The Surprising 73rd Annual Academy Awards!
We should have expected it ... the 73rd Annual Academy Awards ended up to be as varied and unpredictable in most cases as the whole film awards season had been. The film awards season had been spreading the wealth over a number of films, and Oscar Night was no different. Oscar Night was filled with plenty of surprises (some very welcome), and a few of the ones we knew for sure taking home the gold. In the end, Oscar spread the wealth too, as no one film really swept the awards.
Gladiator ended up taking the most, five, including, as expected, the Best Picture award -- by no means a sweep, especially considering that Gladiator becomes the first Best Picture Oscar winner in over fifty years (since All The King's Men in 1949), to win that prize without winning Best Director or a screenplay Oscar. Traffic and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon also walked away winners from Oscar Night, winning four trophies a piece.
Well, let's talk about this year's Oscar show first. Well, they managed to do it, they managed to get the show's running time below last year's, in fact, some 43 minutes shorter than last year's marathon. I still find it so interesting that the Academy Awards are the only awards show where the length of the telecast is continually discussed! Producer Gil Cates did indeed keep the show moving, in fact, at some points, flurries of awards were being presented one by one. This year's show was definitely a return to the more sleek, simpler type of Oscar telecast associated with Gil Cates, in stark contrast to the high tech show put on last year by Richard and Lili Fini Zanuck (which I did enjoy).
I loved the opening of the show, where a film clip inspired by Contact's opening, had the viewer hurtling through time and space, as radio and TV clips from past Oscar telecasts went flying by, until finally, in one of the telecast's surprises, the three current astronauts on board International Space Station Alpha opened the show. I thought that was a great way to show how far we've advanced in comparison to the 2001 world of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke.
Steve Martin then arrived on stage, and was quite slow starting out (could it be that Martin himself was also nervous? I tell you, only the Oscars can make some stars nervous where others cannot). But Martin ultimately became a great host, I thought, with some incredibly hilarious jokes throughout. As much as I love Billy Crystal when he hosts the Oscars, I must admit that Crystal's best stuff is typically all in the beginning. Martin sustained his humor throughout, with some great jokes, especially the ones poking fun at the industry. Some of his best moments were the very brave joke against Russell Crowe hitting on Ellen Burstyn (Crowe's reaction was priceless), the joke about Tom Hanks being behind the plot to kidnap Crowe, and then Hanks's reaction ... the camera catching Danny DeVito eating a carrot, and Martin coming out later to offer him some dip. You really felt as if you were being invited in to the film community for that night, and everybody just seemed to be having a lot of fun.
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