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HOLLYWOOD: Violent thriller “No Country for Old
Men” won the best picture Oscar at the 80th Academy Awards here as
European stars scored a clean sweep in the acting honors in an
historic Hollywood night.
“No Country for Old Men”
emerged as the biggest winner of the evening, scooping four Oscars
including best director for brothers Joel and Ethan Coen ,
best-adapted screenplay and best supporting actor for Javier Bardem.
The film, a bleak and bloody
drama about a drug deal that goes wrong and its murderous aftermath,
was the overwhelming pre-Oscars favorite.
The evening’s acting awards
were dominated by European talent, with France’s Marion Cotillard
winning best actress for “La Vie En Rose” and Ireland’s Daniel
Day-Lewis winning best actor for “There Will be Blood.”
Cotillard, 32, won for her
astounding performance as tragic chanteuse Edith Piaf, becoming the
first Frenchwoman to win the best actress Oscar since Simone
Signoret in 1960.
It was the only second time in
Oscars history that the best actress award had gone to a performance
in a non-English speaking role. Italian legend Sophia Loren was the
other woman to achieve the feat in 1962.
Cotillard, who received the award
from 2007 best actor Forest Whitaker, paid tribute to her director
before exclaiming: “Thank you life, thank you love. It is true
that there are some angels in this city. Thank you so, so much.”
The British-born Day-Lewis
received his award from British actress Helen Mirren, last year’s
winner for her role in “The Queen” quipping: “That’s the
closest I’ll ever come to getting a knighthood.”
The supporting actor and actress
awards went to Spain’s Javier Bardem for his performance as a
psychopathic hitman in “No Country for Old Men” and Britain’s
Tilda Swinton, who played a scheming corporate legal chief in
“Michael Clayton.”
Bardem’s award made him the
first performer from Spain ever to win an acting Oscar. “Thank you
to the Coens for being crazy enough to think that I could do that
and putting one of the most horrible haircuts in history on my
head,” he added, referring to the bizarre coiffure given to his
character in the film.
Bardem also thanked his actress
mother after receiving the award.
“My mother’s been working for
almost 50 years, and she knows everything about all this; the ups,
the downs, the dark, the light, and it’s a great companion, to
have her on my side,” he said.
Swinton meanwhile paid tribute to
her agent after receiving her statuette with one of the night’s
best acceptance speeches.
“Oh, no. Happy birthday,
man,” Swinton said, clutching her Oscar statuette. “I have an
American agent who is the spitting image of this. Really truly the
same shape head and, it has to be said, the buttocks.”
It was the first time since 1965
that European performers won all four of the acting awards.
In other highlights, Austria’s
“The Counterfeiters” won the best foreign film award for its
true story of a group of Jewish prisoners recruited by the Nazis to
mount one of the largest counterfeiting operations in history.
Overall, the awards went largely
to the form book, with the grim “No Country for Old Men” making
a killing to claim the top awards.
However Paul Thomas Anderson’s
“There Will Be Blood,” which had been nominated in eight
categories, finished with only two awards, for cinematography and
Day-Lewis.
The second best performing film
in terms of Oscars was action movie “The Bourne Ultimatum,”
which snaffled three prizes in the technical categories.
Oscar host Jon Stewart had opened
the show with a joke about the crop of “Oscar-nominated
psychopathic killer movies” in his monologue.
“Does this town need a hug?
What happened? ‘No Country For Old Men?’ ‘Sweeney Todd?’
‘There Will Be Blood?’ All I can say is, thank God for teen
pregnancy. I think the country agrees,” Stewart said in a nod to
best picture nominee “Juno,” which won a best original
screenplay Oscar.
The Hollywood A-list meanwhile
was reminded of the grim realities of the world beyond the red
carpet as the best documentary Oscar went to Alex Gibney’s
harrowing “Taxi to the Dark Side.”
The film spotlights interrogation
techniques at US military facilities, investigating the death in
custody of a young Afghan taxi driver, called Dilawar, at a prison
in Afghanistan in 2002.
“This is dedicated to two
people who are no longer with us, Dilawar, the young Afghan taxi
driver, and my father a Navy interrogator who urged me to make this
film because of his fury at what was being done to the rule of
law,” Gibney said as he collected his Oscar.
“Let’s hope we can turn this
country around, move away from the dark side and go back to the
light,” Gibney said.
--AFP
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