Oscar lights a Roman candle

by Timothy M. Gray, Reuters

HOLLYWOOD (Variety) - Oscar took a Roman holiday on Sunday, as Gladiator nabbed five Academy Awards, including best picture.

But the film has the dubious distinction of winning the top prize without a screenplay or directing win -- the first time that's happened since All the King's Men in 1949.

It's the second consecutive best-film win for DreamWorks, after American Beauty, but it's also a sign of the times: This marks the fourth time in six years that a studio-shared picture -- in this case, Universal and DreamWorks -- took the top prize.

The 73rd annual Academy Awards at the Shrine Auditorium offered some winners that were widely predicted: Russell Crowe, best actor for Gladiator; Julia Roberts, actress, Erin Brockovich; Benicio Del Toro, supporting actor, Traffic; Bob Dylan, best song "Things Have Changed" from Wonder Boys; and Sony Pictures Classics' Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, as foreign language film.

But there were also plenty of surprises, including director Steven Soderbergh, for USA Films' Traffic -- only the fifth time ever that voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences differed from the DGA -- and supporting actress Marcia Gay Harden, for Pollock.

Cameron Crowe won the original screenplay for Almost Famous -- his first win, after two nominations, as writer and a producer of Jerry Maguire. On his first nomination, Stephen Gaghan won the adapted screenplay Oscar for Traffic, based on the British Channel 4 miniseries.

Aside from Soderbergh, Del Toro and Gaghan, Traffic took home an award for editing, Stephen Mirrione. Crouching Tiger also nabbed four. No other film scored multiple wins.

Of the best-film nominees -- which were also the five pictures that racked up the most nominations -- only Miramax's Chocolat went home empty-handed.

Studio tallies are difficult, due to the number of shared films; aside from Gladiator, they include Almost Famous (DreamWorks-Columbia) and Erin Brockovich (Universal-Columbia).

But Universal also had wins with Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas and U-571; Sony Classics also had Pollock and Paramount Wonder Boys.

The Gladiator win was not a surprise, but this year featured a tight race, in which nothing seemed a sure bet.

And the thumbs-up for the Roman Empire-set actioner follows the Oscar pattern. With an almost-mathematical precision, Academy voters alternate the best-picture winner among three groups: "small" pics (Driving Miss Daisy, American Beauty), big epics (Gandhi, Braveheart) and the midrange (Forrest Gump).

After the huge Titanic in 1997, the midrange Shakespeare in Love in 1998 and the "little" American Beauty last year, the timing was right for an epic.

Despite real-world worries about strikes, the economy, and attacks from lawmakers over violence in the media, Academy voters decided not to leave their troubles behind: They continued a recent Oscar tradition of voting for pics with unhappy endings.

Since 1991, none of the best-film winners has had a conventional happy ending (The Silence of the Lambs, Unforgiven, Schindler's List, Forrest Gump, Braveheart, The English Patient, Titanic, Shakespeare in Love, American Beauty). In most of those films, at least one of the protagonists dies at the end.

Sunday night's show offered genuine suspense. With questions of whether Soderbergh's twin nominations as director meant he would cancel himself out, whether Tom Hanks' past wins would work against him, whether Roberts' "shoo-in" would actually happen -- and, crucially, what would be the best picture winner.

The Feb. 13 announcement of Oscar nominations indicated Gladiator as the front-runner, since it won 12 bids; the picture with the most nominations has gone on to win the top prize in 19 of the past 20 years.

Gladiator gained momentum with wins at the Golden Globes, BAFTA awards and Producers Guild. Still, even its biggest boosters admitted that there was still plenty of room for upset.

The fact that Writers Guild Awards went to Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count on Me and Stephen Gaghan's Traffic, and Directors Guild of America honors went to Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger) seemed to indicate that the film biz was spreading its admiration wide.

But as General Maximus (Russell Crowe) says in the pic, "I will win the crowd. I'll give them something they've never seen before."

And Gladiator, a sort of ancient-Roman "Smackdown", certainly did win the crowd. It's the biggest box office grosser in this category ($450 million globally) and the best-selling DVD ever (4 million copies sold).

It's only the third film (after The Silence of the Lambs and Braveheart) to win top prize while already on video, and (in a sign of the times) is the first to do it while on DVD.

Gladiator was not only the highest-grossing of the five contenders; at $100 million-plus, it was the highest budgeted and with the longest-running time (154 minutes). And, in an era of outcries from D.C. and the public on violence from Hollywood, the R-rated picture was easily the bloodiest of this year's five nominees.

The winners for best picture and director were for the same film nine times in the past 10 years. However, the best picture winner only won for screenplay in six of the past 10 years. But the picture-director-script gap is highly unusual.

DreamWorks joins nine other studios that previously have chalked up back-to-back best-picture wins, though United Artists holds the record with a triple run, from 1975-77. (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Rocky and Annie Hall).

