Does Clint feel lucky? His extraordinary apotheosis as the grizzled, crinkly-eyed sage of the Hollywood establishment, which began in 1993 with an Oscar for his revisionist western Unforgiven, and was almost sealed with his 2003 drama Mystic River -- has surely now arrived.
With those Best Picture and Best Director awards in both fists for his emotionally charged boxing movie Million Dollar Baby, the 74-year-old Eastwood now has living-legend status, a John Huston for the 21st century.
Conservative commentators in the US will be growling with scorn. They are reportedly annoyed that Clint has jettisoned his gung-ho Dirty Harry persona for this brow-furrowing quasi-liberal mode, a journey to the center-left that now sees him swinging a punch at the Roman Catholic Church and even appearing to endorse euthanasia.
PHOTO: EPA
Meanwhile, Eastwood's appetite for work is undimmed: he is already drumming up interest for his new World War II project about Iwo Jima.
Million Dollar Baby also gave Hollywood the sugar rush of wildly popular acting prizes. There was a supporting-role award for Morgan Freeman, whose elder-statesman status is hardly less than Eastwood's own. Hilary Swank won her second Best Actress award for a fervent performance as the trailer-park woman coached by Eastwood to fleeting glory in the boxing ring. She beat out a funky and offbeat nominee list with no obvious supercharged glam contenders.
It's interesting how, until this year, her name was routinely mentioned in cheeky articles as an example of "The Curse of Oscar," whereby someone gets an award (for Boys Don't Cry in 2000) only to disappear. Now Swank gets the last laugh.
PHOTO: APN
But, oh woe, what about Martin Scorsese? Once again, the Academy has scorned him, and cemented its reputation for rewarding the middlebrow. The Aviator wasn't his best film by a long way, but Million Dollar Baby isn't all that great either, and plenty of people thought Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voters would tacitly reconfigure the Best Director award as Scorsese's career gong.
Well, they didn't.
There were awards for cinematography, art direction, costume, editing, and a well-deserved Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Cate Blanchett as Katherine Hepburn. But nothing remotely commensurate with Scorsese's all-American auteur status.
The great man might have been forgiven for knitting those panda eyebrows in vexation, and thinking: what can you do when nothing works? I gave them an all-American hero, a tribute to Hollywood's pioneering days, a solid performance from Leonardo DiCaprio, even a disability issue with a sympathetic treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It's a mystery.
The rest of the night belonged to Jamie Foxx with an Oscar for his performance as Ray Charles, a terrific acting turn in Taylor Hackford's watchable biopic, which generated a veritable furnace of human warmth and underlined the Academy's weakness for big-hearted performances of people with disabilities. Also nominated as a supporting turn in Michael Mann's Collateral, Foxx is a former TV star who could emerge as the most powerful character actor of his generation.
The British flag was lowered rather sadly at the end of the evening. Twenty-four British nominees in total, but only two winners (including best short film for Andrea Arnold's Wasp) and no major British success stories.
Clive Owen and Sophie Okonedo went home empty-handed. Like many critics, I had maintained the slightly delusional hope that the Academy might honor Mike Leigh and Imelda Staunton for their outstanding film Vera Drake. I even fantasized about a droll speech from Leigh at the podium.
As we all secretly feared, however, a film about an abortionist was never going to go over as well as his multi-Oscared Gilbert and Sullivan picture Topsy-Turvy.
Frankly, the best of New Hollywood was represented in the writing awards: Best Animated Feature for The Incredibles by Brad Bird, an excellent movie that should have been allowed to slug it out with the live-action offerings in the best film category. Best Original Screenplay went to Charlie Kaufman's intriguing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
The Oscar was well-chosen: original is precisely what Kaufman's script is, in an age when screenwriting seminars instruct people in all the three-act, obstacle-overcoming cliches. And any awards ceremony that honors a film whose title quotes Alexander Pope can never be accused of dumbing down.
Then there was Best Adapted Screenplay for Alexander Payne's glorious film Sideways, taken from the novel by Rex Pickett. Better than nothing, I suppose. Payne certainly won't be miserably repairing to his nearest fast-food joint, like Paul Giamatti in that film, to chug fine wine from a styrofoam cup. But Sideways is incomparably finer, richer, funnier and flat-out better than those preening, pumped-up contenders from Scorsese and Eastwood.
They were flashy but pretty moderate compared with Payne's high-IQ picture, with its four beautifully judged performances (especially Giamatti, who wasn't even nominated) and also compared with Mike Leigh's powerful, daring film.
Another middling evening at the Oscars, then, with no massive sweep like Titanic or Return of the King to galvanize the TV audiences and cinema-going public, but rather the spectacle of two greying titans, Eastwood and Scorsese, going head to head with films that don't represent their best work.
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