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 Oscar afterglow Tuesday, March 27, 2001 By Ron Weiskind, Post-Gazette Movie Editor
LOS ANGELES -- Maybe this year's Academy Awards should have been held at Dodger Stadium instead of the Shrine Auditorium. Oscar showed off some new pitches that kept the hitters guessing.
You've got your fast ball -- a show that zipped by in a minute short of 3 1/2 hours, chopping more than 30 minutes off last year's glacial pace.
You've got your curve ball -- upset wins by Marcia Gay Harden as Best Supporting Actress in "Pollock" and Steven Soderbergh as Best Director for "Traffic."
You've got your changeup -- Steve Martin taking over as host from Billy Crystal and getting laughs with jokes about Hollywood and its stars that seemed unusually cynical, perhaps because they were delivered in Martin's patented deadpan smirk, albeit leavened by a few self-deprecating one-liners.
You've got your knuckleball -- "Gladiator" winning Best Picture even though it lost the awards for director, screenplay, cinematography and editing (it won for sound, costume design and visual effects as well as Best Actor, Russell Crowe).
And, inevitably, you've got your screwballs. Russell, that's your cue.
"I'm only into short answers," the Australian import informed reporters backstage. "Ask me questions I can answer yes or no, or shortly, and we'll get along really fine."
When asked about how he connected with his character, the former Roman general Maximus who becomes a gladiator, Crowe condescended, "You see, I'm an actor, and I read the script and I learn the lines and I put the costume on and bounce around."
But later he acknowledged that there was more to the gig than making like a kangaroo.
"The most challenging aspect ... was the physicality. I got very heavily beaten up on this movie, and we didn't have time to repair me so I had to keep going with it. But [it was] also trying to find a real man inside. ... Maximus was just a piece of fiction from [screenwriter David] Franzoni's own mind, and we had to find a way to fill him full of air and keep him constant all the way through a feature film. So it was a really enjoyable experience, little skirts and stuff aside."
When his name was called as the winner, he said there was "nothing going through my mind. There was no connection with the world. I didn't have any legs. I was just sitting there, thinking this is one of those sorts of remarkably bad-taste kind of gags that your brain plays on you. But, yeah, I was stunned." His early favorite to win the award was a man who didn't get nominated, Michael Douglas for his performance in "Wonder Boys."
Crowe was asked to elaborate on his acceptance-speech comments about finding the courage to keep driving toward your dreams.
"That happens to me on a daily basis, particularly when I'm working on a character. I've got to keep my mind on myself. The only way I'm going to get through it is just by being brave. There was one little thing I did want to say, that if the opportunity's at destiny's forge, God bless America. God save the queen. God defend New Zealand. And thank Christ for Australia."
No, Russell, thank YOU.
At least the "Gladiator" producers didn't have to follow Crowe's act. They got to the backstage interview platform first. Douglas Wick took heart in the success of what he called a group of unconventional pictures.
"You don't make pictures with toxic waste ["Erin Brockovich"], you don't have pictures with subtitles ["Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"], you don't do sword and sandals. So already a lot of rules are broken. ... I think it will open up everybody's thinking."
Better not open up Julia Roberts' noggin, however. You can't be sure what you might find. The "Erin Brockovich" star completed her sweep of the year's awards with the Best Actress Oscar, and with another delightfully ditzy acceptance speech in which she openly defied the Academy's on-and-off-in-45-seconds rule -- and somehow forgot to thank Erin Brockovich, the woman whose story she portrayed in the film.
"I'm so glad you asked me that," she told a reporter who asked about Brockovich's whereabouts. "During my out-of-body experience earlier tonight I didn't acknowledge her, shamefully. And really, she is the center of our universe, our movie. And I've said so many things about her and so many things to her that she knows the esteem in which I hold her, which is quite high. But I was remiss in not acknowledging her tonight."
But Roberts was still giddy as she entered the press room, greeting reporters by saying, "Thank you SO MUCH!" When a moderator called off numbers indicating who would ask the next question, Roberts said, "This is like the weirdest auction of all, like I'm auctioning off this" -- she held up her Oscar -- "which would just be so wrong."
Asked how she got under the real Erin Brockovich's skin to play the role, she said, "I have no answer for that. Ask Soderbergh [he was nominated for directing the movie]. I don't know. It was all a kind of a dream and a mystery and a wonderful push-up bra. Let's be honest."
