The 71st annual Academy Awards ceremony delivered more than a few surprises, as had been anticipated in an unusually open year. With no movie to sweep the board - as Titanic did last year and The English Patient did the year before - the awards were spread more evenly among the front-runners.
It was a night of triumph for the Miramax machine as its publicity operation propelled the ceremony's biggest winner, Shakespeare in Love, and biggest surprise winner, La Vita e Bella, to Oscars success - and even brought one to Harvey Weinstein, the canny supremo of Miramax, at the end of the night when he was one of the five producers to collect a best picture Oscar for Shakespeare in Love.
Further dividends will follow immediately for Weinstein as both these Oscar-winning films reap the whirlwind of awards publicity at the box-office. As both are relatively recent releases, they have the potential for very significantly increased financial returns across the world in the weeks and months ahead, whereas the other main Oscar contender, Saving Private Ryan, first released in the US back in July, has more or less peaked at the international box-office.
While many were surprised Saving Private Ryan was pipped for best picture, it was nevertheless another night of Oscars triumph for Steven Spielberg. The man who only a decade ago was regularly snubbed by the Oscars electorate - because of a perception that he was too successful too soon - is now in his 50s and exuding the gravitas of a Hollywood elder statesman.
Spielberg collected his second directing Oscar (after Schindler's List) for Saving Private Ryan, which received five awards in all. He was executive producer of The Last Days, the film about Holocaust survivors which won the Oscar for best documentary feature. And it was Spielberg who was chosen to introduce the tribute to the recently deceased Stanley Kubrick.
Surprisingly, given his apolitical, establishment image, Spielberg - strategically positioned two rows from the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion - was one of the most conspicuous members of the audience to remain seated when the lethargic ceremony was jolted into life, as Elia Kazan was led on to the stage to receive an honorary Oscar.
According to the citation, this award was given to Kazan "in appreciation of a long, distinguished and unparalleled career during which he has influenced the very nature of film-making through his creation of cinematic masterpieces". However, given that Kazan was awarded the Oscar for direction twice in the past - for Gentleman's Agreement in 1947 and On the Waterfront in 1954 - and that honorary Oscars are usually presented to actors and filmmakers who have been neglected by the Academy, this award was clearly intended as a gesture of forgiveness towards a man who is now 89 and in failing health.
In 1952 Kazan testified against eight colleagues in the radical Group Theatre, among them the playwright and screenwriter Clifford Odets, and named them as Communist sympathisers before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Kazan subsequently took out an advertisement in the New York Times in which he defended his action. The honorary Oscar to Kazan was proposed in January by the Academy president, Karl Malden, who appeared in On the Water- front. The proposal was accepted unanimously by the Academy's board of governors, although at least one governor - the lighting cameraman and director Haskell Wexler, who was denied his US passport for eight years under the blacklist - expressed "very mixed feelings" about the award.
Similarly mixed feelings were expressed by the audience at Sunday's Oscars ceremony. Earlier in the evening, there had been a stony silence when Chris Rock, on stage to present the Oscar for best sound-effects editing, departed from his autocued script to joke: "I saw De Niro backstage, and you better get De Niro away from Kazan because, you know, he hates rats."
Two hours later, Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese came on stage to deliver terse tributes to Kazan, both of them looking a little awkward and fluffing their lines, before presenting Kazan with the honorary Oscar. A palpable chill fell over the auditorium.
Karl Malden was first on his feet to lead a standing ovation, closely followed by Warren Beatty, who was given his first leading role by Kazan in 1960, in Splendor in the Grass. The camera angles made it difficult to tell quite how many joined them in the standing ovation, but it seemed like half the audience remained seated.
Some, like Spielberg and his wife, Kate Capshaw, sat it out stone-faced and politely applauded without discernible enthusiasm. Others, such as Ed Harris, Amy Madigan and Nick Nolte, all seated at the front, positively glared at the Oscar recipient on the stage.
This chilling moment came as a wake-up call almost three hours into a soporific ceremony which dragged on for an all-too over-extended duration of more than four hours. The absence of Billy Crystal as presenter told from the outset: Whoopi Goldberg, who was the compere for the evening, could not compare with Crystal's razor-sharp wit and ease with adlibbing.
Instead, her repertoire of jokes consisted of mostly cringe-inducing puns and such tired material as gags about Monica Lewinsky's dry-cleaning bills. "You're missing Billy just about now, aren't you?," she said early on in the show and she was absolutely right.
The first award of the evening was the first of the night's many surprises when James Coburn, on his first nomination at 70 years of age, was awarded best supporting actor for his searing performance in Affliction. What followed amounted to a seesaw routine involving the front-runners, Shakespeare in Love and Saving Private Ryan, as one took an award and then the other, and so it went until Shakespeare in Love took its total to seven with the final award, best picture, while Saving Private Ryan brought its booty to five Oscars when Spielberg was named best director.
It is unusual for the Academy to split the awards for best film and director between different films, although it has happened twice in the past 20 years - at the 1982 ceremony when Chariots of Fire won for picture and Warren Beatty took the director's award for Reds, and again in 1990 when Driving Miss Daisy took best picture and Oliver Stone was named best director for Born on the Fourth of July.
For just eight dazzling minutes on the screen, Judi Dench well deserved her best supporting actress Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, and her acceptance speech was characteristically dignified and generous. Much later, when that film's star, 26-year-old Gwyneth Paltrow, received the Oscar for best actress, she responded with one of those emotion-swept, thank-you-littered speeches which pass into the folklore of Oscars history. Even Paltrow seemed wholly restrained in comparison to the irrepressible Italian actor, writer and director, Roberto Benigni, who went way over the top, walking over the tops of the seats on his way to the stage when his film, La Vita e Bella, was named best foreign-language film. Benigni bounded on stage, bursting with pride and joy for an effusive speech which began with the declaration: "I want to kiss everybody". There was more of the same when Benigni received the best actor Oscar over Ian McKellen, Nick Nolte and Tom Hanks.
"This is a terrible mistake," he protested unconvincingly, "because I've used up all my English. I'm not able to express all my gratitude. My body is in tumult. I would like to kidnap everybody and lie down in the firmament making love." Benigni's film took a third award when Nicola Piovani got the Oscar for best original dramatic score.
Liam Neeson aptly described Vincent Ward's What Dreams May Come as "an oil painting in motion" when he presented its effects team with the Oscar for best visual effects. The excellent, low-budget Gods and Monsters missed out on its two acting nominations, but was rewarded when its director, Bill Condon, was given the Oscar for best adapted screenplay.
Shaker Kapur's Elizabeth, which went into the ceremony with seven nominations, received a single Oscar, for best make-up, while Terrence Malick's comeback film, The Thin Red Line, which also had seven nominations, received nothing. Nor were there any awards on the night for such notable nominees as Central Station, American History X, Out of Sight, Bulworth, Pleasantville, Hilary & Jackie, Primary Colors, Little Voice, and the evening's most unpardonable omission, Peter Weir's richly imaginative The Truman Show.
