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Departing the Oscars
Surprise, surprise. After nearly a lifetime (26 years and seven nominations) of cinematic excellence, Hollywood director Martin Scorsese finally won his Oscar for The Departed, a mob masterpiece set in Boston, at the 79th Annual Academy Awards.
To celebrate the moment, three cinematic titans, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas turned up on stage to present the award to their long-time friend, Mr Scorsese. The envelope, still not opened, had little relevance. Later, The Departed also won best picture.
Of course, we already knew Scorsese would win, as we knew almost where and to whom the Oscars would go with the winners’ checklist published in the February 25 issue of Images.
Of the favorites to win, Helen Mirren did score her best actress for The Queen, saluting Elizabeth Windsor’s courage and consistency, her sense of duty, dignity and hairstyle.
Peter O’ Toole was shunned again in favour of Forrest Whitaker’s Idi Amin for best actor in The Last King of Scotland. An emotional Whitaker said in his acceptance speech: “Receiving this honor tells me that it’s possible for a kid from East Texas, raised in South Central L.A., and Carson, who believes in dreams, who believes them in his heart, to touch them and have them happen.”
For the best supporting categories, ex-American Idol contestant, Jennifer Hudson won for Dreamgirls and Alan Arkin for Little Miss Sunshine.
Also, William Monahan won in the adapted screenplay category for The Departed, while Little Miss Sunshine gave its due to first-time writer Michael Arndt, again memorialising the independent spirit of cinema.
“When I was a kid my family drove 500 miles in a van with a broken clutch. It ended up being one of the funniest things we did together,” Arndt said, explaining the source of his inspiration for the comedy which centers round a cuttingly hilarious road trip en route to a beauty pageant.
In the technical categories, Thelma Schoonmaker relived her Eddie Award winning streak by securing her third Oscar — her previous ones were for The Aviator and Raging Bull (all Scorsese films).
The animated feature Happy Feet won the award in its category, a surprise which we couldn’t and didn’t fathom until the moment of the red carpet from whence George Miller was seen as the spotlight for the award.
Both critics and studio-backed Pan’s Labyrinth swept away three awards — for art direction, make-up and cinematography — while the award for foreign film went to the German entry, Lives of Others.
Marie Antoinette gave Milena Canonero her third Oscar for costume design. The visual effects award was looted by Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, while the one for sound was plucked by Dreamgirls. Letters from Iwo Jima got the Oscar for sound editing.
The three short film awards were grasped by The Blood of Yingzhou District (documentry), The Danish Poet (animated) and West Bank Story (live action), whose presenters were the adorably cute Abigail Breslin (10-year-old Oscar nominee for Little Miss Sunshine) and Jaden Smith.
The award for documentary and original song went to the appositely named An Inconvenient Truth: a chronicle of Al Gore’s campaign to warn the world about global warming. Melissa Etheridge’s I Need to Wake Up took the glory from Dreamgirls, whose three nods in a singular song category cancelled each other, while the best score went to Gustavo Santaolalla, whose second back-to-back win earned Babel its only Oscar.
Although more commercially inclined, the 79th Annual Academy Awards were more than a little unfair to certain people and films, especially Babel whose overzealous street-hype helped tank its favour with the Oscar voters. The other casualties were Children of Men for both cinematography and adapted screenplay; Peter Morgan for his screenplay of The Queen and Apocalypto, which was spurned by the voters because of Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic statements.
Italian composer, Ennio Morricone, received the honorary Oscar from Clint Eastwood, who starred in many of Mr Morricone’s memorable spaghetti westerns. And as ironic as it may sound, Tom Cruise presented the ‘Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award’ to Sherry Lansing, former chairwoman of Paramount, who retired two years ago because of Sumner Redstone’s reshuffle. Cruise, also a Paramount casualty, recently left because of Redstone.
No agents or lawyers were thanked this year due to a pre-planned agreement that had the winners talking all they wanted backstage on the streaming, Internet-ready ‘Thank-You Cam’. Plus once the allotted time for speech was over, the music didn’t jar the environment like it formally did. Instead a slow-raising piece was played to elegantly signal the awarded to make their exit.
The refreshing event, which nearly clocked three hours and 40 minutes felt edge-free and easygoing, besides officially ‘going green’. Hats off to event producer, Laura Ziskin and host Ellen DeGeneres for elegantly pulling the rabbit out of the hat.
This was Ms Generes’ first time as host of the event and her quirky, relaxed approach helped the Oscar ceremony maintain its grace. Ziskin, a once studio mogul who also produces the Spider-Man franchise for Sony helmed the Oscars in 2002, when the industry was shaken up by the September 11 attack.
The Oscars opened by “celebrating the nominees”, rather then the winners, with a quick-reeling, fluctuating speech, which was a collection of montages of various nominees.
Other prominent snippets between the categories were a musical number by Will Farrell, Jack Black and John C. Reilly who eccentrically sang in favour of the comedians, who never win an Oscar; A mesmerising performance entitled Elements & Motion by various sound artists, who melded sound effects and music to perfect harmony; And the most memorable of them all, an astounding performance of shadow-players who crooked their bodies to project iconography from some of the nominated films, at regular intervals.These contorted shapes included the truck from Little Miss Sunshine, the gun from The Departed, the devil’s shoe from The Devil Wears Prada and an impressive Oscar shadow-turned Snakes on a Plane, which had seemingly consumed Ellen earlier.
Along with Al Gore’s and Leonardo DiCaprio’s funny stint targeting the presidency, the funny sides at this year’s Oscars were livelier than last years.
During the event we were often reminded how green the Oscars had turned in favour of the environment, which according to Mr Gore is a renewable resource. “People all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis. It’s not a political issue. It’s a moral issue,” he rightly pointed out.
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