Oscars 2008: For Once, it’s smiles all round on the big, big stage

- This article was first published on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

Among the first of many compilations of clips from previous Oscar ceremonies shown to mark the 80th Academy Awards on Sunday night, there was the memorable moment when Daniel Day-Lewis won his first Oscar as Best Actor, for his portrayal of Christy Brown in My Left Foot. That clip included his widely quoted response that the award was a good reason for "a hell of a weekend in Dublin".

This year's Oscars provide two more very good reasons for weekend celebrations in Dublin, with Day-Lewis collecting his second Academy Award for his magisterial performance in There Will Be Blood, and Glen Hansard and his Czech partner Marketa Irglova winning the Best Original Song award for Falling Slowly, which they wrote and performed in the micro-budget Dublin musical Once.

Theirs was a particularly sweet victory given the questions about the song's eligibility for Oscar consideration, which were raised - and happily, resolved - just days before the Oscar ballots were mailed to voters last month.

Their success at the Academy Awards was one of the most popular with the star-studded audience, who cheered and applauded when the two singers were introduced by Colin Farrell, after they performed their song with passion and to the accompaniment of a 120-piece orchestra, and again when John Travolta presented them with their Oscars.

Farrell referred to Once as "the little film that could", and it did. The journey that began with a 17-day shoot in Dublin in January 2006 and continued with Once winning the audience award at the Sundance Film Festival in the US exactly a year later, culminated in a triumph at the Oscars.

When it was announced that they had won, Hansard and Irglova clasped their hands to their faces in shock, and he hugged his mother, before the duo went on stage to collect their Academy Awards.

"Go raibh mile mile maith agat," Hansard said. "This is mad. We shot this on two Handycams in three weeks for 100 grand. We never thought we would be up here tonight." He concluded with the exhortation, "Make art. Make art." Just as Irglova was about to speak, she was drowned out by the orchestra, who had been instructed to cut off speakers after 45 seconds. Then, in what is surely unprecedented at the Oscars, compere Jon Stewart brought her back on stage after the ad break to give her acceptance speech. "This is such a big deal," she said, "not just for us, but for all independent musicians." Meeting the press backstage after receiving his Oscar, Hansard said he got he a congratulatory text message from Bono. That "is one of the biggest things that can happen to an Irishman", he said, describing the U2 lead singer as "the chieftain of our country".

Receiving his second Oscar as Best Actor, Daniel Day-Lewis kissed his wife, director Rebecca Miller, and kissed his fellow nominee George Clooney on the forehead as he went on stage, where he bowed on one knee before Helen Mirren, last year's Best Actress for The Queen.

"This is the closest I'll ever come to getting a knighthood," he quipped as he received his Oscar. Referring to one of the themes of There Will Be Blood, the relationship between fathers and sons, he said he was accepting the award, he said, "on behalf of my grandfather Michael Balcon, my father Cecil Day-Lewis and my three boys, Gabriel, Ronan and Cashel". Backstage afterwards, Day-Lewis played on his much-quoted line from There Will Be Blood, "I drink your milkshake", saying, "I'm very much looking forward to all the milkshakes I can drink over the next 25 years or so. I think it's fantastic. There's a long tradition - in fact, it's an art form. We call it slagging in Ireland, taking the piss in England. If you can offer them something they can slag you for, they're always grateful for that."

Unusually, quality was to the forefront among this year's Oscar winners, and there can be few quibbles about the outcome, although those of us who regard There Will Be Blood as a modern masterpiece are disappointed that it took just two awards from its eight nominations, for Day-Lewis and for Robert Elswit in the Best Cinematography category. It well deserved a Best Director award for Paul Thomas Anderson, but given that this is just his fifth film, the Oscar electorate apparently feel he has to wait a while and to pay his dues, as brothers Joel and Ethan Coen have done.

They received just a single Oscar (for their Fargo screenplay in 1996) from their first 11 films, but they personally collected three major awards on Sunday night - Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay - for their stylish thriller No Country For Old Men. It also took the Best Supporting Actor prize for Javier Bardem - who was accompanied by his actress mother, Pilar Bardem - as the movie's cold-blooded villain with a horrendous hairstyle.

Joel and Ethan Coen were characteristically laconic as they accepted their statuettes, whereas Marion Cotillard was elated when she received the Best Actress award for her portrayal of Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. All four acting awards went to Europeans: Day-Lewis, Cotillard, Bardem, and as Best Supporting Actress, Tilda Swinton for the US legal drama, Michael Clayton.

