25 February 2008David M. Halbfinger and Michael Cieply
“No Country for Old Men,”Joel and Ethan Coen’s chilling confrontation of a desperate man with a relentless killer, won the Academy Award for best picture on Sunday night, providing a more-than-satisfying ending for the makers of a film that many believed lacked one.
The Coens, who live in New York and remain aloof from the Hollywood establishment, also shared the directing and adapted screenplay awards. Joel Coen thanked the academy members for “letting us continue to play in our corner of the sandbox.”
No film ran away with the night, however, as the 80th annual Academy Awards gave a bruised movie industry a chance to refocus its ever-inward gaze on laurels instead of labor strife.
Daniel Day-Lewis won best actor for his portrayal of a ruthless oil tycoon’s rise from the sweat and sludge of wildcatting to wealth, power and madness in “There Will Be Blood.”
And Marion Cotillard won the Oscar for best actress for her incarnation of the tormented chanteuse Edith Piaf in “La Vie en Rose.”
“Thank you life, thank you love,” an elated Ms. Cotillard said. “It is true there are some angels in this city.”
None of the best picture nominees went home empty-handed: all picked off a significant win in one category or another.
Javier Bardem won the fourth Oscar for “No Country,” capturing the best supporting actor for his role as the cattlegun-wielding, pageboy-wearing serial killer. He thanked the Coens, saying they “put one of the most horrible haircuts in history over my head.”
The Oscar for “No Country” was a long-sought triumph for Scott Rudin, a prolific producer who has specialized in movies on the smarter end of the spectrum, but only once before received a best-picture nomination, for “The Hours” in 2003.
Tilda Swinton took best supporting actress for playing a nervous wreck of a corporate lawyer who throws morality under the bus of her ambition in “Michael Clayton.”
The indie delight “Juno,” about a pregnant teenager with a mouth on her, won for best original screenplay, by Diablo Cody, who once worked as a stripper. She tearfully thanked her family for “loving me for who I am.”
“No Country” was denied in several technical categories, as well as in cinematography: Robert Elswit won that Oscar for “There Will Be Blood,” whose extended tracking shots in harsh open spaces and dimly lighted images of claustrophobic spots made for stunning scenes despite long stretches with little dialog.
With all four top acting prizes going to Europeans and the New York-based Coen brothers’ film in contention for several others, it was a night when Hollywood’s glittery establishment came out to honor what was essentially a gaggle of outsiders.
Another example: “Falling Slowly,” the ballad from “Once” about the music created in the space between two people, won best original song. It was written by the film’s stars, the Irish Glen Hansard and the Czech Marketa Irglova, who have since become a real-life couple.
“Atonement,” nominated for seven awards, won for best original score. The awards were otherwise all over the map, with the first nine going to different films, leaving the show’s host, Jon Stewart, to set the tone with a riff on the three-month writers’ strike that had threatened to turn the Oscars itself into a marathon of montages.
“You’re here — I can’t believe it, you’re actually here!” he joked as the show opened. “The fight is over, so tonight,” he added, “welcome to the makeup sex.”
Mindful of the election season, he took note of the Democratic primary race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. “Normally when you see a black man or a woman president, an asteroid is about to hit the Statue of Liberty,” he said.
“Ratatouille,” a rodent’s-eye view of the accessibility of art, won for best animated feature. Brad Bird, that film’s director, thanked his junior high school guidance counselor: “He asked me what I wanted to do with my life,” Mr. Bird recalled. “I said, ‘Make movies.’ He asked me what else I wanted to do with my life. And I said, ‘Make movies.’ ” Mr. Bird said the doubt he faced was “perfect training” for a life in Hollywood.
“Taxi to the Dark Side,” an examination of American torture practices, won best documentary feature.
Also in the early going, “La Vie en Rose” won for best makeup and “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” won for costume design. “The Golden Compass,” in which every human character is born with a shape-shifting animal companion known as a “daemon,” scored a big early upset in the visual-effects category, beating two far more successful films: “Transformers” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.”
Among the lesser-watched categories, “The Bourne Ultimatum” won Oscars for all three in which it was nominated: film editing, sound mixing and sound editing.
“The Counterfeiters,” a Nazi-era drama, became the first Austrian film to win an Oscar, for best foreign-language film.
Owen Wilson presented the award for best live-action short to “Le Mozart des Pickpockets,” and played it straight, avoiding any reference to his personal collapse and hospitalization just as his “Darjeeling Limited” was being released last fall. Best animated short went to “Peter and the Wolf,” and was presented by an animated Jerry Seinfeld, in his “Bee Movie” character.
The animation award, and Mr. Stewart’s opening monologue, provided a lighthearted liftoff for an Oscars telecast sure to be weighted down by the field of mostly small and dark films in the running for the top honors. Embraced by critics, those movies have been less warmly received by the mass audiences whose attentions have sustained the Academy Awards as one of the nation’s few remaining shared rituals.
The lack of a clear consensus among critics and audiences left the potential for an Oscar night in which the top awards were scattered in every direction. Among other things, the evening promised to be a tug of war over sensibilities: Academy voters were being asked to choose between the nihilism of “No Country for Old Men,” in which the serial killer prevails; the hopeful spunk of “Juno,” in which a pregnant teenager forges her own solutions; or, perhaps, a saga of childhood betrayal and lives destroyed, in “Atonement,” set against the backdrop of British retreat in the early days of World War II.
