LOS ANGELES, March 25
In an Oscar ceremony with little drama but a few surprises nonetheless, "Gladiator," a Roman-era epic marrying modern technology with old-style Hollywood pageantry, won five statues including Best Picture and, in Russell Crowe, Best Actor.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences managed to sprinkle the major prizes among a diverse group of pictures and performers. The Chinese-language martial arts epic "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" took four awards, as did "Traffic," a dark, complex, character-driven story about drug-trafficking.
Although Julia Roberts was the favorite to win the Oscar as Best Actress for "Erin Brockovich," Steven Soderbergh was a bit of a surprise when he earned Best Director for "Traffic."
(Gary Hershorn/Timothy A. CLARY - Reuters/AFP)
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The Best Director win for Steven Soderbergh for "Traffic" was one of the evening's surprises, since he was widely expected to split his supporters between those voting for "Traffic" and for the other movie he directed, "Erin Brockovich." Only one other director in Oscar history, Michael Curtiz in 1939, had ever been nominated twice in a year in the category. (He didn't win.)
As widely expected, Julia Roberts picked up her first Oscar, for Best Actress in the title role of "Erin Brockovich." Benicio Del Toro ("Traffic") was named Best Supporting Actor, and in perhaps the night's biggest upset, Marcia Gay Harden won Best Supporting Actress for her role in "Pollock."
Instead of thanking his agent and family, Soderbergh thanked "anyone who spends part of their day creating -- a book, a film, painting, a piece of dance, a piece of theater, music -- anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us. This world would be unlivable without art."
The show's producers had promised, as they always do, to speed up the notoriously pokey ceremony -- and this time they succeeded. It clocked in at just under 3 1/2 hours -- almost 45 minutes shorter than last year's. The tone of the evening seemed somewhat muted, perhaps because of an undercurrent of concern over a potential strike by screenwriters and actors in the upcoming months. Many nominees confessed to being exhausted, coming from sets of movies they were trying to finish before a strike may begin in May.
An epic in the classic tradition of Hollywood, "Gladiator" took the most awards -- Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Costume Design, Best Sound, Best Visual Effects. Crowe won Best Actor for his portrayal of Maximus, a slave-turned-gladiator and the focus of gory, thrilling fight scenes in a reconstructed Colosseum.
A shocked-looking Crowe stumbled to the stage of the Shrine Auditorium to claim his statue. After thanking a long list of people and dedicating the award to his grandfather and an uncle, Crowe addressed the dreams of people who aspire to movie fame.
"When you grow up in the suburbs of Sydney . . . or Newcastle, or the suburbs of anywhere, a dream like this seems vaguely ludicrous and completely unattainable. But this moment is directly connected to those dreams," he said. "To those relying purely on courage -- it's possible."
Julia Roberts did not look shocked when she won, but she did gasp and shriek at the podium and warned the conductor not to cue his orchestra, because "I may never be here again."
After lingering at the lectern to thank the cast, her parents, her producers, her director Soderbergh -- though she forgot the person whom she played, Erin Brockovich -- Roberts blurted that she loved "everyone in the whole world," and paused again to let out a trademark guffaw and crow, "I love it up here!" Backstage she said, "I don't know how people act cool and calm, because this is so huge!"
John Nelson, who won for the visual effects of "Gladiator," said the latest advances in technology allowed filmmakers to be ever more sophisticated in their filmmaking visions. "The technology is so subtle, you can go back in time. We took modern camerawork . . . modern immersion into a sporting event, in a way you've never seen it before," he told reporters backstage. "That's the big breakthrough, for 'Gladiator' to do that."
The camera shots that swept from above Rome down into the ancient Colosseum -- partly computer-generated -- would have been impossible to do just two years ago. "We pulled it off and made it real," he reflected. "This was not a movie about visual effects, it was using special effects to make you feel you were in a city with a million people 1,000 years before there was another city with a million people."
