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Sunday, March 26, 2000
LOS ANGELES -- His was a shattering performance, nothing less; it was drop-dead perfect in every dimension, style, depth, hue, tonality. And tonight, Oscar night, in the Shrine Auditorium here, it will go without even the hint of a mention.
I speak, of course, of Elmo. Elmo is not going to win for his scorching, haunting self-parody in "The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland." To win, alas, you have to be nominated. Not even Oscar the Grouch was nominated from that film, so Oscar Hammerstein remains, at least for now, the only Oscar ever to win an Oscar.
Americans now drop something like $7 billion on the movies every year. As ever, the way they distribute that $7 billion has only a vague relationship with films of actual quality. The ominous "Pokemon, The First Movie" outdrew "The Talented Mr. Ripley." "Reindeer Games" made seven times the millions of Woody Allen's "Sweet and Lowdown," and if you think the beautifully drawn characters in "Angela's Ashes" seemed a little depressed, it's probably in part because the perfectly dreadful "Snow Day" whomped 'em at the box office by better than 4-to-1.
All of this is what we need the Oscars for.
We need the Oscars to stand up for a film like "American Beauty," in which desperate characters do consistently despicable things and yet, under the first-time direction of Sam Mendes, emerge as profoundly sympathetic contemporary social archetypes.
We need the Oscars to remind us, for the 12th time, that Meryl Streep could play the title role in "The Jesse Ventura Story" and probably carry it off well enough to get elected governor.
We need the Oscars to remind us that seamless acting is not by any definition the new province of youth. So despite the fact that the average age of the five nominees for best supporting actress is 25.6, tonight's best actor statuette could wind up in the weathered old hands of Richard Farnsworth for "The Straight Story." It's somehow not emphatic enough to point out that Farnsworth, at 79, is the oldest lead actor nominee ever. So how's this? He was in "A Day at the Races." Talkies weren't 10 years old.
We need the Oscars to remind us that on the 10th anniversary of "Dances With Wolves" winning for best picture, you still need a lot more than 90 minutes of mammoth Kevin Costner close-ups to be here tonight. Thus "For Love of the Game," a picture that felt like it was shot entirely from Costner's upper lip, looking up his nose, won't be mentioned. This spares us monumental pronouncements such as the one Costner brought out for "Wolves": "My life is bigger than the movies, and my ideas are bigger than the movies."
Yes, but what is bigger than that head?
We need the Oscars to remind us that there is, even in the peaks of the bizarre entertainment industry, a natural maturing of even the most gifted. Wasn't that Dustin Hoffman, just last month, standing at his most dignified, carefully reading the announcements of the Academy's major nominations? Wasn't that the same Dustin Hoffman who mentioned on an L.A. talk show in 1974 that, "The Academy Awards are obscene, dirty and no better than a beauty contest"? Hoffman was a Best Actor nominee that year for "Lenny." He lost the beauty contest to Ed Norton, I mean Art Carney, for "Harry and Tonto."
We need the Oscars to remind us that no matter how viciously hyped a movie can be, even in the age of instantaneous Internet distribution and random fast-food synergies, that it is still a challenge in this industry to keep from delivering a load of crap like "Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace." That crap opinion is not my own, but rather the conclusion of a memorable review in The New Yorker: "What is this? Crap. Say it out loud. Crap."
Yep. It was no "Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo."
Gene Collier's e-mail is gcollier@post-gazette.com.