Ok, now let's get to the awards themselves. With such an unpredictable year, it was no surprise to me that I only got 14 out of the 23 categories correctly predicted in last week's article. Best Actor was a tough category to predict, but Russell Crowe did indeed win for his performance in Gladiator, a good performance, but nothing on the level of his performance in last year's The Insider, which should have brought him the Oscar last year.
Of course, everyone correctly predicted Best Actress : Julia Roberts. I got Supporting Actor right ... I knew that the Academy would embrace Benicio Del Toro instead of honoring Albert Finney for a lifetime achievement type Oscar.
Best Supporting Actress, one of the first awards presented, threw everyone for a loop though, and we should really be used to this by now. Supporting Actress is always the big surprise category, and this year was no exception. Instead of the conventional wisdom favoring Kate Hudson (which I also had predicted), Marcia Gay Harden came out of a left field, in a deserving win for Pollock. In fact, after Harden won, I thought that the mentioned Pollock surprise double whammy could be happening, and would later sneak in Ed Harris to win for lead acting.
Best Director was one of the welcome surprises of the night. Most people, including myself, predicted Ang Lee to win, basically because I felt that he since won the DGA award, he would be a lock (which typically happens), but thankfully, Steven Soderbergh overcame all this "split the vote" talk, and deservedly won for his direction of Traffic, and he also gave a great speech, thanking everyone who spends part of their day creating art. Soderbergh's win got me excited that perhaps they would go for Traffic for Best Picture, but it wasn't meant to be. Gladiator took it, as I predicted, and once again we have another year where the Academy has truly missed the boat to honor the films that people will be talking about and revisiting a decade from now. They will be talking about films like Crouching Tiger, like Traffic, like Almost Famous, but not Gladiator.
I correctly predicted both screenplay categories ... Almost Famous and Traffic deservedly won the Screenplay Oscars (I'm so glad that Cameron Crowe got at least one Oscar for his truly wonderful effort in bringing Almost Famous to the screen).
