Spectacle wins out yet again

Two elaborate period spectacles and an edgy, contemporary drama battled it out from start to finish of the three-way race that was the 73rd Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles on Sunday night (early yesterday morning in Ireland). They dominated the evening, taking 13 of the 23 awards between them, and no other film received more than one Oscar. All three movies - Gladiator, Traffic and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - had collected four Oscars each before the three-and-a-half-hour ceremony drew to its conclusion and Michael Douglas announced that the final and most prestigious award, best picture, had gone to Gladiator, bringing its total to five.

A stirring, robust, epic which breathes new life into one of the most familiar of storylines, Gladiator employs hi-tech effects to revive and vigorously revitalise the Roman epic genre which had been abandoned in the wake of the notoriously profligate 1963 film, Cleopatra. Gladiator vividly captures both the heightened theatricality and the sheer savagery of the ritual arena spectacle in which gladiators were pitted against each other before audiences of baying voyeurs.

For all its striking achievements, however, Gladiator seemed, to my mind at least, a less deserving choice for Hollywood's biggest honour than its two more ambitious rivals, and its victory testifies to the Oscar electorate's long-standing predilection for large-scale spectacle, as evinced in Oscar-winning movies from Gone With the Wind to Ben-Hur to Braveheart.

Winning the best picture Oscar before a global television audience of 800 million can add tens of millions to the cinema takings of a movie. But, given that Gladiator was released on both sides of the Atlantic last May, and that it already has been a huge box-office success, its returns from a cinema re-release will be negligible. That did not in any way deter its production studio, DreamWorks, from conducting an aggressive and extremely expensive campaign to promote its Oscar prospects.

Hollywood's youngest studio, DreamWorks learned a sore lesson two years ago when its hot favourite, Saving Private Ryan, was pipped for best picture by Shakespeare in Love, which had been the subject of an incessant campaign spearheaded by Miramax, the company widely regarded as the most savvy when it comes to securing Oscar nominations and awards.

If violet is the new black, as it seemed from the fashions on parade at the Oscar ceremony, then DreamWorks is the new Miramax. Having won best picture last year with American Beauty, the company made it a double this year with Gladiator.Meanwhile, for the first time in more than a decade, Miramax came away entirely empty handed from the ceremony.

Their biggest casualty was the treacly Chocolat, which surprised many by taking five nominations, including best picture, and less surprisingly, won nothing. Among the other movies which went into the ceremony with more than one nomination and left unrewarded were Billy Elliot, The Patriot, Quills, Cast Away, Malena, The Contender, Shadow of the Vampire, You Can Count On Me and O Brother, Where Art Thou?

The ceremony itself was unusually witty and entertaining and mostly tight and tasteful, and uncluttered by the tacky dance routines which tested patience in previous years. Much of the credit must go to Steve Martin, who made a scintillating debut as the show's compere, keeping the tempo brisk with a succession of sharp oneliners.

"We live in a great country - if we were in Afghanistan this statue would be destroyed by now," he quipped as he kicked off a hilarious opening routine in which he noted that the glittering audience members were united by one thing - their love of publicity. He went on to poke fun at Eminem's alleged homophobia, Russell Crowe's sex life, trailers that give too much away, and why it's not easy to keep a marriage together in Hollywood - "Because we sleep with so many different people".

The first award of the evening, for art direction, went to Tim Yip for Crouching Tiger, and was followed by the first surprise - Kate Hudson (Almost Famous) losing out for Best Supporting Actress to her strongest rival, Marcia Gay Harden for her passionate portrayal of Lee Krassner, the painter and long-suffering wife of Jackson Pollock in Pollock.

Traffic chalked up its first Oscar when Stephen Mirrione took the prize for Best Film Editing. Next came the awards for Best Live Action Short (to the Mexican-set Quiero Ser . . .) and Best Animated Short (the Dutch film, Father and Daughter). Gladiator collected its first when Janty Yates won for Best Costume Design, and made it two with the award for Best Sound.

One of the most popular winners of the evening was the Puerto Rican actor, Benicio Del Toro, when he received the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of the Tijuana cop who is the moral core of Traffic. One of just two nominees for Best Sound Editing, U-571 took the award. And Crouching Tiger made it two when Peter Pau won for Best Cinematography for Crouching Tiger.

