Word: winner
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...award won by an American was Best Actor; it went to Sean Penn, who played gay-rights activist Harvey Milk in the biopic Milk. This was the one half-surprise in an evening of few big upsets. The oddsmakers had Penn tabbed as a slight underdog to Golden Globe winner Mickey Rourke, whose performance in The Wrestler had all the earmarks of a sentimental Hollywood comeback. (See pictures of Rourke...
...biggest upset in the specialty categories was the Best Foreign Language Film win for the Japanese Departures, about an out-of-work musician who takes a job preparing corpses at a funeral home. It emerged victorious over, among others, the French school drama - and Palme d'Or winner - The Class (Entre les Murs) and the odds-on-favorite, Waltz with Bashir, the Israeli animated documentary. Both films had earned critical raves in the States. Nobody, though, was startled that the Oscar for Best Animated Feature went to WALL-E, or that Man on Wire was voted Best Documentary Feature...
...wrong too; adding blockbusters to the nomination lists is part of the answer, but it's not the big answer. Which is: have a designated celebrity read out the five names in each major category in ascending order of the votes they received - the last-named being the winner...
...that's what you get on Oscar night: five names, one winner, four losers; then it's move on, dot, yawn. What if we learned, as the tally was shown on a big board behind the person reading out the nominations for Best Actor, what the names of the top two contenders were - and that they were just one vote apart? That actually happened in 1932, and the Oscar was given to both Fredric March and Wallace Beery. But we know that only because the Academy later changed the rule: to declare a tie, the tallies had to be exactly...
...Making the vote tabulation public would also invigorate the weeks before the Oscar show. So-called experts give odds on the nominees in top categories, but the knowledge that only the winner will be revealed renders that exercise useless; now it'd mean something. And all those office Oscar pools could promote, in addition to the winners, any number of beguiling side bets. Who can pick the top five in the most categories - in order? How many votes will separate Sean Penn from Mickey Rourke? Does The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, seemingly left in the dust by Slumdog Millionaire...