February 28, 2005

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  February 28, 2005

  
  

  ‘Million Dollar Baby’ Dominates Oscars

  
  

  By SHARON WAXMAN and DAVID M. HALBFINGER
  
  

  
  
  
  

  
  

  OS ANGELES, Feb. 27 – In a year without blockbusters in the biggest Oscar categories, “Million Dollar Baby,” an intimate film about an underdog female boxer, captured four top awards Sunday at the 77th Academy Awards: best picture, best director, best actress and best supporting actor.

  
  

  The victories overshadowed the three-hour epic about the billionaire Howard Hughes, “The Aviator,” which had the most nominations, 11. It won five awards, but its director, Martin Scorsese, was denied the Oscar for best director for the fifth time.

  
  

  Jamie Foxx won best actor for his masterly portrayal of the rhythm and blues musician Ray Charles in “Ray.” A joyous Mr. Foxx, 37, tearfully recalled how his grandmother – “my first acting teacher” – told him how to carry himself, to “act like you got some sense” and beat him when he did not.

  
  

  “Now she talks to me in my dreams,” he said, breaking down in tears. “And I can’t wait to go to sleep tonight because we got a lot to talk about. I love you.”

  
  

  The Oscars for “The Aviator” included best supporting actress for Cate Blanchett.

  
  

  But it was Mr. Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby” that captured the hearts of voters in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It was Mr. Eastwood’s second directing Oscar; he won for “Unforgiven” in 1993.

  
  

  Hilary Swank also won her second Oscar for best actress, for her portrayal of Maggie Fitzgerald, the waitress-turned-boxer who battles her way to the championship bout. At the podium, she thanked her husband, Chad Lowe, whom she forgot to thank publicly when she won for “Boys Don’t Cry” in 2000. Finally, Ms. Swank turned to Mr. Eastwood. “You’re my ‘Mo Cuishle,’ ” she said, using the Gaelic term Mr. Eastwood’s character translated as “my darling, my blood.”

  
  

  Morgan Freeman won best supporting actor for his portrayal of a worldly-wise ex-boxer. Mr. Freeman, nominated four times in his career, was given a standing ovation as he accepted the Oscar, his first.

  
  

  Asked to comment on the large number of nominations for black actors this year – five nominations for four actors – Mr. Freeman observed: “It means Hollywood is continuing to make history. Life goes on. Things change. They never stay the same. We are evolving with the rest of the world.”

  
  

  Ms. Blanchett won best supporting actress for her portrayal of Katharine Hepburn, Hughes’s lover, in “The Aviator.” In her speech, Ms. Blanchett thanked Hepburn, who died in 2003 at 96, for “the longevity of her career,” which she said was inspiring. Backstage, she said Hepburn’s relatives had been supportive of her performance. “They seem pleased and said she’d be pleased, and I believe them,” she said.

  
  

  “The Aviator” also took four other Oscars: for best cinematography (Robert Richardson), best editing (Thelma Schoonmaker), best art direction (Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo) and best costume design (Sandy Powell).

  
  

  For Harvey and Bob Weinstein, the founders and co-chairmen of Miramax who helped finance “The Aviator,” the night was a bittersweet farewell, after a quarter-century run that racked up 249 nominations and 60 Academy Awards. The company had 20 nominations this year.

  
  

  The Walt Disney Company is in the final stages of negotiation to close out the Weinsteins’ contract. “The Aviator” was also financed by Initial Entertainment Group and Warner Brothers.

  
  

  Chris Rock fulfilled his promise to shake up the established Oscar traditions as M.C. of the event, weaving racial humor throughout the show as when he had two burly black men come out as representatives of the accounting firm Price Waterhouse.

  
  

  This was not the sort of gentle, in-crowd humor that had been provided in years past by Billy Crystal or Steve Martin, and members of the audience seemed shocked, with Oprah Winfrey staring, her mouth agape, at Mr. Rock’s bald, if funny, critique of the industry. Early in the broadcast, he berated the industry for making movies without stars, saying Clint Eastwood was a star but Tobey Maguire was not. “You want Russell Crowe and all you can get is Colin Farrell?” he asked, advising: “Wait.”

  
  

  Underscoring the remoteness of this year’s best picture nominees from mainstream tastes, Mr. Rock introduced a taped segment in which he interviewed mostly black moviegoers at a theater in an inner-city neighborhood here, asking them if they had seen movies nominated for best picture. None of them had. Asked if they had seen “White Chicks,” a comedy starring two of the Wayans brothers, they said yes.

  
  

  Mr. Rock also took aim at President Bush, saying that if a Gap employee had squandered a budget surplus, started a war against Banana Republic and then learned that the reason given for going to war did not exist, there would be consequences.

  
  

  The best picture nominees largely traded on classic themes and human warmth, capping a film year that began with heated national debate over the religious, political and social implications of the director Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” and the director Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

  
  

  In addition to “The Aviator” and “Million Dollar Baby,” the best picture nominees were “Ray”; “Finding Neverland,” about Peter Pan’s creator, J. M. Barrie; and the comedy “Sideways,” set in California’s wine country.

