by Robert Osborne, The Hollywood Reporter
LOS ANGELES (The Hollywood Reporter) --- Caution, Julia Roberts. Don't relax just yet.
Despite what all the soothsayers, pollsters and Tarot card readers are declaring, it ain't over until the proverbial fat lady sings. Oscar has thrown many an upset in the past and could do so again come Sunday night.
One should never forget the year that all the preshow hype and predictions insisted that Rosalind Russell was an absolute shoo-in to win the best actress Oscar, a situation that eventually left Russell standing red-faced in the aisle of that same Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles where Roberts and the rest of Hollywood's elite will be gathered in two days for the final verdicts re: the 73rd Annual Academy Award presentations.
Russell was competing for the prize as best actress of 1947 against a field that included Joan Crawford, Susan Hayward, Dorothy McGuire and Loretta Young, none of whom seemed to have a whiff of a chance to beat Russell's work in the prestigious drama Mourning Becomes Electra. Time magazine said it would be Roz in a walk. Life magazine also declared it a done deal. Table talk at Chasen's, Ciro's and the Polo Lounge further agreed it was a sure thing. (Sound familiar?)
The bosses at RKO, the studio that had released Russell's film, felt it was such a no-brainer that they took over the Ciro's nightspot (now the Comedy Club) on the Sunset Strip for a big postshow party in Russell's honor. Even before the Shrine show began on the night of March 20, 1948, a banner was hanging from Ciro's screaming, "Congratulations, Roz!"
Further buoyed by a preshow poll widely published on Oscar day that also declared Roz would be the champ, the actress was out of her seat near the rear of the Shrine, adjusting her dress by the time actor Fredric March came center stage to open the secret envelope. But the name he read was not hers. The winner was Young for The Farmer's Daughter. Luckily for Russell, television cameras were not yet a part of the Academy process, so she was able to return to her seat seen only by a few -- not by millions.
So, Julia, do proceed gingerly.
The buoying news is that Roberts does have good reason to prep a place at home where, if the forecasters are right this time, a shiny new Oscar could be placed. All signs definitely point to the golden boy going in her direction. Roberts also has a plus-factor that Russell did not: The film that brought Russell her 1947 nomination was, though distinguished, a stiff. Roberts' film, Erin Brockovich, is so well regarded that it's in the running for the prize of best picture of the year.
However, at this juncture, Gladiator, with 12 Oscar nominations to its credit, seems the most likely to succeed in taking home the Big Kahuna. It is the only film among the five noms with the size, stature and pretensions that has most often won favor with Academy voters in the past. Think Titanic and Braveheart. Think Dances With Wolves, The Last Emperor and all the way back to the first best pic winner, Wings. Size counts.
Chances are slight but possible that Ridley Scott's muscle-and-blade epic could end up the most Oscared film ever, but will have to win in each of its 12 nominated categories to do so. So far, the highest number of Oscars won by a single film is 11, first accomplished by William Wyler's 1959 epic Ben-Hur and tied 38 years later by James Cameron's 1997 epic Titanic. Size definitely counts.
But Gladiator doesn't have a clear track to a sweep. Considering the best picture category alone, many are vocal about preferring the edgier, contemporary Traffic; others are solidly beating the drums for Ang Lee's surprise blockbuster Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, embraced with an awesome 10 nominations, the most ever given a foreign-language film. Brockovich and Chocolat have their support teams, too, though a best pic win by either will constitute a major upset.
Should Tiger go the distance, it would set an Academy precedent as the first foreign-language film to ever pick off the best picture trophy. Before Tiger, six non-English-language films have been nominated in that top-of-the-mountain category, beginning in 1938 with the French film Grand Illusion, the Algerian entry Z in 1969, Sweden's The Emigrants in 1972, Sweden's Cries and Whispers in 1973, Italy's The Postman in 1995 and Italy's Life Is Beautiful in 1998, but none won.
Tiger, for the record, is the third film to be nominated in the same year in the Academy's film and foreign-language film categories. Both of those earlier films, Z and Life Is Beautiful, did go on to win in the latter category but not the former.
Six of this year's 20 acting nominees have an Oscar to their credit. The Academy Award winners are Geoffrey Rush, Frances McDormand and Juliette Binoche, all three of whom won in 1996; also Ellen Burstyn (1974), Judi Dench (1998) and Tom Hanks, who has back-to-back Academy Award wins to his credit, for 1993's Philadelphia and 1994's Forrest Gump.
A win by Hanks would put him in rarefied air as one of only five actors who have won as many as three competitive Oscars. Walter Brennan won three (1936, 1938, 1940, all in the supporting actor division); so did Ingrid Bergman (1944 and 1956 as best actress, 1974 as supporting actress) and Jack Nicholson (1975 and 1997 as best actor, 1983 as supporting actor). To date, Katharine Hepburn is the undisputed champ among Academy Award-winning actors. She has won four (the first for Oscars 1932-33 season, then again in 1967, 1968 and 1981). Hanks would be the first, except for Hepburn, to have won all three of his acting awards in the Upstairs acting category.