But later, she rose to the occasion.
"[Soderbergh] infused me really with so much confidence, and he teaches a great lesson to all of us who were there, which is that filmmaking can not only be totally collaborative, it can be utterly enjoyable and expedient. You don't have to be tortured and kind of be, you know, the thinker all the time. Oh, the angst.
"I'm just so happy to know that man, I can't tell you."
Someone inquired if, after getting two nominations early in her career (for "Pretty Woman" and a supporting actress nomination for "Steel Magnolias"), she had set a goal of finding a role that would earn her another nomination.
"No. You know, my goals are smaller, dare I say, slightly more complicated and less public. My goals are a little more humble. This is a little beyond my reach."
So we'll follow her suggestion and ask Soderbergh about both of his Oscar-nominated films and about his Best Director win.
"I think I looked pretty surprised, didn't I? All of you must know that I didn't anticipate this. Didn't see it coming. I was having a great time, got to see a lot of my friends get up there and was very happy already. But this is going to take a lot of time to process."
Soderbergh made his mark as an independent director, proving that low-budget films had a future with the success of his mid-1980s movie "sex, lies and videotape." Now he's an Oscar winner making movies for major studios. But he insists he hasn't changed -- and won't.
"I've always followed the same methodology from my first film up to the one I'm doing now. So I don't think I could alter my way of working and thinking even if I tried.
"But, frankly, from the beginning I've said that I don't delineate between studio films and independent films. I delineate between good movies and bad movies. And we all would like to see good movies. And I don't care who's writing the check."
Throughout the Oscar campaign he was urged to support one of his nominated films over the other, lest he split the vote and lose the Best Director race. But he refused.
"Whenever people ask me, which of your films is your favorite, I say, the one I'm making right now. ... Once I deliver them, I tend to move on mentally. I wish for the best, but, as we know, you can't control what happens to these things once they go out there. Certainly none of us anticipated what would happen to 'Traffic' because it was a difficult film to set up and one that we were told time and again had no commercial potential. It was really exciting to see that the audience went. That was a pleasant surprise."
But the movie was much more than that to its screenwriter, Stephen Gaghan, who knew something about drug trafficking. His use of illegal substances almost killed him.
"I live my life today in an entirely different way than I used to," he said, holding the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. "It's like such a cataclysmic shift. I have gratitude. I wake up and I'm happy and I feel love and I feel joy and I like to go through my life. It didn't used to be that way.
"I was killing myself in the most cowardly way imaginable -- and I did it daily. I just didn't have the courage to do it all at once. One day I hit the wall and I reached out my hand. I just said I need help. And the help was there in so many forms, you can't even imagine."
He said the Oscar is "just icing, you know. It's not even the cake. And I'm lucky to be alive. The movie was very, very personal in a lot of ways. ... There was a lot that didn't even make it in, that I couldn't put in and maintain an R rating. I did about 22 years of research on that picture. It feels like some kind of closure although of course it isn't closure because I still have to wake up tomorrow and keep doing the same stuff."
He credited Benicio Del Toro, who won the Best Supporting Actor award for his role of a Mexican drug cop in "Traffic," for bringing so much insight into the character that Gaghan extensively rewrote the script to accommodate some of the actor's ideas. He talked of giving away pieces of his Oscar, "the head can go to Soderbergh, and maybe an arm to Benicio and another arm to Michael Douglas," who also starred in the film.
The other screenwriting winner, Cameron Crowe for "Almost Famous," has already reaped a different kind of reward for the film, based on his experiences as a teen-age rock-music writer for Rolling Stone magazine.
"It meant a lot tonight because I was able to bring my family together in a way. The movie, besides being about music and why we love music, was also about why I love my family and why I never quite understood the cleavage that developed between my sister and my mom," both of whom are characters in the movie. "And tonight I was able to bring them both here and thank them from the stage. And I think the movie in some wonderful way brought our family a little more together, which is great. And that's what makes it particularly sweet. The cast did an amazing job for me and made the world come to life."
And then there's Crowe's long-lost relative. "My brother Russell will be here in a moment," he joshed.
Knocked it right out of the park. Yes, it was that kind of Oscar night.
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