The road to the 72nd Academy Awards: Bumpy

A very long red carpet

March 26, 2000
Web posted at: 8:47 p.m. EST (0147 GMT)

By Porter Anderson
CNN Interactive Arts Writer

(CNN) -- Getting there has been more fun than usual.

As the limos clog the streets of downtown Los Angeles and the lint-brushes fly, more than the presentation of musical theme nominations has changed at the Oscars ceremony. One of the longest hangers-on from shows past -- the interpretive dance sequences set to musical numbers -- has been ditched this year. As the show began Sunday night, no pro-dance picketers had been sighted.

And even before "American Beauty" collected its pack-leading eight Academy Award nominations, there was a little cyber-ambush when a Web site claimed it had short lists from which this year's Oscar nominees would be drawn on February 15. That info didn't pan out.

· Get the bios on nominated stars · Review those nominated plotlines and movie trailers · Cast your unofficial Oscar ballot · Visit the Oscar message board · ...and more!

But when ballots went out to the roughly 5,600 voting Academy members, about 4,000 went astray in transit.

Then 55 of the statuettes -- each boasting the best-cut external obliques in fitness-crazed Hollywood -- were swiped from a loading dock. A shipping-company employee has been charged with grand theft. All but three of the coveted mantelpiece tchotchkes were found. But security, as they usually say about more politically dicey events, is tight at Los Angeles' Shrine Auditorium this evening.

And the final blow, at least to the Academy faithful, came Friday when The Wall Street Journal published its poll of more than 6 percent of the Academy voters in an effort to tip off readers as to where the awards may go in the ceremony that gets underway at 8:30 p.m. ET. (ABC begins its live coverage half an hour before that, at 8 p.m. ET.)

All this off-screen melodrama becomes the backdrop, ironically, to an Oscar year without a blockbuster -- no "Titanic" goes under, no "E.T." goes home. In fact, if anything, the latter months of 1999 saw a flurry of comparatively thoughtful large-budget films hit the screens, a little rash of intellectualism breaking out on the usually action-adventure thinned skin of Hollywood.

Chances are "The Talented Mr. Ripley" won't be pulling in any Oscar gold this year

Not all happy endings

That isn't to say that all the smarter stuff is well represented among Oscar hopefuls.

"The Talented Mr. Ripley," for example -- a disturbing and richly made film about murderous obsession and self-delusion -- offers only faint hopes of an Academy for its writer-director Anthony Minghella and in the best supporting actor category for Jude Law. Conspicuously overlooked in the nominations is Matt Damon's brooding performance of the dark title role.

And "Being John Malkovich" -- a gleefully edgy bit of mild surrealism about being exactly who you are, no more, no less -- offers the chance of an award only to Charlie Kaufman for its screenplay; Spike Jonze, its director; and Catherine Keener, for best supporting actress.

But many take heart in Tinseltown's embrace of "American Beauty," a far more challenging take on dysfunctional suburbia than most United States sitcomery can accommodate. And Hilary Swank is thought to have heavy competition for best actress from Annette Bening ("American Beauty"). But Swank's nomination for her work as a cross-dressed victim of intolerance in so difficult a film as director Kimberly Peirce's "Boys Don't Cry" is seen by some observers as a good sign that the industry may be broadening its scope in social issues and aesthetic treatment.

Among the best picture nominees, "The Cider House Rules" may be widely thought to have gotten where it is because an aggressive PR campaign by Miramax put it there. But the film does carry a very clear message in support of a woman's right to an abortion under certain circumstances -- bracing stuff for an Academy that sits down more comfortably to award last year's conquering sonnet, "Shakespeare in Love."

"The Cider House Rules"

"The Insider" is about blowing whistles, not smoke, in the real-life struggle of the American big-tobacco industry, and arrives at a time when manufacturers are mounting "don't smoke" ad campaigns aimed at kids. "The Green Mile" has been called a "death row fairy tale." And Bruce Willis' "The Sixth Sense" is a determinedly brainy horror tale that has carried in young Haley Joel Osment for a best supporting actor award.

As Stuart Klawans, critic for The Nation, writes in The New York Times, "Those who would find political meaning in the whims of the Oscar voters ought to remember that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is not a nation-state but a tribe.

"Its members are fewer than 6,000 in number and markedly endogamous in their mating habits. Their deliberations make sense only within the context of the local folkways, an inbred kinship system and the seemingly irrational trade mechanisms of the Hollywood People."

And yet, as Klawans goes on to note, a worldwide audience has come to accept the vision of these Southern Californians as, well, worldly.

The Oscars program may be -- not unlike Broadway's Tonys, which are mounted by the organization that represents the shows' producers -- but filmgoers have come to accept the award as a dependable and fair measure of important work on celluloid.

So as the spike heels step out onto the red carpet, it's another night of what happens in good moviemaking: a willing suspension of disbelief. Let the awards show begin.

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The Official Academy Awards Site
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

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