Sunday, March 04, 2007 Covington: The Oscars and stuff By Gary Covington looking in
IT WAS a good night too for one-time US vice-president Al Gore whose global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth, won two golden statuettes; Best Documentary Feature and Best Original Song -- the latter quite a feat as the Motown musical Dream Girls crowded the category with no less than three nominations.
THE Oscars this year were muted -- conservative and well-behaved -- the men wore black suits or pretty near and the ladies long evening dresses and scrumptious most of them looked. Nobody got up and let their hair or the side down except maybe Clint Eastwood who (again) forgot his eyeglasses and struggled to read the teleprompter.
Clint had to make do with only one trophy this year - Best Sound Editing for Letters from Iwo Jima - it was, at last, the turn of Martin Scorsese to win. His film, The Departed (and, according to one wit, the first film Scorsese has made with a plotline), won four Oscars including Best Film and Best Director.
Scorsese's been around a good long time. His first film was a wondrous movie called Boxcar Bertha in 1972 but not too many statuettes have come his way since. It was good to see, twenty-five films and twenty-five years on, the man's work appreciated at last.
It was a good night too for one-time US vice-president Al Gore whose global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth, won two golden statuettes; Best Documentary Feature and Best Original Song -- the latter quite a feat as the Motown musical Dream Girls crowded the category with no less than three nominations.
Dream Girls didn't do as well as the reviewers prophesied, winning only two Oscars. Predictably one was for Best Sound Mixing; the movie does, after all, feature a good many songs and snippets of songs. Not so predictably the second trophy, Best Actress in a Supporting Role, went to Jennifer Hudson, a statuesque lady, who really is a singer.
Still with songs and at one point an old guy with a guitar appeared on stage to sing one of the themes from the animated feature film Cars; who he was I don't know, much of the show's announcements came over as an incomprehensible bass rumble. The song was written by Randy Newman. Remember him? Sail Away, Mama Told Me, Simon Smith and his Amazing Dancing Bear?
Cars -- and woe is me because I thought it was a marvelous film -- didn't win the Best Animated Feature Oscar. That went to Happy Feet, the penguin movie, which I haven't yet seen. The other nominee in this section was Monster House. Don't be put off by the lackluster advertising or bum poster, it's a great film.
Music played a big part in this year's Oscars -- few live acts thank goodness although Celine Dion trilled for a while. I can't stand Miss Dion -- I'm not sure why, it may have something to do with that Titanic film because I have similar problems with Leonardo DiCaprio. He's a fine actor -- terrific in The Aviator -- but groan I groan whenever his name crops up.
Interspersed with the awards were the usual handful of themed nostalgia features. The Oscar highlights cuts some of these but I did catch a couple. First up was a compilation of film clips with writers as the theme. I didn't pay much attention to the visuals because the music being played was the old (1950s!) Typewriter Song. You know the one; real typewriter keys clacking out the rhythm and a bell tinging at the end of each 'line'. What a treat! I hadn't heard it for years.
The other score played over the writer clips, and which I thought most apt, was Mission Impossible. Not the ersatz big screen version but the great Lalo Schifrin original, which has to be the best action theme ever written.
The last interlude was a tribute to composer and conductor Ennio Morricone, he who everybody associates with the music to A Fistful of Dollars. I'd visualized him as another Burt Bacharach or John Barry -- a Hollywood guy, suave and expensively barbered -- but no; up stepped an earnest looking Italian gentleman. Maybe a city accountant or insurance broker, surely not the man who gave us such original and spirited themes as Once Upon A Time in the West, The Mission and The Untouchables. And he didn't speak a word of English -- Clint to the rescue but that durn teleprompter...
Tribute was also paid, as usual, to those in the movie industry who last year passed on to that great green room in the sky. Glenn Ford, forever playing Mr Nice Guy. Jack Wild, not so nice as the artful dodger Oliver. James Doohan, Captain Kirk's chief engineer aboard Star Trek's Enterprise. And Jack Palance.
Palance, no beauty, regularly played the black hat, the bad guy, and thus I'll always remember him as Alan Ladd's adversary in the movie Shane. Don't ask me what year -- decades ago -- Palance, evil Palance, bushwhacked Shane from an upstairs balcony and how their guns roared. Great booms; not the phtts and parps of modern filmic pistols. Rent the video. See Shane. Did it win an Oscar? I haven't a clue.