  
  

  Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay for “Sideways.” “Ray” won the Oscar for best sound mixing, and “Finding Neverland” won best original score. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” a love story with an absurdist bent about erasing love from one’s memory, won best original screenplay for Charlie Kaufman.

  
  

  So far, none of the best picture nominees have made it to $100 million in ticket sales at the domestic box office, unlike last year’s best picture, “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.” And no great controversy – with the exception of a late-breaking protest by advocates for the disabled, who objected to the portrayal of an assisted suicide in “Million Dollar Baby” – enlivened the run up to this year’s Oscars.

  
  

  “The Incredibles” won best animated feature and best achievement in sound editing. The Oscar for best foreign film went to “The Sea Inside,” based on the true story of a Spanish man’s 30-year struggle to have the right to end his own life with dignity. On the red carpet, the parade of stars and gowns – nominees, presenters and academy members – gave the evening the required sheen of glitz and glamour.

  
  

  To some extent, the campaign season had looked like a match race between Mr. Eastwood, 74, and Mr. Scorsese, 62, both of whom are sentimental favorites among academy members.

  
  

  This year’s ceremony came at a crossroads not only for Disney and Miramax but for other studios as well. MGM and its United Artists unit are on the verge of being swept under the umbrella of Sony Pictures through a complicated deal with Sony and Comcast.

  
  

  “Born Into Brothels,” a moving story of a Westerners attempt to teach photography to children of prostitutes in Calcutta, won best documentary. The film’s producers Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski said backstage they were now building a school in Calcutta for the children.

  
  

  The year was a landmark one for African-American actors, the first time that black men won both acting categories. It followed 2002, another landmark year, when Halle Berry and Denzel Washington won the two top acting awards, and suggested that blacks were gaining greater acceptance in Hollywood. Asked about the significance of his win backstage, Mr. Foxx said black people had too many negative images, and needed positive symbols. “In our music, our everyday life – why not have something positive, and stamp it with blackness,” he said. “When I was watching Halle Berry, watching Denzel Washington it gave me inspiration, that I could do my thing too.”

  
  

  
  

