Top Oscars Visit Coen ‘Country’: 80th Academy Awards

By Lawrence Toppman, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.

Feb. 25–It was a country for old men Sunday at the 80th Academy Awards: Joel and Ethan Coen, who’ve made movies longer than any of the directors who were up against them, collected three prizes for the blood-drenched Texas gangster picture “No Country for Old Men.”

The brothers won best picture, director and adapted screenplay but failed to win an unprecedented four for the same feature. (They were nominated as editors under the pseudonym “Roderick Jaynes” but lost to Christopher Rouse of “The Bourne Ultimatum.”) “No Country” did win four, however, as Javier Bardem took supporting actor for playing a stone-faced killer.

“Bourne,” which also won sound mixing and sound editing, was the only other picture to collect more than two statues. Awards were spread around with remarkable generosity: All five best picture nominees won at least one award, and 14 features shared in the bounty.

Acting awards unfolded almost as predicted: Bardem, the most obvious, was canonized as soon as he entered the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles. (He was seated in the front row, next to Jack Nicholson.)

Tilda Swinton won on her first try, playing a heartless lawyer in “Michael Clayton,” and she lived up to her reputation as an oddball. She compared the Oscar statue to her American agent: “It has the same shape (of) head and, it must be said, buttocks.”

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences broke with tradition to announce best actress early, and that change yielded the lone surprise: Marion Cotillard, who played broken songbird Edith Piaf in “La Vie En Rose,” topped Julie Christie.

Later, the best actor award was almost anticlimactic: Daniel Day-Lewis, who had won every critics’ award in sight, collected his second Oscar (after “My Left Foot”) for playing a bitter oilman in “There Will Be Blood.”

Jon Stewart proved an urbane host on his second Oscar go-round, riffing naturally off the recent Writers Guild of America strike in his opening monologue.

“They say having the Oscars helped end the strike,” he said. “So before we spend the next four to five hours giving ourselves golden statues, let’s take a moment to congratulate ourselves.” Turning to the author of “Juno,” he quipped, “Diablo Cody used to be an exotic dancer; now she’s an Oscar-nominated screenwriter. I hope you’re enjoying the pay cut.” (She then won best original screenplay, so she’s probably satisfied.)

The year’s most significant event (yes, even more than the Oscars) prompted a few political sallies, which Stewart handed out more or less evenly.

” ‘Away From Her’ was the moving story of a woman who forgets her own husband,” he said. “Hillary Clinton called it ‘the feel-good movie of the year.’ …Normally, when you see a black man or a woman as president, an asteroid is about to hit the Statue of Liberty.”

He noted that Oscar turned 80 this year, which “automatically makes him the front-runner for the Republican nomination.” Earlier, the Republicans got a subtler dig, as Stewart considered the box-office failure of movies about wars in the Middle East: “If we stay the course and keep these movies in the theater, we can turn this around. Withdrawing the Iraq movies would only embolden the audience. We cannot let the audience win!”

Oddly enough (or not so oddly in left-leaning Hollywood), three movies related to the Iraq War were nominated for best feature-length documentary. “Taxi to the Dark Side,” which will open in Charlotte March 7, won for its story of an Afghan cab driver who was innocent of any crime but killed by U.S. interrogators.

Had the strike continued, producers planned to show highlights from past ceremonies. They hated to waste all the effort of digging through clip libraries, so meaningless montages of winners and nominees — most unidentified — occasionally flashed past viewers who could hardly have known who they all were. (One collection of clips from all 79 winners allotted two seconds apiece to these alleged classics.)

Surely no one at home knew production designer/art director Robert Boyle, a 98-year-old lifetime achievement winner, who gave a quiet speech about the power of the moving image. But they knew his work: “Fiddler on the Roof,”"In Cold Blood,”"North By Northwest.”

Almost any of the alleged 1 billion viewers around the world might have noticed that Boyle had something in common with every other winner: All were white and came from the United States or western Europe. The industry has a long way to go before it can honestly say it represents the best work of the world. MOVIES Lawrence

Toppman

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