Word: oscared
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...Oscar turned 80 tonight, and his birthday party, aka the Academy Awards, had the tone and pace suitable to an octogenarian's temper. A few little surprises - Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose for Best Actress, Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton for Supporting Actress - but no big ones that might have sent a murmur through the golden olden dude's nervous system. No Country for Old Men took its four expected awards: Picture, Director (for Joel and Ethan Coen), Adapted Screenplay (the brothers Coen again) and Sepulchral Menace (Javier Bardem). Daniel Day-Lewis, of There Will Be Blood...
...party favors were equitably distributed: each of the five films nominated for Best Picture received at least one Oscar. Flanking No Country, Michael Clayton and Juno, the period drama Atonement nabbed a prize for music and There Will Be Blood took the Cinematography award. The big prize went, as expected, to No Country - Oscar choosing a steely chase film over warmer, more comforting fare - though for most of the ceremony there was some suspense as to whether it would come from behind at the end to win the most Oscars over the early leader: The Bourne Ultimatum, which had taken...
...early part of the evening - or daytime, as they call it on the West Coast, where the glamorati have to put on their Gaultier gowns and Armani tuxes right after lunch - it seemed as if Oscar might be following the Super Bowl, the Grammys and the Democratic presidential primaries in providing a slate of improbable winners. Cotillard, who poured her 5ft. 6in. frame into the shivering, shimmering 4ft. 8in. personality of chanteuse Edith Piaf, was only the second Best Actress winner from a foreign-language film. (Sophia Loren won in 1962 for Two Women.) Swinton, a Brit much admired...
...Peter and the Wolf; and The Mozart of Pickpockets, about two doofus criminals who adopt an immigrant waif, was outshone by a droll Dutch gem, Tanghi Argentini, and a Danish hospital weepie, At Night. In a year when the best foreign-language films weren't even nominated, the Oscar went to The Counterfeiters, an Austrian drama about (really?) the Holocaust. Points to it, though, for lacing its noble sentiment with the bleak cynicism of a forger who remains devoted to his craft under the worst circumstances. In Feature Documentary, a strong category this year, the Guantanamo exposé, Taxi...
...dark. But this year, as a party-starved Hollywood convened under a leaky tent on the beach in Santa Monica, Calif., the annual frolic over independent film seemed especially, well, spirited. With quirky low-budget movies like Juno and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly well represented in the Oscar nominations, the Spirit Awards didn't need to fulfill its usual role of lauding under-acknowledged indies. Instead it became a place to let your hair down after three months of writers' strike-imposed solemnity...