upset victory of
Jim Broadbent in Iris over the
favored (even by me) Ian McKellen in The
Lord of the Rings . The victories of Moulin
Rouge for costumes and art direction further eroded the prospects of The Lord of the Rings in the overall
award count. Still, Moulin Rouge did
not seem to have much of a chance when Whoopi Goldberg opened her Mistress of
Ceremonies gig with a devastating takeoff of Nicole Kidman’s swinging descent
into the leering males of the audience in Moulin
Rouge.
Ms. Goldberg then proceeded to rip apart the whole Hollywood community
with barbed one-liners. Eventually she plumbed the depths with a tasteless
reverse-racist routine at the expense of Robert Redford, who had just walked
off the stage with a special Oscar for his total career-and this after the
now-venerable Sidney Poitier had received a thunderous standing ovation for his special lifetime-achievement award,
and just before Halle Berry and Denzel Washington made a sweep of their own as
best actress and best actor in what was turning out to be white-guilt night at
the Oscars.
Actually, it was strange that A
Beautiful Mind was chosen as best picture with by far the best thing about
it-Russell Crowe’s performance-being rejected; obviously the rumors about the
real John Nash being anti-Semitic had backfired.
Mr. Crowe was being punished for something else entirely, though not perhaps
punished so much as considered expendable in the rush to honor Mr. Washington
for an uneven performance in a thoroughly muddled movie. Indeed, I wonder how
many academy voters had actually seen Training
Day when they cast their votes for Mr. Washington. Only the foreign-film
category
requires the voter to prove that he or she has seen all the films in the
category
before making a choice.
Halle Berry’s award was
something else again, as her almost frighteningly hysterical acceptance speech
indicated. It reminded me of nothing so much as the hysterics she displayed so
frequently in Monster’s Ball . I had
seen her on the Barbara Walters show before the Oscars, and the story she tells
about her life is both fascinating and moving, and we could see it all
re-enacted in her acceptance breakdown, with her ever-supportive white mother
and her husband lending her all the support they could from their seats in the
first row.
On a lighter note, the
unexpected appearance of Woody Allen to introduce Nora Ephron’s short montage
of New York in the movies with one of his casual stand-up routines did not
quite bring down the house, but was one of many reminders throughout the night
that we’re all supposed to still be recovering from 9/11. Mr. Allen made a kind
of pitch for people to return to New York to make movies, and then he announced
his own current project in a comically apologetic tone.
Actually, the funniest thing I
heard all evening came from the lips of Kate Winslet as she was being
interviewed on the red carpet before the Oscars by a particularly fatuous
announcer who kept pestering her about how comfortable she felt in her red designer
dress. I thought I heard her say in response, “Well, I wouldn’t want to pee in
it.” The announcer went positively ashen and hurriedly ushered her away. I
loved her more than ever, and am still sorry that she didn’t win the Oscar for
best supporting actress in Iris . But
there were compensations in the victories of Shrek as best animated film, No
Man’s Land as best foreign film, and Julian Fellowes for best original
screenplay for Gosford Park . Mr.
Fellowes struck an unexpectedly sweet and unforced note when he thanked us
Americans for being kind to foreigners like him, and concluded with a heartfelt
“God bless America.”
It was that kind of night, and
somehow I liked it.
A Post-Oscars Remedy:
Budd Boetticher Revival
Budd Boetticher (1916-2001)
never came close to being considered for an Oscar, and perhaps that’s just as
well. For a director of westerns, toreador tales and other forms of action
melodrama, the slightest inflation of production values and social pretensions
would have destroyed the lean grace of the six “program” westerns being
screened from March 26 to April 4 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center at the
Walter Reade Theatre (70 Lincoln Center Plaza, 496-3809).
I recommend all six films not
only as first-rate genre entertainment, but also as unostentatiously lyrical
morality fables with a single steadfast and chivalrous hero (Randolph Scott),
an archetype with different plot names, strategies and objectives. Ideally, one
should see all six westerns as variations on a theme, but if I were forced to
pick and choose in order of preference, it would go something like this:
1. Comanche Station (1960), 74 min., March 30, 8:45 p.m.; April 4, 1
p.m.
2 . Seven Men from Now ( 1956), 78 min., March 29, 7:15 p.m.; April 2,
6:30 p.m.
3. The Tall T (1957), 78 min., April 2, 8:15 p.m.; March 29, 3:45 and
9 p.m.
4. Ride Lonesome (1959), 73 min., March 29, 2 and 5:30 p.m.; March
31, 8:45 p.m.
5. Decision at Sundown (1957), 77 min., March 30, 7 p.m.; April 2, 4:30
p.m.
6. Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), 78 min., March 31, 7 p.m.; April 2,
2:30 p.m.; April 4, 3 p.m.