Saoirse Ronan, the 13-year-old Carlow schoolgirl nominated as Best Supporting Actress for Atonement, sat in the front row of the Kodak theatre at the awards and was wearing a green dress. She could well be back in contention next year for The Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson's film of the Alice Sebold novel, now shooting in New Zealand.

Armagh native Seamus McGarvey was nominated for Best Cinematography for his virtuoso work on Atonement, but the Oscar was given to Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood). Peter Devlin, who is from Belfast, was on his second Oscar nomination in the Best Sound Mixing category for Transformers. The award went to the team from The Bourne Ultimatum, which collected three Oscars (the others were for Best Film Editing and Best Sound Editing) on a night when the awards were spread more evenly than usual.

The Bourne Ultimatum and Ratatouille, which won for Best Animated Feature, were the only mainstream Hollywood studio productions to make any significant impact at this year's Oscars, and they also happened to be among the most favourably reviewed movies released last year.

Stripper-turned-writer Diablo Cody collected the Best Original Screenplay award for the low-budget comedy-drama Juno, which has been a surprise box-office smash hit.

Atonement, which had seven nominations, won one Oscar, for Best Original Score, which went to Dario Marianelli, the Italian composer whose earliest scores included two 1990s Irish productions directed by Paddy Breathnach, Ailsa and I Went Down.

Veteran Italian production designer Dante Ferretti received the Best Art Direction award for Sweeny Todd. La Vie en Rose took a second award for Best Make-Up. The Oscar for Best Visual Effects went to the team behind The Golden Compass.

For the first time, an Austrian movie, The Counterfeiters, won the prize for Best Foreign-Language Film. Its director Stefan Ruzowitsky noted that such great Austrian film-makers as Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann and Otto Preminger had to emigrate to the US "because of the Nazis", and that this made it all the more appropriate that the first Austrian film to win an Oscar deals with the Nazis.

When Tom Hanks introduced the two documentary awards, the show cut to five US soldiers in Baghdad, who announced the five nominees for Best Documentary Short. That award went to Freeheld, dealing with the campaign of a dying New Jersey police officer for the right to pass her pension on to her lesbian partner.

It was no surprise that it was Hanks and not the soldiers who noted the five nominees for Best Documentary Feature, given that two of them are highly critical of the Iraq war and another was Michael Moore's attack on the US health care system, Sicko. The Oscar went to Taxi to the Dark Side, dealing with US torture practices in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.

The Best Live Action Short Film award went to the French production, Le Mozart des Pickpockets, and Best Animated Short Film was given to the British stop-motion picture Peter and the Wolf.

The honorary Oscar was given to Robert Boyle, now 98, whose career has spanned over 100 movies. He received a standing ovation when he came on stage to give a dignified acceptance speech.

Running three hours and 20 minutes, the Oscars ceremony ran over by 20 minutes, but was generally lively and featured copious montage sequences which had been assembled as a standby in case the show was threatened by the continuation of the writers' strike, which was resolved a fortnight ago.

These compilations included succinct flashes of all the Best Picture winners since Wings won in 1928, and evocative archival footage of acceptance speeches from former winners in all four acting categories, along with montages of such ephemera as bees, bad dreams, and binoculars and periscopes in movies down the years.

The annual Oscar ceremony fixture the "roll of the dead" marked the passing of such diverse talents as Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Deborah Kerr, Jane Wyman, Betty Hutton, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Laszlo Kovacs, Freddie Francis, and finally, Heath Ledger.

With the assistance of 11 other credited writers, the host for the evening, Jon Stewart, was much more relaxed and a lot wittier than when he made his debut in that role two years ago.

Inevitably, there were gags about the US election campaign. "Oscar is 80 this year, which makes him automatically the front-runner for the Republican nomination," quipped Stewart who, less tastefully, made a reference to Away From Her, featuring Julie Christie as a woman with Alzheimer's. Noting that it's "about a woman who forgets her husband", Stewart joked that Hillary Clinton calls it "the feel-good movie of the year".

Remarking on the Best Achievement in Make-up nomination for the critically lambasted Eddie Murphy movie Norbit, Stewart said: "Too often the academy ignores films that aren't good." He added that Angelina Jolie could not be present because "it's hard to get 17 babysitters".

And referring to Cate Blanchett’s dual nominations for her portrayals of Elizabeth I and Bob Dylan, he insisted that she also played the pit bull that pursued Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men.