The 72nd Annual Academy Awards

After Roberto Benigni's acceptance speech the previous year, "The 72 Annual Academy Awards" would be hard-pressed to equal it. Still, I liked that the first Oscar ceremony of the 21st century (assuming that we start the 21st century in the year 2000) gave "American Beauty" Best Picture. Like "The Graduate" in 1967 - when, incidentally, my parents were as old as I was in 1999 - it presented a totally new approach to how cinema looks at things. Other such movies in 1999 were "Election", "The Blair Witch Project", "The Sixth Sense" and "Being John Malkovich".

As for the rest of the program, I thought that the most interesting part was the look back at the 20th century (I remember that it included a scene from "Yellow Submarine"). And Hilary Swank's win for "Boys Don't Cry" was also well-deserved (Hilary Swank and Annette Bening were both nominated again five years later, and Swank won again).

Overall, a worthy ceremony.

I personally thought American Beauty was very, very overrated. The Best movie of the year was obviously The Matrix, as we all know, but it wasn't nominated, though it did win 4 technical awards. THe Best film out of the nominees for me was "The Green Mile", but it had the least chances of winning. All things considered this awards show was considerably less entertaining than the one of 1999, when there was real tension between Private Ryan and Shakespeare in Love, and when we saw Roberto Benigni, the most spontaneous and outrageous Oscar winner ever, scream and laugh with joy on the stage. Also 1998's one was quite amazing, with Titanic winning almost everything. I like it better that way than when everything is divided between movies, as happened this year (2002), and last year too.