There has been a lot of superior smirking over the recent performance of Gwyneth Paltrow as she received her Oscar for best actress. Ms Paltrow launched into a very embarrassing blubbery speech, thanking family and friends and even dead cousins, though despite all the sobbing, no tears actually stained her silk Ralph Lauren dress.
We were also treated to the much more amusing spectacle of double-Oscar winner Roberto Benigni clambering over the chairs and distinguished guests, bounding across the stage and thanking the whole world, and in particular his family ("for the greatest gift of all - poverty"). He publicly declared his passion for Sophia Loren - who presented his best actor award - and replied to a bemused American reporter regarding the seat-clambering, "I let my body do what it wants. When you are in love, you cannot organise your body."
On this side of the Atlantic we generally regard such performances with anything from mild distaste to horror. The typical Oscar acceptance speeches do not reflect the sort of sentiments expressed on stage when the winners are announced at the Rose of Tralee Festival, the Feis Ceoil, the Eurovision Song Contest or the Crufts Dog Show. No. In Ireland, England and right across northern Europe we are more demure, dignified, reserved. If we must be publicly honoured, we smile gratefully, pay brief tributes, accept our gongs graciously, imply (but not too strongly) that all other contenders were equally good, vacate the stage and perhaps then indulge in modest celebrations. We prefer to leave it to others to carry out our more uninhibited celebrations for us.
But it is peculiar in Ireland that when it comes to the business of accepting awards, we display more traditional British reserve than Mediterranean passion or American effusiveness. It is peculiar because we usually hate to be confused with the Brits (for all the old reasons) and regularly express pride in our Mediterranean attachments as well as our historical links with the US. Why then, as award-winners under the spotlight, are we such a prissy, uptight, sober bunch? Have we perhaps underestimated the Nordic element in our make-up?
It was interesting to hear Englishman Tom Stoppard admitting, on winning his Oscar, that while keeping a stiff upper lip he nevertheless "felt like Roberto Benigni underneath". It was even more satisfying to see the Italian media going mad with pride after Benigni got his two Oscars. Sophia Loren said that Benigni's achievement would change the image of Italy, "which people still associate only with pizza, spaghetti and the Mafia." (The actress modestly omitted herself, along with Gina Lollobrigida and the Pope). And yet sophisticated urban Italians have long turned up their noses at Benigni, whom they regard as a bit of a clown, forgetting that Italy is justifiably famous for its production of clowns through the ages, not even counting Mussolini. This pseudo-sophistication cannot be just an urban thing. Nowhere is more urban than Los Angeles, spiritual home to the Oscars.
But European cultural unity, and unity of cultural response, are clearly going to take a long time. Right now, France is in a cultural spin with the recent spate of scandals involving sex, fraud and nepotism which has, as one newspaper put it, "catapulted France into a struggle between Gallic flamboyance and northern European rectitude. "
We are talking of course about the dreadful Edith Cresson, and sleaze allegations against President Chirac and France's most senior judge, Roland Dumas. The French are all for grandeur and hauteur, having invented both words, and they make enormous allowances for misdemeanours at high levels; but they don't like one of their representatives making a fool of himself or herself on the international stage. The traditional Gallic shrug - which French children are taught in school at a very early age - is no answer to these most recent scandals. The French now know that internationally, Roland Dumas is perceived as an idiot, and as a result of the recent EU debacle, Edith Cresson is revealed to all of Europe as the vainglorious grande dame she has always been.
We Irish can hardly aspire to the heights of French sophistication, but we have caught up a lot in recent times, with our various tribunals revealing all kinds of sleaze, fraud and nepotism, though there is still a long way to go on the sex front. We are not quite part of what the French journalist Christine Ockrent has scorned as the "rigid, Protestant culture that is dominant in Europe" but no doubt that is because there are so few Protestants among us. And if we never had hauteur, at least we had Haughey.