To paraphrase actress Sally Field, Oscar loves Julia Roberts. It really loves her.
Despite the fact that a film about life-and-death combat, "Gladiator," wound up becoming the big winner at the 73rd Annual Academy Awards on Sunday night, the center attraction of the evening was the "Erin Brockovich" star, who finally took home the gold.
After winning the Best Actress trophy for her performance as the real-life crusader Brockovich, Roberts flashed The Smile, her trademark, and praised her fellow nominees.
"It felt like a triumph for me to be in that list," she said. "My name starts with 'R' so I'm at the end, but I'm still glad to be in (their company)."
Without Roberts' crowning moment — one that can be seen as the career transition from Roberts the Beloved Celebrity to the newer, more successful version, Roberts the Respected Actress — this may have turned out to be the Year of the Gladiator.
Director Ridley Scott's money-making sword-and-sandals epic took home five of the 12 trophies it was nominated for, including Best Picture and Best Actor, for star Russell Crowe, who beat perennially nominated "Cast Away" star Tom Hanks.
Crowe used his moment in the spotlight as an opportunity to encourage those whose lives hadn't been as fortunate as his. "A dream like this seems vaguely ludicrous," he said. "For anybody who's on the downside of advantage and relying purely on courage: It's possible."
As for Scott, he was denied one coveted trophy by "Traffic" filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, who won the Best Director Academy Award and who paid tribute to all the nominees, suggesting that life would be "unlivable without art."
(Both "Traffic" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," the most successful foreign-language film in U.S. history, won four Oscars apiece, with the latter film being honored as the Best Foreign Film.)
The whole ceremony appeared to be ripe for similar upsets when Marcia Gay Harden took home the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her work in "Pollock," upsetting heavy favorite Kate Hudson from "Almost Famous."
Harden was probably responding to restrictions on the length of acceptance speeches when she summed up a lengthy list by thanking "all the people who help you in this crazy business."
But the awards quickly turned predictable again when, as predicted, Benicio Del Toro received the Best Supporting Actor trophy for his performance as a Mexican police officer in the drug-war drama "Traffic."
Like Harden's, his speech was relatively brief, and several others simply became lists of thank-yous because of the time-limit restrictions (45 seconds or less) placed on most of the winners.
Consequently, it came as a relief to have the reassuring presence of comedian Steve Martin, who replaced longtime Oscar icon Billy Crystal as the host of the show.
While he may not have had the musical montage that Crystal would use to open the show, his opening monologue was at least somewhat free of some of the more suggestive humor that typified Crystal and one-time host Whoopi Goldberg's stints (however, it wasn't completely free of that type of humor.)
For the most part, though, Martin relied on topical humor and zings at some of the celebrities, as well as at himself. For instance, he joked that when told by producers that he would be hosting, he wondered if there would "be time for my face-lift to heal."
Plans by the show's producers to hold down the length of acceptance speeches may have worked, but that didn't stop others from rambling. In particular, screenwriter Ernest Lehman, in accepting an honorary Oscar, used the moment as an poorly concealed bully pulpit. (He praised his fellow writers, who are threatening to cripple the entertainment industry this summer with strikes.)
Despite that and some rather clip-heavy segments, the usually swollen ceremony ran close to its planned 200-minute-plus length. However, that didn't stop Martin from using the leaden pacing as a running joke, even jesting early on that "we've got five hours (to kill)."
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Also, the scant musical numbers yielded uneven results. On the plus side, Sting was as terrific as always (he performed the nominated song "My Funny Friend and Me," from "The Emperor's New Groove"), as did the dream pairing of violinist Itzhak Perlman and cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who helped perform a soaring medley of nominated musical scores.
But Bob Dylan's tuneless warbling marred an in-concert version of his Oscar-winning song, "Things Have Changed," from "Wonder Boys." (To be fair, the concert was in Australia, and was shown via satellite transmission, so maybe that had something to do with it.)
Even more odd may be the fact that actress/singer Jennifer Lopez, who presented the Best Original Song Oscar, even wore clothing to an awards ceremony for a change.
However, the most inauspicious moment of the Oscars may have come during the always-embarrassing awards pre-show, in which host Julie Moran wished arriving celebrities good luck, even though some of them weren't even nominated for Oscars.
E-MAIL: jeff@desnews.com