THE 69th annual Academy Awards ceremony, held at the Shrine Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles on Monday night, was one of the most entertaining shows in the event's recent history and one of the most satisfactory in terms of its outcome.
There was no Hollywood tosh like Forrest Gump to sweep the board, no overrated talent like Sally Field collecting an unwarranted second Oscar, and no longevity awards for performers passed over in the past.
Quality won out time and again at the ceremony with well-deserved awards going to Frances McDormand, Billy Bob Thornton and Joel and Ethan Coen. And the night was a triumph for Anthony Minghella's film of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, a book once widely regarded as unfilmable, which swept the board to take home nine Oscars, a total matched or surpassed by only four other movies: Ben-Hur, which still holds the record with 11 Oscars, West Side Story with 10, and Gigi and The Last Emperor with nine apiece.
The English Patient took the Oscars for best picture, director, supporting actress (Juliette Binoche), cinematography, original dramatic score, costume design, art direction, film editing and sound. As Andrew Lloyd Webber joked when he and Tim Rice received the best original song award for You Must Love Me from Evita: "Thank heavens there wasn't a song in The English Patient."
With the Hollywood studios taking just one principal award - best supporting actor to Cuba Gooding jnr for Jerry Maguire - independent productions had a field day. Their achievements were played down by observers who pointed out that most of those independent companies are owned by the Hollywood studios - Miramax, which had a glorious night taking 12 Oscars, including the nine for The English Patient, was acquired some years ago by Disney; Fine Line Features, which released Shine in the US, is owned by Warner Bros; and Grammercy, the US distributor of Fargo, is part of the PolyGram empire.
However, the facts remain that one major studio, 20th Century Fox, withdrew from The English Patient because director Anthony Minghella would not replace some of his chosen cast with better-known Hollywood names such as Demi Moore, and that it is as inconceivable Disney would make as intricately structured and uncompromising a movie as Minghella's, as that Warners would have made Shine. And Fargo was produced by Working Title, a London-based company enjoying its second consecutive Oscar success after Dead Man Walking last year.
The other hotly disputed topic of the evening was the claim that the evening was some kind of landmark for the British film industry. Certainly, British talent did remarkably well in the nominations - especially in the best actress category where three of the five nominees were British, although that award eventually went to an American, Frances McDormand. And indeed, among the British winners on the night were director Anthony Minghella and art director Stuart Craig for The English Patient, Lloyd Webber and Rice with the best song Oscar, and Rachel Portman whose victory in the best musical or comedy score for Emma makes her the first woman ever to win an Oscar for composing a musical score. But it is more than stretching a point to describe The English Patient as a British film.
Its substantial budget was raised in the US, it is based on a book by a Canadian, none of it was filmed in Britain, it was photographed by an Australian and features an Americana and a Frenchwoman in two of its four leading roles. The only key British creative talents involved are writer-director Minghella and actors Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas. One might as well describe Interview With The Vampire as an Irish movie because its writer-director (Neil Jordan) and one of its stars (Stephen Rea) are Irish.
"No one knows who's going to go home with an Oscar," commented compere Billy Crystal at the outset. "The only one who's sure to wake up with a statue is Tipper Gore." Crystal was dropped digitally into clips of the Oscar-nominated movies before bounding on stage to the first of the night's many standing ovations. The audience was clearly glad to see Crystal back as master of ceremonies after a three-year absence.
The first award of the evening was that best supporting actor to Cuba Gooding jnr for Jerry Maguire, and his acceptance speech was as flamboyant and exuberant as his performance in the movie, setting a sprightly pace for the show which ran for three hours and 35 minutes - exactly as long as last year's ceremony. Next came art direction and costume design, both going to The English Patient, and it looked like Minghella's movie was on a roll.
When Madonna came on to sing You Must Love Me, Crystal commented that she showed "a great deal of class" for turning up to sing it even though her own performance in Evita was not nominated, and the camera cut pointedly to Barbra Streisand in the audience - Streisand had declined to sing her composition, I Finally Found Someone, from The Mirror Has Two Faces for which she failed to be nominated as writer, producer, director or leading actress.
Streisand's movie did seem certain to pick up one Oscar best supporting actress for Lauren Bacall, who had never been nominated for an Oscar in the past. But when Kevin Spacey opened the envelope, he announced that Juliette Binoche had won for The English Patient, sending shockwaves through the auditorium while Bacall bravely pretended to be pleased: her companion looked as if he was going to fall out of his seat.
The unspeakable Beavis and Butthead presented sound-effects editing to The Ghost And The Darkness and Courtney Love gave the make-up prize to The Nutty Professor. Dreamworks SKG, the new Spielberg-Katsenberg-Geffen company, took its first Oscar, best live action short for Dear Diary, and best animated short film went to Quest, which won best European short film at the Cork Film Festival last year and was shown on the opening night of the Dublin festival this month.
Julie Andrews presented a well-earned honorary Oscar to the gifted choreographer, Michael Kidd, and Celine Dion, a last-minute stand-in for the ailing Natalie Cole sang Streisand's song, I Finally Found Someone, reading from the lyric sheet.
In the documentary awards, Breathing Lessons, dealing with the life and work of the paralysed writer, Mark O'Brien won best short film, and best feature went to Leon Gast's superb When We Were Kings - which chronicles Muhammad Ali's 1974 Rumble In The Jungle with George Foreman in Zaire - and there were emotional scenes as the two boxers took to the stage.
The box-office blockbuster, Independence Day, received its sole award of the evening - for visual effects - before being overtaken by The English Patient for best sound. In a tribute to film editing, Michael Flatley and his dancers did a vigorous routine while a collage of clips rolled on screens behind them, and the editing award itself went to The English Patient, now well and truly on a roll with five awards from its first five categories.
It won again for dramatic score, and again for cinemntography. Seven out of seven. And its veteran producer, Saul Zeantz, added to the haul when he was presented with the honorary Irving Thalberg Award for his achievements as a producer. "My cup is full," said Zaentz at the end of his dignified acceptance speech.
The best foreign language film Oscar went to the charming Kolya, the third Czech movie to win that prize, and we were down to the last six awards of the night. Could The English Patient go all the way and win five of them? Next up was best adapted screenplay, for which Anthony Minghella was the firm favourite, but the spell was broken when the award went to Billy Bob Thornton for his admirable Sling Blade screenplay. "Well, Lord have mercy," drawled Thornton as the audience rose in a standing ovation.
When Jodie Foster presented the best original screenplay award, Oscar recognition finally arrived for the immensely talented Joel and Ethan Coen, and Joel's wife, Frances McDormand, looked as deliriously happy as if she herself had won - which she proceeded to do, taking the next award, best actress, for herself. This made her the second consecutive winner (after Susan Sarandon in Dead Man Walking) of the best actress award for a movie directed by her husband.
Sarandon herself came on, dismissed the usual banal platitudes on the autocue and went straight into announcing the nominees for best actor. From the tremendous response of the audience when Billy Bob Thornton's name was announced, it looked likely he had pulled off a double, but the name in the envelope was that of Shine star Geoffrey Rush, an actor unknown outside his native Australia this time last year.
Having lost out in the categories of adapted screenplay, actor and actress, The English Patient rebounded in the final stretches with a joyous Anthony Minghella receiving the best director Oscar for what is only his third cinema film, and Saul Zeantz returning to the stage to accept the best picture Oscar from Al Pacino. "I said earlier that my cup was full," Zaentz commented. "Now it runneth over".
