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The
timeless allure of a 16th century English playwright bags the trophies,
but a bespectacled Italian steals the show. Christopher Pickard
looks back at the 71st Academy Awards.
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While
Titanic had dominated in 1998, the only titanic event
in 1999 was the struggle between Shakespeare In Love
(pictured) and Saving Private Ryan,
which stood toe-to-toe, marketing-dollar-to-marketing-dollar, and
slugged it out over four hours as first one film and then the other
picked up the Oscars until Shakespeare won on points (seven wins
to five) and got the ultimate glory for Best Picture.
Unlike 1998, when it was easier to spot the winners than the losers,
at the 1999 awards there were plenty of worthy nominees but no clear-cut
favourites. Like tipsters at the track, most LA-based film writers
kept their options open and their heads down only to emerge from
their bunkers days later to say that they had spotted the winners
all along. But was James Coburn's best supporting performance in
Affliction really any more worthy than that of the other nominees,
Robert Duvall, Ed Harris, Geoffrey Rush and Billy Bob Thornton?
And even Judi Dench seemed a little embarrassed to get the best
supporting actress prize. "I feel for eight minutes on the screen,
I should only get a little bit of him," she said, clasping her Oscar.
Would audiences have been outraged if Kathy Bates, Brenda Blethyn,
Rachel Griffiths or Lynn Redgrave had taken home the supporting
honours instead? Unlikely. But that is what made the 1999 award
show such compulsive viewing for real film anoraks rather than the
mainstream audience which craves the sight of more obvious mainstream
box-office fodder - fodder such as Titanic.
Saving Private Ryan, even with Tom Hanks leading the
charge, was seen as a touch cerebral by mainstream audiences, and
if they thought the only way to understand anything to do with Shakespeare
was to get a set of pass notes, at least the members of the Academy
showed they could enjoy a good joke within a well-structured film
and rewarded it with statues for best film, actress (Gwyneth Paltrow),
supporting actress (Dench), costume design, art direction, musical/comedy
score, and its bedrock, Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard's original
screenplay.
In the night's two-horse race, Shakespeare had opened up an early
lead, taking the evening's second award (art direction) and went
two up before Ryan struck back, winning the night's seventh and
eighth awards. After half of the night's 24 competitive awards had
been handed out the score stood at three all. After 19 awards they
were tied again at four all, Janusz Kaminski winning best cinematography
for Ryan after Sandy Powell had taken costume design for Shakespeare.
Down to the wire it went. Paltrow had no Ryan rivals in her category
and helped Shakespeare nose ahead 5-4. Norman and Stoppard's head-to-head
screenplay win over Ryan's Robert Rodat gave Shakespeare clear water
at 6-4 with only two statues up for grabs. However, when Steven
Spielberg got the directing nod over Shakespeare's John Madden to
close to 6-5, most money backstage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion
was on the name of Saving Private Ryan coming out of the last envelope
for best film. If it had, it would have tied the game 6-6 at the
buzzer and with no extra time or penalty shoot out, Ryan would have
been seen as the big winner and Shakespeare the plucky loser. But
history and Hollywood have a short memory for losers, so when the
envelope contained the name of Shakespeare In Love, it put the icing
on the cake for Harvey Weinstein (one of the film's five credited
producers) and his company, Miramax. Shakespeare was Miramax's second
Best Picture win in three years and seventh nominee in a row.
Weinstein and Miramax had been criticised in the run up to the awards
(and the criticism has continued since) for raising the Academy
campaign marketing bar with its hefty support of all its nominees,
which resulted in the Mouse House's mini-major (once the darling
of the indie crowd) picking up 10 of the 24 awards from a season-best
23 nominations.
Many, even in Hollywood, would counter that Miramax just beat the
major players at their own game and at the end of the day smaller
but well-targeted campaigns had also helped indie player Lions Gate
pick up five nominations and two wins for Coburn in Affliction
and Bill Condon's adaptation of Gods & Monsters. If
in 1999 Paltrow, in a teary acceptance speech, had been Oscar's
Princess, he also had his clown prince and court jester in Roberto
Benigni. Benigni, a Hollywood outsider, almost managed to steal
the spotlight from Shakespeare and Ryan and certainly pulled the
comedy carpet from under Academy regulars Robin Williams and Jim
Carrey.
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"I
have been beaten by Roberto," a good-humoured Carrey acknowledged
after seeing the Italian's Life Is Beautiful (pictured)
pick up the prize for best foreign language film. Little did he
imagine that Benigni would be back on stage just minutes later to
receive the statue for best actor, the category Carrey had been
overlooked in for his performance in The Truman Show.
While the possibility of a Benigni win had shown up on the Hollywood
radar, the "smart" money had the race between Hanks and Ian McKellen
(Gods & Monsters). For once even Benigni looked stunned
by the enormity of his triumph. Only Sophia Loren, who appropriately
presented Benigni with the foreign film award, had previously won
top acting honours for a performance in a foreign language film.
"This is a terrible mistake because I used up all my English," Benigni
said in accepting his second award of the night and the film's third.
It was an appropriate sentiment for a man who may have done more
than anyone in recent times to promote foreign language films in
the US. Life can be beautiful in Hollywood, even if you are a foreigner.
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