A win Sunday would be a first for previous nominees Roberts, Russell Crowe, Ed Harris, Joan Allen, Jeff Bridges, Willem Dafoe, Albert Finney and Julie Walters. (Finney comes to the party with the most nominations sans a win; this year's nomination for Brockovich marks his fifth, his first as supporting actor). The remainder -- Javier Bardem, Laura Linney, Benicio Del Toro, Joaquin Phoenix, Marcia Gay Harden and Kate Hudson -- are first-time nominees.
Harris, a best actor nominee for Pollock, is the 10th actor to direct himself into an acting nomination, the others being Charlie Chaplin (1927-28 and 1940), Orson Welles (1941), Laurence Olivier (1948, 1956 and 1965), Woody Allen (1977), Warren Beatty (1981), Kenneth Branagh (1989), Kevin Costner (1990), Clint Eastwood (1992) and Roberto Benigni (1998). Olivier and Benigni went on to win acting Oscars, Olivier in 1948, Benigni exactly 50 years later.
A win by Hudson, nominated for best supporting actress for Almost Famous, would be an Academy first: an Oscar for the daughter of an Oscar-winning actress (Goldie Hawn, who won in the supporting category for Cactus Flower in 1969). Other mother-daughter combinations on the Academy roster include Judy Garland-Liza Minnelli and Diane Ladd-Laura Dern, but in that foursome, only Minnelli received a competitive Oscar. Garland, twice-nominated, did receive an honorary miniature A.A. in 1939 but never a competitive Academy Award. Neither Ladd nor Dern has won, so far.
Having two performers from the same film competing in the same Oscar category, as in the case of Hudson and McDormand being nominated as best supporting actress for Almost Famous, does not automatically kill the chances of either, as legend suggests. A total of 19 times in the past an actor has won an Oscar competing in their category with a fellow cast member, beginning in 1939 with Hattie McDaniel winning as best supporting actress in Gone With the Wind over Olivia de Havilland for the same movie and most recently with Dianne Weist in 1994 winning as supporting actress for Bullets Over Broadway against competition that included fellow Bullets player Jennifer Tilly.
One of the major questions being debated this year is whether Steven Soderbergh, nominated twice as best director, will go down in defeat because of his embarrassment of riches. The only other time a director has competed against himself was in 1938 when Michael Curtiz was a double-nominee for Angels With Dirty Faces and Four Daughters, losing to Frank Capra for his direction of You Can't Take It With You. (Frank Lloyd was nominated for three directorial efforts in the Academy's second year but had his name on the ballot only once, incorporating all three achievements. To make it nice and confusing, Lloyd is nevertheless listed in early Academy documents as winning that year for only one of those three films, The Divine Lady, a situation historians are still trying to decipher.)
The fact that Soderbergh also directed two of the year's best picture nominees is also unusual but not unprecedented. Curtiz also had two films nominated in 1938, Four Daughters and The Adventures of Robin Hood, which he co-directed; Victor Fleming directed two of the 1939 nominees, Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz; and Sam Wood directed two 1942 nominees, Kings Row and The Pride of the Yankees. In 1940, during a period when there were 10 nominees each year for best picture instead of five under current rules, three directors -- count 'em, three -- had two films each on the list: Alfred Hitchcock with Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent, Sam Wood with Our Town and Kitty Foyle and John Ford with The Grapes of Wrath and The Long Voyage Home.
Of all this year's nominees, James Schamus could go home with the largest number of Academy statuettes Sunday. He's nominated in three categories for Tiger: best picture, best adapted screenplay and best original song. Even if he wins all three, he still won't set the record for the biggest haul in one night. Walt Disney did that March 24, 1954, when he took home four statuettes, all of them in the documentary and short subjects categories.
Another first that could happen at Sunday night's party: If Brockovich wins for best film, it would be the first time in which the name of a living person has been part of a film title. Seven previous Oscar-winning best pictures have had actual personages as part of their handles (The Great Ziegfeld, The Life of Emile Zola, Patton, Gandhi, Amadeus, Schindler's List and Shakespeare in Love); none, however, was living at the time the film was made.
One guaranteed first: Sunday's gala will mark Steve Martin's debut as the Oscar ceremony host, following a tradition that has encompassed a rich mix of Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, David Letterman (once), Johnny Carson, Bob Hope, Jack Lemmon, Frank Sinatra, Jack Benny and even Paul Hogan and Donald Duck.
If things go according to plan, this also will be the last time the party will be held at the Shrine Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles or Oscar's other homestead, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center. Plans are for next year's gala to take place at the new Kodak complex at Hollywood and Highland, only a few steps from the Chinese Theatre where the awards were held in 1944, 1945 and 1946.
Following that three-year visit, Oscar has lived a nomadic life, moving to the Shrine Auditorium in 1947 for two years, then other locales such as the Academy's own theater in West Hollywood in 1949 (a building long since razed), followed by 11 years at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood (the current home of The Lion King), from which Oscar scrammed after the theater booked the wide-screen Spartacus, eliminating many seats in the house.
After giving out the awards for eight years at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, the annual event made its home at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in 1969, later alternating at the Shrine, the same statuesque building on which, with lights ablazing, all eyes will be zeroed in Sunday night.
� 2001 The Hollywood Reporter