'No Country,' no question
Coens' Western takes top prizes while Europeans sweep in acting
In a year of bleak cinematic visions, the bleakest won out: "No Country for Old Men," a dark tale of evil and entropy in the new West, took best picture at the 80th Academy Awards last night, also winning statues for best directors for Joel and Ethan Coen, best supporting actor, and best adapted screenplay.
This year's Oscars was also notable for the continental flavor of its acting awards. All four of the night's performance trophies went to foreign-born actors: a Spaniard, a Frenchwoman, and two British subjects.
The winner of the best actress award was France's Marion Cotillard, for her performance as the tormented chanteuse Edith Piaf in the biopic "La Vie en Rose." It marked only the second time in Academy history that the Oscar has gone to a lead actress in a foreign-language role; the first was Sophia Loren in 1960's "Two Women." The win came as something of a surprise given that Julie Christie was favored to win for "Away From Her."
Daniel Day-Lewis won best actor for playing an obsessed oilman in early 1900s California in "There Will be Blood," an expected bouquet tossed to a much-praised performance. The actor dedicated his Oscar - his second best actor award after 1989's "My Left Foot" - to his producer grandfather Michael Balcon, his poet father Cecil Day-Lewis. and his three sons.
As with the lead performances, so with the secondary players. As predicted, Javier Bardem won the best supporting actor Oscar for his unnerving performance in "No Country for Old Men" as Anton Chigurh, the stone-cold killer with a page-boy hairdo and a deadly cattle gun.
The Spanish-born Bardem was visibly elated as he accepted the Oscar. He thanked the Coens for putting "one of the worst haircuts in Hollywood history on my head" and in his native tongue sent greetings to his mother, his grandparents, and the entire country of Spain.
The surprise winner of the award for best supporting actress was Tilda Swinton, who played a villainous corporate lawyer in "Michael Clayton." Swinton beat out three actresses who were widely thought to have a better shot: Cate Blanchett in "I'm Not There," Amy Ryan in "Gone Baby Gone," and Ruby Dee in "American Gangster."
By common consensus, the tart-tongued British actress gave the best backstage performance of the evening, saying of her stunned reaction to winning, "It helps that I never even watched this thing on television, and I've never been here before, I didn't know what to expect. I'm a little disappointed there weren't any dance numbers. . . . I thought it would be much more like Siegfried and Roy." Of the sweep by continental actors, Swinton commented, "Dude, Hollywood is built on Europeans."
The directing award for the Coens, who also shared the adapted screenplay award, marked the full final acceptance of the maverick brother filmmaking team into the status of Hollywood royalty. Accepting the directing Oscar, Joel Cohen spoke of the duo's childhood experiences making super-8 epics and expressed gratitude for being allowed to "play in our corner of the sandbox."
The award ceremonies, held at Los Angeles' Kodak Theatre, had almost been scuttled by the 100-day-long writers' strike, which counted the Golden Globes and Vanity Fair's traditional Oscar party among its casualties. With the strike resolved two weeks ago, however, host Jon Stewart was free to mock both writers and studio executives.
Envisioning an awards ceremonies without writers, Stewart presented clip-shows of classic movie moments devoted to binoculars and characters waking up from bad dreams. He also pointed out the screenwriter of "Juno" in the audience and said, "Diablo Cody was an exotic dancer and now she's an Oscar-nominated screenwriter. Hope you enjoy the pay cut."
Cody got the last laugh late in the evening when she picked up the Oscar for best original screenplay. The 29-year-old writer, whose real name is Brooke Busey, took the stage in a sleeveless dress that showed off her bodacious arm tattoo, thanked her family, and promptly burst into tears.
It was one of the few engagingly messy moments in an evening long on history, class, and slightly dull duty. The greatest suspense came when the 98-year-old production designer Robert Boyle accepted a lifetime achievement Oscar and gave a rambling but terribly moving speech dedicated to the moving image. The evening's emotional high point was the annual clip-reel of the previous year's fallen, this one ending with an image of Heath Ledger in "Brokeback Mountain."
Among the "craft" awards, the statue for best costumes went to Alexandra Byrne for "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" and its lavish gowns, while best art direction went to Dante Ferretti for "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street." "There Will Be Blood" director of photography Robert Elswit won best cinematography, only the second of that film's eight nominations to result in a win.
"The Bourne Ultimatum," the third in the popular espionage series, won three Oscars, for best editing, best sound editing, and best sound mixing. "Taxi to the Dark Side," about the torture of US prisoners in the war against terror, won best documentary.
Other unexpected winners included "La Vie en Rose," whose best makeup Oscar set up the film's leading actress win. Best visual effects went to "The Golden Compass," a movie that received mixed reviews and weak box office.
"Ratatouille," the much-loved computer-generated comedy about a rat turned French chef, won the Oscar for best animated feature, beating out "Persepolis," a film submitted by France for the foreign-language award but ignored in that category. The winner of the award for best foreign-language film was "The Counterfeiters," an Austrian drama about Jewish counterfeiters forced to work for the Nazi Reich; it opens in the Boston area on March 7.
Continuing the evening's continental drift, the Oscar for best song went to the Irish rock singer Glen Hansard and the Czech Republic's Marketa Irglova, for "Falling Slowly," the song from the low-budget art-house hit "Once." Clearly amazed, Hansard said "What're we doin' here? This is mad. . . . We never thought we'd be in a room like this."
With unstoppable momentum and eight nominations, though, "No Country for Old Men" seemed the movie to beat. The Coens's adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel divided audiences and united critics with its violence, startling performance by Bardem, and disdain for conventional closure. Despite being set in 1980, it seemed a film very much of its moment, the product of an unsettled and ambiguous time in American life.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more about movies and the Oscars, go to www.boston.com/movies 