The sole bearer of the Irish flag this year was two-time Oscar-winner Michele Burke, on her sixth nomination for her accomplished work on The Cell, but she lost out this time to Rick Baker's remarkable creations for The Grinch.

The first of three honorary Oscars for movie veterans was presented by Dustin Hoffman to the gifted British cinematograher, Jack Cardiff. Later Anthony Hopkins gave the Irving Thalberg Award to the remarkably prolific 81-yearold Italian producer, Dino de Laurentiis, who is enjoying yet another big hit with Hannibal.

A radiant Julie Andrews presented an honorary Oscar to the accomplished screenwriter, Ernest Lehman, who reminded the audiences that "every picture begins and ends with a screenplay" and that "we (screenwriters) have suffered from anonymity much too often". Lehman was the only person to mention either of the two strikes - writers next month, actors from the end of June - which threaten US film production. Clearly, it was even too delicate a subject for the irrepressible Steve Martin.

The Best Song nominees were treated more tastefully than usual until the fourth nominated performer came on stage - Bjork, looking like the Sugar Plum Fairy in a swan-shaped dress topped by a swan's head curled around her neck, which made her the runaway winner of the Cher Award for Worst Dressed Guest. The Best Song award went instead to the next nominee, the almost-60 Bob Dylan who performed his spirited Wonder Boys song, Things have Changed, live via satellite from Sydney.

Best Documentary Short went to Big Mama, in which a 91year-old woman raises her abandoned grandson, and Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, dealing with children in the Holocaust, was named Best Documentary.

No sooner had Gladiator taken its third Oscar, for Best Visual Effects, when Crouching Tiger made it three as classical music composer Tan Dun won for Best Original Score. The Taiwanese epic made it four when director Ang Lee deservedly won for Best Foreign Language Film. Lee's film now equals the record of Oscar wins for a non-English-language film set by Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander in 1983.

FURTHERMORE, the unanticipated commercial success of Crouching Tiger, which has made over $100 million in the US alone, has shattered all records for subtitled films and may well prove instrumental in breaking down that barrier for audiences around the world.

The New Zealand-born, Australian-raised Russell Crowe was visibly stunned and untypically subdued on receiving the Best Actor award for Gladiator, in which he is the personification of honour and valour. However, it hardly counts as the best performance of the past year, and Crowe's victory is widely regarded as compensation for losing out with a superior performance in The Insider last year.

The show's producers had promised a television set to the winner who gave the shortest acceptance speech - an unlikely inducement in the movie business - and most complied or were drowned out by the orchestra when they turned loquacious. Not so the winner of the Best Actress Oscar, Julia Roberts for her most spirited performance to date, in Erin Brockovich.

Dressed in a Versace gown so tight that her actor partner, Benjamin Bratt, had to help her to the stage, Roberts declared: "I have a television, so I'm going to spend some time here to say a few things." She was obviously so overcome with emotion that her speech was rambling as she tried to register the reality of her victory, one which came as no surprise to anyone else.

Traffic then took its third Oscar when Stephen Gaghan won Best Adapted Screenplay for his intricate transposition of the 1989 Channel 4 mini-series, Traffik, to US and Mexican settings. It proved a good night for the Crowes when Cameron Crowe, no relation of Russell, took Best Original Screenplay for his charming Almost Famous, based on his own teenage experiences as a Rolling Stone rock reporter.

A casually dressed and tieless Tom Cruise came on to present Best Director, a prize widely expected to go to Ang Lee, who has won the Directors' Guild of America (DGA) award a few weeks earlier; only four times in the previous 53 years had the DGA winner not gone on to take the Oscar for Best Director.

History, it was generally agreed, was against Steven Soderbergh, who had two nominations in the same category, for Traffic and Erin Brockovich; the last time a director received two nominations - Michael Curtiz in 1938 - he lost out for both movies. And Soderbergh had made no attempt to promote his prospects for one movie over the other.

When Cruise opened the envelope, Soderbergh was declared the winner for his powerful, kaleidoscopic drug trade drama, Traffic, giving it its fourth win from four nominations, and now it really looked like Traffic would go all the way and take the final Oscar, for Best Picture. But it was not to be, as Gladiator surged ahead to win the major prize.

Edited highlights of the Oscar ceremony will be shown on RTE 1 tomorrow at 0.15 p.m.