Word: oscars
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...Then, 3 hours 21 minutes into the telethon, Jack Nicholson announced the winner for Best Picture-which had at first been thought to be a lock, then a tight squeeze, for Brokeback. ?And the Oscar goes to... Crash.? Those famous eyebrows editorialized surprise, and Nicholson mouthed a ?Whoa.? Paul Haggis, the film?s writer-producer-director, geysered from his seat in joyous shock, and revelry exploded among what seemed like half of the 5,000 audience members at the Kodak Theater. One of the revelers did such ecstatic contortions, she nearly fell out of her gown. The rest hugged...
...victory also validated the old rule that the Editing Oscar is the savviest predictor for Best Picture. The theory is that people, even Academy members, don?t know much about the craft of editing-the extent to which the cuts in a film are determined by the script-so they vote for the movie with the most stuff going on. Crash was certainly the busiest film nominated. And the noisiest. Whereas the other four nominees (Brokeback, Capote, Munich and Good Night, and Good Luck.) kept seeking reconciliation within their social and political conflicts, Crash let its arguments bubble over, like...
...piece. (This year, the orchestra played softly through each of the spoken thank-you speeches, making the winners? comments sound like song cues in an old musical.) But Haggis had been on stage earlier, as a Screenplay winner. Besides, his victory was unique, at least to lovers of Oscar trivia. He became the first person to have written two consecutive Best Pictures (after last year?s Million Dollar Baby). Haggis was also, by my calculations, the first member of the Church of Scientology to win Best Picture...
...first time in 49 years, and only the third time in Oscar's 78-year history, the top six awards (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress) went to six different films. So it was a night with something for everyone, except Steven Spielberg, whose Munich was shut out in the five categories (including Best Picture and Best Director) for which it had secured nominations. The other four Best Picture nominees all found something to take home-Clooney through a side door, since he won as an actor in Syriana, not as a director or screenwriter of Good Night...
...There were even door prizes for movies that hadn?t fulfilled their original promise. As late as October, the Oscar favorites were two imminent, unseen films by recent winners of Best Picture: Rob Marshall?s Memoirs of a Geisha (exotic, elevated, epic) and Peter Jackson?s King Kong (a super-sophisticated remake of a beloved antique). Once those films opened, they fell to the back of the pack, disappointing their investors and the critics, and earned no major Academy nominations. Yet in the absence of old-style epic films among the top contenders, Geisha and Kong aced the technical categories...