The picture, set in 180 A.D., is the first toga film to be nominated in this category since Ben-Hur and Cleopatra four decades ago.

The film is a Douglas Wick in association with Scott Free production. It's the second nomination for Wick and Branko Lustig, the first for David Franzoni (though he was also a nominee in the original script race.)

Soderbergh, winning for Traffic, was a double nominee this year (also for Erin Brockovich), and he becomes the first person to defeat himself in the directing category. (In the 1928-29 voting, Frank Lloyd was a double nominee, winning for The Divine Lady. But there were no official nominations that year.)

Soderbergh was also the first person to compete against himself in this race since Michael Curtiz in 1938. (Frank Capra won that year.) Soderbergh was previously nominated for the script of sex, lies, and videotape.

Also, with Lee winning the Directors Guild of America honors on March 11, this marks only the fifth time that the Oscar and DGA have not been in synch. It's happened once a decade.

The DGA and Oscar winners were, respectively, Anthony Harvey and Carol Reed in '68; Francis Ford Coppola and Bob Fosse in '72; Steven Spielberg and Sydney Pollack in '85; Ron Howard and Mel Gibson in '95.

In the four acting races, the New Zealand-born Crowe was the only thesp this year who was also cited last year (for The Insider).

Roberts scored her first win on her third nomination. She's the second consecutive best actress (after Hilary Swank) to win for playing a real person, but the 44th thesp overall. Her win helps rebut the theory that the Academy doesn't vote for actors who earn too much money.

Aside from the Tiger wins, Del Toro's victory helps underline the international flavor of the evening. The Puerto Rico-born thesp becomes only the fourth actor ever to win speaking a foreign-language (after Sophia Loren, Two Women; Robert De Niro, The Godfather, Part II, and Roberto Benigni, Life is Beautiful, all speaking Italian).

A quartet of wins for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon summed up the evening: The winner's circle was filled with newcomers and international representatives. For Tiger, Tim Yip won for art direction, Peter Pau for cinematography, and Tan Dun for music score, all enjoying their first nominations. (Yip and Dun were double nominees this year, also in the costume design and song races, respectively.)

And helmer Lee, as director of the film, takes home the Oscar given to the picture as best foreign-language film.

After Z and Life is Beautiful, Taiwan's Crouching Tiger was the third picture to be nominated in the best film and foreign-language picture race in the same year. And, like those earlier pictures, it took home the prize in the latter category. It marks the first win for Taiwan, which has had two other nominations in this category, both for Ang Lee-directed films: The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman.

Harden, also a first-timer, won the supporting actress kudos -- clearly the dark horse since she wasn't even a nominee for the SAG award, and she was an also-ran at Saturday's Independent Spirit Awards.

Dylan won the song kudos for "Things Have Changed", from Wonder Boys. It's his first Oscar nomination.

Dylan, Gaghan, Harden and Del Toro were just a few of the Oscar novices.

Other first-time contenders who won include Stephen Mirrione, editing, Traffic; Janty Yates, costume design, Gladiator: Jon Johnson, sound editing (formerly called sound effects editing), for U-571; John Nelson, Neil Corbould, Tim Burke and Rob Harvey, all newcomers, for the visual effects on Gladiator.

Documentary short producer Tracy Seretean summed up the mood in her acceptance speech by joking about "beginner's luck". Seretean won for her first film, the 40-minute documentary Big Mama, about a woman's determination to raise her grandson in South Central L.A.

Other new nominees included Florian Gallenberger for the 34-minute live action film Quiero Ser (I Want to Be).

But it wasn't all newcomers, as past winners were plentiful. These include Rick Baker, his sixth triumph, for the makeup on Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas, his 10th nomination, which was shared with first-timer Gail Ryan. In sound, Scott Millan and Bob Beemer earned their second wins for Gladiator, shared with first-time winner Ken Weston.

Producer Mark Jonathan Harris, who'd won on his sole previous nomination, a 1967 documentary short, is two for two with the documentary feature Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport. Harris shared the award with producer Deborah Oppenheimer, her first bid. The documentary looks at the British WWII mission to rescue 10,000 children, mostly Jewish, who were living in German territory -- the fourth Holocaust-themed film in the past six years to take home the documentary feature prize.

For the 73rd Oscar ceremonies, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences avoided major snafus like last year's, when the post office lost ballots and crate-loads of Oscars were stolen.

This year, the Shrine Auditorium was immune from L.A.'s rolling blackouts, and even a scaffolding collapse on Thursday outside the venue resulted in no major injuries.

The Academy consists of 5,722 voting members in 14 branches. The largest group is actors, with 1,329, or 23% of the total. Steve Martin hosted the Gil Cates-produced event.

© 2001 Reuters/Variety REUTERS