Oscars 2000

Dull-edged plastic battle-ax Phil Collins beat out actually fresh and interesting talent Aimee Mann for best music because, in Hollywood, there can't always be aesthetic justice, or everyone would starve.

Angelina Jolie, big-lipped ingenue, accepted her best supporting actress Oscar looking like a vampire bat, and made sexy demonstrations of ecstatic love toward her own brother, who wept. It was a weirdly intimate "Angels and Insects" moment and seemed to warrant the writing of an immediate unauthorized biography.

Michael Caine, Old Guy Who Won't Go Away (in the same camp with Nicholson, Beatty and Cher), won for best supporting actor. Sunday night was the apotheosis of Caine.

I really, really hate the way that the Oscar show producers, whenever a black or Hispanic person is mentioned, immediately cut to a reaction shot of a black or Hispanic person. When Morgan Freeman was talking, the cameras industriously cut to all six black people in the audience, each one nodding seriously. We saw unsmiling black people Denzel Washington and wife when Crystal made a crack about Isaac Hayes getting submerged in dry ice during the "Shaft" medley, and then saw Samuel L. Jackson when he mentioned "The Green Mile" because that movie had a big black guy in it. The organizers got the two Latin stars, Penilope Cruz and that pimpy-pantsed Antonio Banderas scalawag to scream out the name of another Latin winner, Pedro Almodsvar, in an attempt to re-create the Sophia Loren/Roberto Benigni moment of last year. Then they cut to a reaction shot of Gloria Estefan. When Chow Yun-Fat took the stage, there weren't any Chinese-Americans in the audience to cut to, so they bunched him in with the Latinos. The Oscars need to stop visually quarantining multicolored people. They're not going to infect others outside their own racial on-camera orientation.

The only good thing about this Oscar show was that a lot of good work got recognized. I was thrilled to see "Topsy-Turvy" get noticed at all, even if it was for a ghetto award like best costumes. I thought all of the "American Beauty" awards (except maybe that of the Talented Mr. Spacey) were well deserved. I wanted Jim Taylor and Alexander Payne to win best screen adaptation for "Election," but that's because Taylor is a pal of ours, and I personally loved the film a lot. Still, it was good to see John Irving make a nice stand on behalf of pro-choice-manship, since Susan Sarandon wasn't around to do it. Hilary Swank came out of nowhere and outclassed everyone with her poise and talent. "See?" the Oscars seemed to be saying. "We're not the Grammys; we didn't let 'The Sixth Sense' win anything! We're good. We love art, not just money, even if we did feature an 'N Sync segment."

The night wasn't interesting, but at least it wasn't evil. Sometimes, that's enough. Last night, though, it wasn't.

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