Now Showing: March 29, 2001

Now Showing
Candid Reviews of Movies Just Hitting The Big Screen

What’s It All Mean?
The Oscars Improve By Degrees
By Cole Smithey

If you skipped the oppressively amateurish and vacuous red carpet dialogue of Joan and Melissa Rivers, you had a pretty clear shot at enjoying the world’s biggest awards show. The 73rd Annual Academy Awards ceremony hit a new watermark in streamlined success over its notoriously drawn out proceedings. With its distinct post-modern stage and a host truly qualified for the job, the show ran better than it has in recent years. Gone was Billy Crystal’s opening comic film and dance routine as Steve Martin lit in with a standard issue monologue that was centered as it was funny. Martin set a professionally comic tone for the night’s proceedings that compensated for certain unflattering occurrences such as Dustin Hoffman putting Jack Cardiff’s Honorary Oscar on the floor instead of handing it to the cinematographer for films such as The Red Shoes (1948), and The African Queen (1951).

The Oscar for Best Actress proved to be the most predictable and problematic award of the evening as Julia Roberts (Erin Brockovich) gave a pretentious and juvenile acceptance speech revealing the guile behind her overrated status in Hollywood. Roberts took special glee in making sure hers was the longest speech of the night, further begging the question of why she had won the award over the far superior performance of Ellen Burstyn in Requiem For A Dream. Perhaps if Roberts had carried along a photo of the 15 year-old black and white Valentino dress she wore, she would have better prepared her demeanor to match the elegance of the dress.

One of America’s best kept secrets in acting was liberated, when Marcia Gay Harden won a much deserved Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Jackson Pollock’s wife Lee Krasner in Ed Harris’ Pollock. Harden has long been considered an ‘actor’s actor’ for her inspired stage performances and powerful roles in films like Miller’s Crossing (1990), and Crush (1994).

Hollywood’s predictable sword-and-sandal proclivity allowed Gladiator to sweep awards for Best Picture, Best Actor (Russell Crowe), Sound, Costumes, and for Visual Effects. However mysterious it may have been for the Academy to favor Russell Crowe’s inapt Australian accent representing ancient Rome over Ed Harris’ spot-on rendering of the tortured artist Jackson Pollock, there was solace at least in the fact that Hollywood pet Tom Hanks was also kept in his seat.

The Academy’s acknowledgement of Ang Lee’s masterful Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (awarded for Best Foreign Film, Art Direction, Cinematography, and Original Score) sends a welcoming message to foreign filmmakers. With a widespread strike from actors, directors, and screenwriters looming over Hollywood, its ironic and coincidental that CTHD should make the heaviest impact of any foreign film in the Academy’s history.

Awards to Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, for Supporting Actor (Benicio Del Toro), Adapted Screenplay (Stephen Gaghan), and Film Editing, recognized the best American film to come out in the past year. If there’s one film to eclipse past winners for Best Picture in recent years, it is clearly Traffic.

For all of the critics’ moans about this last year as being one of the ‘worst’ years ever for American films, there was an identification of movies that were involving and groundbreaking. Between Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous (Original Screenplay Award Winner), Requiem For A Dream, Pollock, The Contender (Joan Allen nominated for Best Actress), and Shadow of the Vampire (Willem Dafoe nominated for Best Supporting Actor), lies a richness of cinema experience every bit, if not more, vibrant than last year’s winners American Beauty and Boys Don’t Cry. The majority of films made every year are always bad. What’s significant is that America is finally coming around to taking a more international stand regarding cinema.

For a formulaic program that glorifies everything Hollywood stands for, the Academy Awards show still insists on falling on its face when the stage is handed over to renditions of original songs. If the five musical renditions of the night had been reduced to three, the show would have run smoother. But, as if audiences were charmed by Sting’s lacking vocal ability on “My Funny Friend and Me” (from Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove), the program ground to an uncomfortable halt when even Bob Dylan’s winning song “Things Have Changed” (from Wonder Boys) brought wry laughs from the audience.

This year the Wall Street Journal kept its pecker in its pants by not revealing the top six Oscar winners after last years debacle over their survey article. The Academy Awards is alas a large scale media opportunity for the global public to relish Hollywood’s profoundly skewed assessment of films as art. Steven Soderbergh made the most eloquent acceptance speech of the night by saying that he would thank the people important to him in private, and went on to thank ‘anyone who spends any part of their day creating something.’ With the Irving G. Thalberg Award going to Dino De Laurentis and an Honorary Oscar going to screenwriter Ernest Lehman (a first in Academy history), this year’s Oscars was significant because it showed a new respect for the creative impulses in filmmaking from around the world. When Benicio Del Toro thanked the people of Nogales, Mexico, he eluded to a scale of human interaction that films are built on. Now, if only the Academy will choose competent journalists to man the red carpet segment of next year’s show, we may be getting somewhere.