  
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  December 15, 2004 FILM REVIEW; 3 People Seduced by the Bloody Allure of the Ring By A.O. SCOTT Clint Eastwood’s ”Million Dollar Baby” is the best movie released by a major Hollywood studio this year, and not because it is the grandest, the most ambitious or even the most original. On the contrary: it is a quiet, intimately scaled three-person drama directed in a patient, easygoing style, without any of the displays of allusive cleverness or formal gimmickry that so often masquerade as important filmmaking these days. At first glance the story, about a grizzled boxing trainer whose hard heart is melted by a spunky young fighter, seems about as fresh as a well-worn gym shoe. This is a Warner Brothers release, and if it were not in color (and if the young fighter in question were not female), ”Million Dollar Baby,” with its open-hearted mixture of sentiment and grit, might almost be mistaken for a picture from the studio’s 1934 lineup that was somehow mislaid for 70 years. Which is not to say that Mr. Eastwood, who is of Depression-era vintage himself (he will turn 75 next year), is interested in nostalgia, or in the self-conscious quotation of a bygone cinematic tradition, or even in simplicity for its own sake. With its careful, unassuming naturalism, its visual thrift and its emotional directness, ”Million Dollar Baby” feels at once contemporary and classical, a work of utter mastery that at the same time has nothing in particular to prove. Mr. Eastwood treats the conventions of the boxing-movie genre, its measured alternations of adversity and redemption, like the chord changes to a familiar song — the kind of standard that can, in the hands of a deft and sensitive musician, be made to yield fresh meanings and unexpected reservoirs of deep and difficult emotion. Mr. Eastwood (who, speaking of music, also composed the film’s gentle, unobtrusive score) plays Frankie Dunn, the owner of a tidy, beat-up gym tucked away in a shabby corner of Los Angeles. His best friend, who supplies world-weary voiceover narration to help the plot through its occasional thickets, is Eddie Dupris, (Morgan Freeman) a former fighter (nicknamed Scrap) whom Frankie managed long ago. Both men carry some heavy frustration and regret — Frankie has lost a daughter, Scrap has lost an eye — but they bear the weight gracefully and with good-humored fatalism, reconciled to loneliness and the diminishing returns of age. Scrap spars with the young would-be tough guys who hang out in the gym and watches out for the slow-witted orphan who is both their mascot and their scapegoat. Frankie, meanwhile, reads Yeats, studies Gaelic and goes to Mass every day, mainly to annoy the prickly young priest with inane theological challenges. The banter between Scrap and Frankie — the way that Mr. Freeman’s warmth and wit play against Mr. Eastwood’s gruff reserve — is one of the movie’s chief pleasures, and for long, satisfying spells Mr. Eastwood pushes aside the demands of storytelling to savor the comforts and abrasions of longtime friendship. Frankie is the latest in a lengthening line of crusty old-timers Mr. Eastwood has played since he became eligible for AARP membership, joining the gunnery sergeant in ”Heartbreak Ridge” and the retired astronaut from ”Space Cowboys” (among many others) in an unequaled pantheon of leathery masculinity. Perhaps no American actor besides Gene Hackman (who joined Mr. Eastwood and Mr. Freeman in ”Unforgiven”) has ripened with such relish, becoming more fully and complicatedly himself as he grows older. As a director, Mr. Eastwood’s innate toughness has mellowed into a sinewy grace, and as an actor his limitations have become a source of strength. When, late in ”Million Dollar Baby,” Frankie sheds tears, the moment brings a special pathos, not only because we’re unaccustomed to seeing Mr. Eastwood cry, but also because we might have doubted that he had it in him. Frankie, a gifted professional whose timidity — he prefers to think of it as common sense — has kept him away from the big time, receives a second chance in the unlikely person of Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank, in her best performance since ”Boys Don’t Cry”), a waitress who shows up at his gym and won’t take no for an answer. Frankie insists that he doesn’t train girls, and since Maggie is already 30, she’s too old to have much chance for glory in any case. But her combination of eagerness and discipline (and Scrap’s quiet expertise at manipulating his buddy’s few remaining heartstrings) wear down Frankie’s resistance, and he and Maggie are soon embarked on a classic underdog’s journey toward triumph. Or so we are led to believe. Midway through the movie, after Frankie and Maggie have had a frustrating visit with her unpleasant family back home in Missouri, Mr. Eastwood ends a calm, relatively unimportant scene by fading to black — a subtle, simple and chilling harbinger of the greater darkness to come. ”Million Dollar Baby,” written by Paul Haggis, is based on some of the stories in ”Rope Burns,” F.X. Toole’s collection of lean and gamy pugilistic tales. There is a pulpy, Irish Catholic fatalism in Mr. Toole’s work — and certainly in Mr. Eastwood’s approach to it — that can also be found in Dennis Lehane’s ”Mystic River,” the source for Mr. Eastwood’s last movie. This picture is smaller and more concerned with the fates of individuals than with the workings of family and community, but if anything, the shadows of authentic tragedy fall more deeply over its hushed, intimate spaces. Mr. Eastwood’s universe is, as ever, a violent and unforgiving place, in which the only protections against nihilism are the professional regulation of brutality (in this case by the sweet science of boxing) and the mutual obligations of friendship. Mr. Eastwood is unusual among American filmmakers not only for his pessimism, but also for his disinclination to use romantic love as either a dramatic motive or as a source of easy comfort. The question of sex never arises between Frankie and Maggie, and while there is abundant love in ”Million Dollar Baby,” it is entirely paternal, filial and brotherly. It is also severely tested by circumstances and proves to be at once a meager and a necessary compensation for the cruel operations of fate. I apologize for this flight into abstraction. It is, for one thing, the only way to avoid giving away the devastating surprises that give ”Million Dollar Baby” its overwhelming power. But such lofty language is also a way of suggesting the nature of that power, and the unexpected largeness of this intimate, casually told story. The film rarely shifts its gaze from its three main characters, who glow with a fierce individuality and whose ways of speaking unlock the poetry that still lives in the plain American vernacular. It seems fortuitous that Frankie is an admirer of William Butler Yeats, who in his later years developed a style of unadorned, disillusioned eloquence and produced some of his greatest poems: lyrics that are simple, forceful and not afraid of risking cliché. Late in the film, in his darkest hour, Frankie reads from ”The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” the younger Yeats’s pastoral dream of flight and transformation, a choice that makes sense in context. Mr. Eastwood himself, though, is closer to the sensibility of a late poem like ”The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” whose famous image of ”the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart” might describe Frankie’s gym. Or there is this stanza, from one of Yeats’s ”Last Poems,” called ”The Apparitions,” which seems to me to capture the paradoxical spirit, at once generous and mournful, of this old master, Mr. Eastwood, and his new masterpiece: When a man grows old his joy Grows more deep day after day, His empty heart is full at length But he has need of all that strength Because of the increasing Night That opens her mystery and fright. ”Million Dollar Baby” is rated PG-13. It has some brutal fight scenes and some salty gym-rat language. ‘Million Dollar Baby’ Opens today in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Toronto. Directed by Clint Eastwood; written by Paul Haggis; director of photography, Tom Stern; edited by Joel Cox; production designer, Henry Bumstead; produced by Mr. Eastwood, Albert S. Ruddy, Tom Rosenberg and Mr. Haggis; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 135 minutes. This film is rated PG-13. WITH: Clint Eastwood (Frankie Dunn), Hilary Swank (Maggie) and Morgan Freeman (Scrap). Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy

  
  
  

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