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"If movie-makers were building airplanes, there would be an accident every time one took off. But in the
movies, these accidents are called Oscars." Another year, another time for Hollywood to congratulate itself on its thick hide. The 75th annual Academy Awards will go on as planned this Sunday, we are told, regardless of whether U.S. troops are attacking Iraq. There may be newsbreaks between segments or even, God forbid, the occasional outspoken winner, to remind audiences that there's a world outside the glittery pavilion. Not that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences could be considered to be political in the slightest. Unlike the Cannes Film Festival, which closed down in 1968 to reflect the turbulent political climate, the Oscars take their show-must-go-on attitude seriously -- bombs may be dropped on civilian villages, but there is always time for viewers to luxuriate at the gorgeous gowns or giggle at the production numbers. If I come off as resentful of the ceremony's innate frivolity in dark times, I should confess that the Oscars to me have long been leeched off any true artistic value. I guess I stopped taking them seriously back in 1995 when Forrest Gump got top honors, though even before that I had been suspicious of the awards' canny blend of "meaningful" prestige and self-regarding glitz. Then again, it is no secret that the reason everbody tunes in is to see Tinseltown's crème de la crème parading, looking their priciest. There is more regard for art to be found in virtually any other film festival, but the Academy Awards have gloriously cornered the market for expensive pageantry and vacuous glamour. In its White-Elephant way, the Oscars, with the red carpet catwalk and statuette-waving histrionics, have become as reassuringly glossy an event to people as an eccentric old aunt's birthday party. It may be embarrassing to watch, but audiences seem to lap it up even as they shrug it off -- "Why fight it? I had a good time." So let us look at some of the categories. Best Actor: Adrien Brody (The Pianist), Nicolas Cage (Adaptation), Michael Caine (The Quiet American), Daniel Day-Lewis (Gangs of New York) and Jack Nicholson (About Schmidt). Except for Day-Lewis' expansive vaudeville turn and Cage's nifty double-duty, the Academy this year seems to be promoting modulation over bravura, with Caine and Brody in particular eschewing their recent scenery-devouring for implosive, seething-under-the-skin pale fire. But the critics' favorite is probably Nicholson, a three-time winner who has managed to instill his bitter-patsy role with every single bit of star persona since his 1969 breakthrough in Easy Rider. His Schmidt shoulders the entire Nicholson mystique, summing it up while professing to say deep truths about "us" -- just what the Academy loves. It's almost irrelevant to add that the performance itself is splendid. Best Actress: Salma Hayek (Frida), Nicole Kidman (The Hours), Diane Lane (Unfaithful), Julianne Moore (Far From Heaven) and Renée Zellweger (Chicago). Recent past winners have exclusively been glamorous young actresses doing penance for their beauty: Hillary Swank as a cross-dressing misfit enduring white trash intolerance in Boys Don't Cry, Julia Roberts as a bulldozing single mom enduring bureaucracy in Erin Brockovich, Halle Berry as a dilapidated slattern enduring a nude Billy Bob Thornton in Monster's Ball. By that logic, Kidman and Hayek would seem to be shoo-ins for enduring a fake nose and an unbecoming unibrow, respectively. My own favorites are Moore for her unlikely combination of parodic distance and emotional vulnerability, and Lane for her lived-in yet full-bodied sensuality in a role that accentuates rather than dampens the actress' assets. Yet most bets seem to be on spunky lil' Zellweger, whose hardworking performance in a musical could impress voters by its sheer bouncing-ball energy. It worked for Liza Minnelli in Cabaret in 1972, after all. Best Director: Pedro Almodovar (Talk to Her), Stephen Daldry (The Hours), Rob Marshall (Chicago), Roman Polanski (The Pianist) and Martin Scorsese (Gangs of New York). Daldry and Marshall are impersonally efficient artisans, while Almodovar, Polanski and Scorsese are distinguished artists with decades of work to back them up. Since "direction" to my mind stands for much more than just the best way to shoot a scene, I only take the last three seriously. Almodovar's directorial nod is a token gesture for having had his movie blocked from the Best Foreign Picture category, and Polanski has so much legal trouble here that he could not set foot in the country, much less in the pavilion. That leaves Scorsese as the sure thing. Now, I yield to nobody in my admiration of Scorsese, but his status as the favorite choice among voters strikes me as condescendingly sentimental. Chaplin and Hitchcock never won competitive Oscars; to award Scorsese as a gloved apology for snubbing him through most of his career is no less insulting. Best Picture: Chicago, Gangs of New York, The Hours, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and The Pianist. A shoot-the-fireworks musical, a birth-of-the-Big-Apple epic, a coffee-table literary chamber piece, a crowd-pleasing fantasy epic and a semi-autobiographical Holocaust piece -- at last some variety in the choices. The Hours has this year's equivalent of the A Beautiful Mind slot, a harmless piece of name-dropping and celebrity self-effacement; I have not been enchanted by any of the Lord of the Rings paraphernalia, so the film means little to me. Gangs of New York and The Pianist are deeply personal works by major directors, hardly enjoyed by the Academy's craving for respectable vulgarity despite their weighty themes. Chicago, then, is the landslide favorite. With Miramax's ruthless strong-arms promotion behind it, I would not be surprised if Oscar voters swallow the whole resurrection-of-the-musical thing and awards the movie its top laurels. Maybe the Academy would be just returning a favor: after all, the film will be providing the ceremony with its snazziest production numbers.
Either way, don't count on me to watch the damn thing. I will probably be busy catching up with an old Robert Bresson
film on video, and having a better time while at it.
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