It was a Beautiful night at the Academy Awards, but the Irish went home empty-handed. Whoopi Goldberg was only half-joking when she used to quip that she and Hattie McDaniel were the Hollywood blacklist. Her point was that they were the only two black women ever to win acting Oscars in the chequered history of the Academy Awards.
Both had won in the best supporting actress category - McDaniel for Gone With the Wind, in 1939, and Goldberg for Ghost, in 1990. Black men had not fared much better, taking only four acting Oscars over the 73 years of the awards, and only one had ever won for a leading role - Sidney Poitier for Lilies in the Field, back in 1963.
The 74th Academy Awards ceremony, held at the new Kodak Theatre, in Hollywood, on Sunday night - the early hours of the morning on this side of the Atlantic - will go down in history, not for bestowing four major awards on the overestimated A Beautiful Mind, but for increasing by a third the number of Oscars for black actors, tripling the number they have received for leading roles.
It all happened in the space of 15 minutes, towards the end of the over-extended show, when Halle Berry was named best actress for Monster's Ball and Denzel Washington followed her to the podium to accept the best actor Oscar for Training Day. It was appropriate that their victories occurred on a night when Whoopi Goldberg was the presenter of the Oscar show and a special award was presented to Sidney Poitier.
The awards to Berry, Washington and Poitier provided some of the few high points in a turgid ceremony. Introducing Poitier, Washington pertinently noted that black actors used to be relegated to supporting roles so that they could be cut out in certain parts of the US, and how all that began to change as Poitier broke through into leading roles, becoming an inspiration to all black actors. Poitier was dignified and unsentimental in his direct and thoughtful acceptance speech, as was Washington himself when he took the best actor Oscar for his sturdy cast-against-type performance as a corrupt Los Angeles detective in Training Day.
Berry briefly electrified the static proceedings, when Russell Crowe opened the envelope and declared her best actress for Monster's Ball - which, inexplicably, is not due for release here until June. She movingly portrays a troubled and impoverished young woman who tentatively becomes involved with the executioner of her criminal husband. This category was one of the most keenly contested this year, with Sissy Spacek, Nicole Kidman and Berry all regarded as firm contenders, and Berry looked shell-shocked when her name was announced. Bursting into tears, she staggered to the stage and finally found the words to dedicate her award to "every faceless woman of colour, who now has a chance, given that this door has been opened".
It was a special moment of rare emotional spontaneity in a ceremony more noted for phoniness and platitudes. It only faltered towards the end when Berry dragged out her speech by thanking her lawyers and agents.
There was no good news on the night for the Irish nominees. About an hour into the show came the category of best sound, where the Florida-based Belfast native, Peter Devlin, was a nominee for Pearl Harbor. However, the award went to Black Hawk Down, which also took the prize for best film editing.
Halfway through the third hour of the ceremony, Irish nominees were back in the arena with two of the five shortlisted places for best animated short film - Cathal Gaffney and Darragh O'Connell for Give Up Yer Aul Sins, and Ruairi Robinson and Seamus Byrne for Fifty Percent Grey. Reading out the nominees, Naomi Watts, the Australian star of Mulholland Drive, mispronounced the names Ruairi and Cathal, and went on to announce that the award had gone to the hi-tech Pixar company, the market leaders in computer animation, for their engaging For the Birds. However, the Irish nominees can be very proud to have gone so far in the Oscars, an achievement remarkable for a country with such a small and under-resourced animation industry.
Ireland's best prospects of an Oscar this year always rested on Enya, and her co-writers, Nicky and Roma Ryan, for May It Be from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and the consensus was that she stood a strong chance against the favourites for that award, Sting and Paul McCartney. But, as often happens at the Oscars, there are old debts to be repaid, and this year it was Randy Newman's turn finally to win after 16 nominations, even though it was for the weakest of this year's five best song nominees, If I Didn't Have You from Monsters Inc.
The Fellowship of the Ring had gone into the ceremony with the highest number of nominations - 13, just one short of the record shared by All About Eve and Titanic, and had there been a groundswell of support for the film, Enya's prospects would have been formidable.
The evening started well for the epic Tolkein adaptation, the first in the trilogy directed by Peter Jackson, and it took four craft awards - cinematography, visual effects, make-up and music score. But, despite a lavish and vastly expensive promotional campaign waged over the past three months, it failed to figure when the major Oscar categories were decided, confirming that the Academy voters are reluctant to bestow its most high-profile awards on fantasy or science-fiction films. In 1977, Star Wars, an even bigger popular success, went home with seven Oscars, but all of them in technical categories. Peter Jackson and his team have two more shots at the major awards when the second and third parts of the trilogy are released over the next two Decembers, but the odds seem stacked against them.
A Beautiful Mind, the movie which took the major prize on Sunday night, the best picture Oscar, is much more in line with the Academy's taste - a would-be inspirational drama, celebrating the triumph of the human spirit, as it follows the struggle of the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, John Forbes Nash Jr, against schizophrenia.
The movie seemed tailor-made for Oscar acclaim, given the penchant of the voters for films dealing with mentally or physically disabled characters - Forrest Gump, Rain Man, Shine, My Left Foot, to name but a few recent examples. And it survived a smear campaign which got dirtier as the closing date for Oscar ballots approached last week, as the makers fought off charges that it conveniently elided the information that Nash had homosexual affairs and a child out of wedlock, that he and his wife had parted and then reunited, and that he allegedly made anti-Semitic remarks. In fact, it may well be that the astute handling of those charges by the film's producers and studio financiers transformed the movie into a sympathy candidate in the end.
The film also received the best director award for Ron Howard, who has been in show business since he was three years old, and who smoothly made the transition from child star to a director of popular middlebrow fare. A Beautiful Mind also won in the best adapted screenplay category, for writer Akiva Goldsman, formerly best known for churning out the likes of Batman and Robin and Lost in Space.
The movie's fourth and most deserving award went to Jennifer Connelly, for her impressive portrayal of Nash's wife, Alicia. It is notable, too, that Connelly - like Jim Broadbent, who was named best supporting actor for playing John Bayley in Iris - certainly benefited from being strategically positioned in the supporting category, even though the roles played by her and by Broadbent were substantial enough for them to be in the more competitive leading role categories.
The dark horse of the evening, Moulin Rouge, which had eight nominations, only managed to canter home in two categories - costume design and art direction - both of which were accepted by Catherine Martin, who is married to the film's director, Baz Luhrmann.
One of the most fancied entries, Amelie, entered the evening with five nominations and seemed the sure-shot for the best foreign-language film Oscar, but was pipped at that post by the topical and acerbic Bosnian anti-war satire, No Man's Land.
Going into the ceremony with seven nominations, Robert Altman's Gosford Park received just one award - best original screenplay for actor and writer Julian Fellowes. And there was no joy on the night for the US independent productions, In the Bedroom, Memento and Mulholland Drive.
The Oscar show itself certainly does not merit any awards this year. There were no outrageous gaffes or embarrassments, as there have been in previous years, but they would have been welcome ingredients to enliven a generally dull and plodding ceremony, which rarely caught fire and long outstayed its welcome by running an unwieldy and mind-numbing four hours and 20 minutes.
It seems like Hollywood will never get the message that less is more.