As Mr. Stewart put it: “Does this town need a hug?” He added, “All I can say is, thank God for teen pregnancy.”
The 80th annual Academy Awards, held at the Kodak Theater here, delivered a welcome return to pomp and ritual for a town still recovering from the strike by film and television writers that stripped the glitz from the enterprise. “I think the town is ready to celebrate,” said George Clooney, walking up the red carpet accompanied by his girlfriend, Sarah Larson. “I know I am, but then that’s never been a problem for me.”
On Sunday, however, jitters still surrounded a broadcast that was assembled quickly around a roster of independent-style films, none of which has shown the audience appeal of a “Titanic” or “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” previous best-picture winners that pulled large audiences to the awards show in the past.
The early proceedings were slightly ad hoc, not quite normal for a show that operates more like an industry, bringing the 6,500-member Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences roughly $40 million in net income each year. Security was tight, but did not operate with the usual precision. Promised ID checks and wristbanding did not occur. Mr. Stewart, the evening’s host, had little more than a week to prepare once writers voted to return to work.
With help from a smash-up special effects opening and Mr. Stewart’s monologue, things started out with a bang. But the show began to drag as one dusty montage after another of Oscar history piled up, more numerous and less effective than in recent memory.
The machine came slightly off the rails later on, as Mr. Stewart brought Ms. Irglova back out after a commercial break when she had been denied the chance to give an acceptance speech.
Probably nothing caught the slightly cynical air of self-reference better than Jack Nicholson’s lead-in to a montage of all 79 prior best-picture winners. “They touch the humanity — heh, heh, heh — in all of us,” laughed Mr. Nicholson, with a touch more of the Joker than human warmth.
A film community that lost its balance, and never quite got it back, was also clearly unsure how much fun was too much fun under the circumstances: The annual orgy of status, heat and sequined victory laps, Vanity Fair magazine’s Oscar after-party, was abruptly canceled, as were several other ordinarily hot-ticket private gatherings.
That sense of being unmoored was not the only disconnect on display.
All the stated concern for films and filmmakers aside, Oscar night has always been about stars — just ask ABC. Thirty nine million people tuned in two years ago when “Crash” upset “Brokeback Mountain,” one of the worst ratings performances in memory. (The 2003 telecast, shadowed by the beginning of the Iraq war, was worse.) That is compared with 1998, when 55 million viewers watched “Titanic” win 11 Oscars, Jack Nicholson beat out Matt Damon, and Helen Hunt slip past Kate Winslet.
Though no one would deny that this year’s contenders are long on talent, they are exceedingly short on celebrity. Casey Affleck’s breakthrough in “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” was nominated, but Brad Pitt’s starring performance was not. Cate Blanchett picked up nominations in both actress categories, but Angelina Jolie (“A Mighty Heart”) and Julia Roberts (“Charlie Wilson’s War”) went unacknowledged.
Rather, relative unknowns like the 21-year-old Ellen Page and the 13-year-old Saoirse Ronan nabbed nominations for best actress (“Juno”) and best supporting actress (“Atonement”), respectively. For that matter, Mr. Clooney (“Michael Clayton”) and Johnny Depp (“Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”) picked up best-actor nominations, while the twice-honored Tom Hanks (“Charlie Wilson’s War”) and Denzel Washington (“American Gangster”) went empty-handed.
Instead, the megawatts would be supplied by the awards presenters — Mr. Hanks and Mr. Washington among them, along with stars like Jessica Alba, Renée Zellweger, Forest Whitaker, John Travolta and Harrison Ford — creating a scenario in which the Hollywood establishment turned out to sustain an institution that had failed to repay the gesture.
If Hollywood’s preoccupation with its intramural tensions seemed at odds with the celebratory order of the day, some here have suggested a divide involving the movies themselves: between the darkness and despair of films like “There Will Be Blood” and “No Country for Old Men” and what the industry’s countless amateur political analysts discern as a more hopeful mood abroad in the land. By that logic, the frustrations over the Iraq war that gave rise to such films, as well as more direct cinematic responses like “In the Valley of Elah,” may have come a year too late to strike a chord with a public that has finally moved on, at least to the next election.
Perhaps nothing has drawn more attention and concern than the sharp line dividing films that have pleased the widest audiences from those embraced by critics. Thanks to “Juno” and its $130 million in ticket sales, the five best-picture nominees together have grossed $327 million, $111 million of that since the academy nominations were announced, an unusually strong Oscar bump. But the combined grosses are a far cry from a decade earlier, when “Titanic” inflated the total.
“Juno” was not the only $100 million-plus movie up for an award; the animated “Ratatouille” received five nominations; “The Bourne Ultimatum,” “Transformers” and “Enchanted” each had three. But in the major categories, only “American Gangster” exceeded that mark besides “Juno.”
Art and quality aside, the paucity of widely seen movies up for consideration is ominous not just for ABC selling commercial time against the telecast but for the academy itself, rendering it that less culturally relevant. Left unchecked, the trend threatens to turn the yearly ritual into a niche affair instead of a shared national experience.
Yet for all the doom and gloom on the minds of academy members and obsessives — Heath Ledger’s death provided another reason to mourn — there were many areas in which excitement could be seen bubbling up out of the ground like Daniel Plainview’s black gold in “There Will Be Blood.”
If small and dark films captured the attention of critics and the academy, it was not for lack of ambition among Hollywood studios.
