Academy Awards in the time of war

Bookies bet on Nicole Kidman, Weinstein Ganged upon and screenplay noms puzzling

With the U.S. waging war on Iraq, organizers at this year's Academy Awards are debating whether or not to put a ban on stars from using the podium as a platform to air their political views
The Oscars ceremony is no flashpoint for social conflict but neither is it a stranger to controversy. In 1973, Marlon Brando sent Sacheen Littlefeather (actually B-movie actress Maria Cruz) to the Academy Awards ceremony in his place. She turned down his Oscar for The Godfather to protest Hollywood's treatment of American Indians.
When Vanessa Redgrave won a best supporting actress Oscar in 1977 for Julia, she famously praised the Palestinians during her acceptance speech.
Richard Gere, a Buddhist and long-time critic of China's presence in Tibet, was a presenter at the 1993 Academy Awards where he interrupted the ceremony to give a long speech attacking China's leader Deng Xiaoping and that country's human rights record. He was told he would not be invited back. Prior to his speech, the activist couple of Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins assailed the U.S. government for incarcerating 266 HIV virus-infected Haitians at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
More recently, there was fair amount of controversy when director Elia Kazan (On The Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire), received an honourary Oscar in 1999. Along with various other writers, actors and filmmakers, Kazan was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s about his knowledge of alleged communists and communist activities. While many others refused to reveal anything to HUAC, Kazan named names during the blacklist era. The decision earned Kazan the enmity of many in Hollywood. It also reportedly ended his close friendship with Brando, who had starred in two of his most acclaimed films.
There was a big hubbub leading up to 1999's ceremony but when Martin Scorsese actually presented Kazan with the honourary Oscar, there wasn't much of a stir. To show their disdain, several attendees - including Ed Harris, Nick Nolte and Steven Spielberg - did not stand up or clap when Kazan received his award.
While officials running the show say that the 75th annual Academy Awards will go on come rain or shine - even in the event of war - the question remains whether ABC will televise the show.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Awards show Producer Gil Cates was asked the question at the Academy Nominees Luncheon on March 10th, to which he responded: "Who knows? We're going to do the show, if [ABC] writes things under the screen indicating what's going on in the world, that's fine. If something happens and they have to go away, they'll go away and they'll come back... it's nothing that the network hasn't done over the years."
ABC has made it clear that they have considered the possibility of pre-empting the Oscars show. "As is always the case, if there are world events that warrant coverage on the night of the Academy Awards, ABC News will bring them to the American audience with the full support of the Academy," said ABC's head of publicity, Kevin Brockman.
Which seems to indicate that there is a possibility that ABC will tape the program instead of airing it live, and possibly delay the broadcast until a later date.
This would not be the first time the award show was delayed due to news coverage. The Oscars were postponed for 24 hours in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan was shot earlier in the day that the ceremony was due to take place. A two-day delay occurred after the 1968 assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and there also was a delay for a full week in 1938 due to flooding in Los Angeles.
While the Academy Awards continued as scheduled throughout World War II, the ceremonies themselves became dressed-down affairs lacking the glamour of previous years.

Gangs of New York
Days after running a controversial print ad that featured an opinion column by Oscar-winning director Robert Wise urging voters to cast their ballots for Scorsese, Miramax has pulled the offending advertisement and issued a mea culpa. Some Oscar voters are so angry about the politicking for Best Director they're even demanding their ballots be returned.
In the ad, Wise (who is a two-time Oscar-winning director for West Side Story and The Sound of Music) writes that Gangs of New York is "both a remarkable movie in its own right, and in many ways a summation of (Scorsese's) entire body of work."
Scorsese has been nominated for the directing Oscar four times, but has never won and Miramax honcho Harvey Weinstein has made it his mission to see that Scorsese finally receives a statuette. Oscar politicking is nothing new but Weinstein is known for being particularly aggressive. He campaigned heavily for Shakespeare In Love which was nominated for 13 Oscars and won six in 1999. At the time, many industry-watchers sniped that Weinstein had bought Gwyneth Paltrow her Best Actress Oscar.
The recent Gangs of New York ads provoked a rare - and unusually harsh - public reaction by current academy officials. Academy President Frank Pierson said the column explicitly violates academy rules prohibiting voters from telling anyone how they vote. "It's a corruption of the process," said Pierson. "The reaction among our membership has been real dismay, anger and outrage is not too strong a word."
Scorsese himself was less than thrilled with the campaigning. "Marty was very touched by what Bob Wise said," said the director's publicist, Lois Smith. "But he never knew it was going to become an advertisement."
Gangs of New York is nominated for 10 Oscars, including best picture, and is among the 40 nominations that Miramax has received this year.

Kidman best bet
Renee Zellweger's recent Screen Actors Guild Awards win may appear to be giving her a leg up for the Oscars, but the oddmakers are still putting their money on Nicole Kidman.
Zellweger nabbed the leading actress SAG Award for her performance in Chicago over Kidman in The Hours, Julianne Moore in Far From Heaven, Diane Lane in Unfaithful and Salma Hayek in Frida.
Bookmakers from Las Vegas to London to Australia's Alice Springs, as well as all three New York Times film critics, are all betting that Kidman will be taking home the gold Oscar statuette.
Aside from her face-altering, turn as author Virginia Woolf in The Hours, in Kidman's favour is the fact that many believed she should have been recognized for her role in Moulin Rouge last year.
Kidman's odds of winning in the category average about 4:7, while Zellweger comes in second at 15:8, followed by Moore with 4:1, Lane at 25:1 and Hayek with 33:1.
Bookmakers have selected Daniel Day-Lewis as the favourite for leading actor and Chicago as the most likely to take home best picture at the Academy Awards.

Original or adapted?
What separates an adapted screenplay from an original screenplay? No one really seems to know. This year more than ever, confusion reigned as to which category certain contenders would be considered in.
In some cases it was obvious. About a Boy, The Hours and The Pianist were all adapted from novels. But what about Adaptation? It's based on Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief but has to count as one of the loosest page-to-screen adaptations ever.
And then there's Chicago. Why was that film, which was based on a musical, nominated in the adapted screenplay category while My Big Fat Greek Wedding, based on Nia Vardalos' one-woman show, nominated in the original screenplay category?
The confusion doesn't end there. Jay Cocks, Steve Zaillian and Kenneth Lonergan received an original screenplay nod for Gangs of New York despite the fact that the source material for the film was a book, The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld by Herbert Asbury.
The 75th Academy Awards will be televised live on March 23.

Publication Date: 2003-03-23
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=2513