The 73rd Academy Awards were the occasion for less anger and controversy than for many years. As a result the event itself became the centre of criticism and discussion. As Lord Acton didn't quite say, business tends to corrupt and showbusiness corrupts absolutely, and this year there was as much attention paid to the Vivienne Westwood dress and décolletage of the BBC's arts correspondent as to the appearance of the stars. As is my custom, I didn't watch the presentations live on TV and by design I avoided any of the extended recordings. It was, of course, impossible not to see snatches of the acceptance speeches on the news and they were as incoherent, sentimental, self-serving and egotistical as ever. But then what do you expect from actors improvising on such occasions? From the bits I heard of compere Steve Martin he didn't do much better with his carefully scripted material.
But as I said, the awards them selves seemed pretty reasonable, and went to serious films. Gladiator is a work of grandeur, a movie that renews a tradition going back to the pre-Hollywood epics of the Italian cinema. Equally, Russell Crowe was a splendidly virile representative of stoic probity, and I'm glad to see that Jon Solomon, professor of classics at Arizona University, thinks highly of the film in a revised edition of his authoritative The Ancient World in the Cinema (Yale University Press, £16.50). I think it right that Steven Soderbergh won the Best Director Award ahead of Ridley Scott and Ang Lee, because Traffic, apart from exhibiting a sharp, controlling intelligence and sense of pace, was also photographed by him under a pseudonym.
Since the nominations were announced last month, I've seen Laura Linney in You Can Count On Me playing a character not entirely unlike Erin Brockovich. But while she provided formidable competition for Julia Roberts, I can see why the Academicians went for the more obviously incandescent star performance. As for the supporting players, Benicio Del Toro in Traffic is as deserving of his Oscar as predecessors like De Niro (Godfather Part II), Christopher Walken (The Deer Hunter), Gene Hackman (Unforgiven) or Kevin Spacey (The Usual Suspects). I eagerly look forward to seeing the other winner, Marcia Gay Harden, as the painter's wife in Pollock .
Had Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon not won the Best Foreign Language Film against such feeble competition, it would have been a disgrace, and I think it's time that this patronising and arbitrarily chosen category was abandoned. About the technical awards (of which Crouching Tiger took three), it is not easy for non-professionals to speak, though the craft sections of the Academy have always tended to be conservative. There was one near certainty, however, in an important, often overlooked category, the Documentary Feature. I doubt if anyone emerged from seeing Mark Jonathan Harris's Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport not positively willing it to win an Oscar.
