Oscars 1999
March 1999
February 1999
Hollywood's most hated hero
The Oscars are usually the apotheosis of luvvieduvviedom, awash with sugary schmaltz. When Sally Field (remember her?) received her second award as best actress, she hyper-ventilated on cue and burbled her thanks to the colleagues who had voted for her: 'Gee, I guess this means that you guys really like me!' It will be rather different this year on 21 March, when the director Elia Kazan receives an honorary Oscar from the academy. As he accepts the gilded homunculus, Kazan will be able to reflect that many of those present hate his guts. One of Kazan's peers, Abraham Polonsky, has remarked: 'I'll be hoping someone shoots him.'The Guardian's alternative Oscars
The Oscars are, without doubt, the most important film awards of the year. But how fair are they? The first thing to realise is that you hardly ever win Oscars with movies that are unsuccessful at the box-office. The only film that might buck the trend in 1999 is Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, an art film many critics account the best film of the year but not one likely to set the box-office on fire.
Bardic Oscars
Shakespeare has never been easy to squeeze into English national corsets, for all his fun at the expense of Welsh Fluellen and assorted Scots and Irish comedians. Some of his greatest interpreters have spoken or sung in foreign tongues, including American. Shakespeare is a shared treasure. It's thus entirely appropriate that a fiction celebrating his life (and lust) should be a marvellous mongrel.