The sprawling 72nd Academy Awards show had just crawled past the four-hour mark when Clint Eastwood took to the stage of the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Sunday night, opened the envelope and declared American Beauty the winner of the major award, Best Picture. This brought the movie's tally to five Oscars, making it the big winner of the night and marking a sea-change in the decisions of the Academy members.
Defying the tradition whereby so many Oscar winners for best picture have been bloated, self-important, period extravaganzas, American Beauty is a mature, thoughtful, and subversive movie which reveals itself as a riveting dark comedy of middle-aged crises, teenage angst, self-delusion and suburban alienation. It's even set in the present.
Dan Jinks, who produced the film with Bruce Cohen, noted in his acceptance speech how their movie "dealt with sex and drugs, blackmail, homophobia, infidelity and suburban dysfunction". He added: "Two years ago, when others were passing on this wonderful script, DreamWorks came up to the plate," and enabled it to go into production.
The five Oscars for American Beauty, and the Best Actress award to Hilary Swank for the even more edgy and daring Boys Don't Cry, helped vindicate the Academy after what was shaping up to be its annus horribilis. Over 4,000 ballot papers intended for California-based voters were diverted by the US postal service to its third-class processing centre. Then 55 Oscar statuettes were stolen, and two days before the ceremony, the Wall Street Journal played spoilsport by publishing its poll of 365 Academy voters and accurately predicted five of the six principal Oscar categories.
If the newspaper makes this unofficial Oscar poll an annual exercise, it will rob the Academy Awards of its crucial surprise element and threaten its status as one of the top-rated television shows of the year in the US. Without the suspense factor, it will prove difficult to sustain interest in an unwieldy and protracted show which long overstayed its welcome this year with a duration of four hours and nine minutes.
"I've just been told this is the shortest Oscars show this century," compere Billy Crystal quipped as he signed off the marathon show. It had kicked off in sparkling style with a zippy, clever and very witty filmed sequence which dropped Crystal in and out of celebrated movie scenes, most amusingly when he appeared in drag as Mrs Robinson in the seduction scene from The Graduate.
The first award went to Topsy-Turvy for Lindy Hemming's costume designs, and that film also took the third prize of the evening, Best Make-up, disappointing the only Irish nominee this year, Michele Burke, who was a strong contender for her work on Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. However, she still holds the distinction of being the only Irish person to win two Oscars, and she is very likely to be back in contention again soon.
The award for best sound went to The Matrix, which was nominated for four Oscars and won all of them - the others were for sound effects editing, visual effects and film editing - giving it the highest tally of the night after American Beauty.
The first acting prize, Best Supporting Actress, went to the hot favourite, Angelina Jolie for Girl, Interrupted, and though very emotional, she eschewed Paltrowesque extremes in accepting the award. Among those she thanked was her father, Jon Voight, who had won the Best Actor Oscar for Coming Home in 1978.
Next came the best of the (too) many set-pieces which would follow, the history of the past 2,000 years as depicted in movies and assembled in chronological order by Chuck Workman in a dazzling edited compilation of clips. Ireland was represented by a glimpse of Michael Collins.
There was a surprise when Phil Collins won best song for You'll Be in My Heart from Tarzan, pipping the favourite, Randy Newman's Toy Story 2 song; from 13 Oscar nominations to date, Newman has yet to win one. Another surprise followed when the much-fancied The Buena Vista Social Club lost out in best documentary to One Day in September, dealing with the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.
The best acceptance speech of the night followed when a dignified and deeply moved Michael Caine collected his second Best Supporting Actor Oscar for The Cider House Rules, having won in 1986 for Hannah and Her Sisters. Caine graciously paid full tribute to his four fellow nominees, all much younger than him, adding: "I'm what I hope you'll be - a survivor."
JANE Fonda returned to the Hollywood spotlight when she presented the first of the night's two honorary awards, to the gifted Polish filmmaker, Andrzej Wajda, whose finest work (A Generation, Ashes and Diamonds, Man of Iron, Man of Marble) has been marked by political urgency and a profound humanity. Wajda spoke in Polish during his brief acceptance speech.
Another universally popular winner was the exuberant Spanish director, Pedro Almodovar, who deservedly won the Best Foreign-language Film Oscar for All About My Mother, and the award was presented by Antonio Banderas, ovar gave who got his first break in movies from Almodovar.
After the award for original music went to John Corigliano for The Red Violin and Ric Heinrichs won Best Art Direction for Sleepy Hollow, Edward Norton introduced the roll of those who died in the past 12 months.
The walkaway winner of the night's Worst Haircut award, Jack Nicholson spoke eloquently as he presented the honorary Irving Thalberg award to his good friend, Warren Beatty, one of Hollywood's shrewdest and most adventurous film-makers and actors.
"If I had a choice between the Thalberg award and the White House, I'd choose this," Beatty said, referring to his political ambitions. He described his actress wife, Annette Bening, as his "treasure". The evening's only moment of controversy came when John Irving received the Best Adapted Screenplay award for The Cider House Rules, based on his own novel and featuring a character whose opposition to abortion melts in certain circumstances. There was a collective deep intake of breath when Irving thanked the Academy for "this award to a film on an abortion subject" and dedicated it to "everyone at Planned Parenthood and the Abortion Rights League".
Finally, three hours and 22 minutes into the show, American Beauty received its first Oscar when Best Cinematography went to its veteran cinematographer, Conrad L. Hall, and shortly afterwards Alan Ball took the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for the same film.
"He's had nine espressos," Billy Crystal warned as Roberto Benigni bounded on stage to present the Oscar for best actress. "I wish I possessed a tail I could wag to demonstrate my joy," Benigni declared. It was not to be a night of double joy for Annette Bening and Warren Beatty, though, and the award went to the 25-year-old Hilary Swank for her intense, gutsy portrayal of a young woman who courts terrible danger when she begins to dress and act like a young man in Boys Don't Cry.
"You probably all remember how wimpy I was (last year)," Gwyneth Paltrow commented as she presented the Best Actor Oscar, for which Denzel Washington had been strongly tipped for The Hurricane. But the award went to Kevin Spacey for Ameri- can Beauty. A stunned Spacey - who won Best Supporting Actor in 1995 for The Usual Suspects - dedicated the award to "the man who inspired my performance, my friend and mentor, Jack Lemmon".
The ceremony was reaching the four-hour mark when Steven Spielberg presented the Best Director Oscar to the 34-year-old English director, Sam Mendes - who modestly described himself as "a bloke from English theatre" - for his first film, American Beauty, and that film collected its fifth Oscar when the show concluded with presentation of the Best Picture award.
With American Beauty and The Matrix between them taking nine of the 18 awards for which they were eligible, many of the most heavily nominated movies left the ceremony empty-handed, among them The Insider (which had seven nominations), The Sixth Sense (six), The Talented Mr Ripley (five), The Green Mile (four), Magnolia, Being John Malkovich and The Phantom Menace (three each), and The End of the Affair, Music of the Heart and Sweet and Lowdown (two each).
The good news for readers tuning into the Oscar highlights show on Network 2 at 8 p.m. tomorrow night is that it has been edited down from four hours and nine minutes to one hour and 45 minutes.
