Producer of the film 'Chicago' Martin Richards (bottom left)
celebrates with Richard Gere (center, facing), Renee Zellweger (top right), Catherine
Zeta-Jones, and an unidentifiable person at the 75th annual Academy Awards at
the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, California, on Sunday. Richards accepted the Academy
Award for best motion picture of the year for the film. - Reuters
LOS ANGELES (AP):
THE BEST-PICTURE Academy Award for the flashy musical Chicago was one of the only predictable elements of an Oscars ceremony that included three key wins for the Holocaust drama The Pianist.
On a night when the war with Iraq set a sombre tone, Adrien Brody took best actor and Roman Polanski earned the directing prize for The Pianist against higher-profile front-runners. The Japanese film Spirited Away won for feature-length animation against cartoon behemoths from Hollywood. Eminem took the best-song Oscar against a field that included veterans Paul Simon and U2.
The ceremony included an angry indictment of the Bush administration from documentary winner Michael Moore and a tearful moment of empathy for war victims from Brody.
With six awards, Chicago was the main winner at a ceremony where pageantry took on greater solemnity because of the United States United States (U.S.) -led war on Iraq.
Chicago became the first musical to win best picture since 1968's Oliver! Catherine Zeta-Jones, supporting-actress winner for Chicago, was the first performer to win an Oscar for a musical since 1972.
Nicole Kidman won for lead actress as author Virginia Woolf in the sombre drama The Hours. Chris Cooper earned the supporting-actor Oscar for the twisted Hollywood tale Adaptation.
Kidman, Cooper and Zeta-Jones had been acting front-runners, but first-time nominee Brody was something of a longshot in the best actor field, where each of the other contenders already had at least one Oscar. Jack Nicholson of About Schmidt and Daniel Day-Lewis of Gangs of New York had been viewed as best bets to win the lead-actor trophy.
The Pianist was based on the life of Holocaust survivor Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew who eluded the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto. Brody told the Oscar crowd the film was a tribute to Szpilman, and he fought back tears as he said the role gave him a taste of the dehumanisation that comes with war.
"It's just a very difficult thing to do, to celebrate when there is sadness and conflict in the world. Our achievements as artistes and filmmakers and actors are valid, and we deserve to celebrate that," Brody said backstage. However "...the timing for me is a little odd."
Polanski had been a bit of a longshot for director. Martin Scorsese was viewed as the likely winner for Gangs of New York through much of Oscar season, but Rob Marshall's triumph for Chicago at the Directors Guild of America awards made it look like a horse race between Scorsese and Marshall.
A Holocaust survivor himself, Polanski has been an exile from the United States since he fled 25 years ago.
The Pianist also earned the adapted-screenplay award for Ronald Harwood.
Chicago came in with a leading 13 nominations, followed by the crime epic Gangs of New York with 10. However, Gangs was shut out in every category.
Chicago was adapted from the Bob Fosse stage hit about two 'Jazz Age' murderesses using their jailhouse celebrity to further their singing careers.
Musicals gradually fell out of favour in Hollywood after their critical peak in the early 1960s, when West Side Story, The Sound of Music and others won best picture. Moulin Rouge, a best picture nominee a year ago, helped rekindle the genre, and Chicago has become a huge box-office success with a domestic gross of US$134 million and climbing.
"I just hope that we continually do musicals," said Chicago producer Martin Richards. "I just hope that they don't do one musical after another just because it's the flavour of the week, and that they do good musicals, and we bring back at least one of them a year. That would be my joy."
Spirited Away, from Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki, was a huge hit in his home country, but an English-language adaptation did only a modest US$5.5 million in the United States last fall. The animated-feature Oscar seemed more likely to go to one of the Hollywood films, like the US$100-million-plus hits Ice Age or Lilo & Stitch.
Eminem won his Oscar for co-writing Lose Yourself, a song from 8 Mile, in which he also starred.
Oscar organisers scrapped much of the ceremony's revelry in light of the Iraq war. A celebrity or two decided against attending because of the conflict, while some wore peace pins or drove to the Oscars in fuel-efficient vehicles to protest American reliance on overseas' oil.
Moore, whose Bowling for Columbine won the feature-length documentary prize, railed against the White House, saying, "Shame on you, Mr. Bush", for going to war. He received a standing ovation as he headed to the stage, and his angry speech was greeted with a mix of applause and boos.
Bowling for Columbine, Moore's alternately hilarious and horrifying examination of gun violence in America, also condemns U.S. policies and intervention overseas.
"We kill each other at an enormous rate, more so than virtually any other country on this planet," Moore said backstage. "What was the lesson that we taught the children of Columbine this week? This was the lesson, that violence is an acceptable means to resolve a conflict."
For a change, Oscar organisers moved the show along with swiftly, bringing it at just over its scheduled 3-hour time. Some past Oscar shows, including last year's, topped four hours.
