'Gladiator,' 'Crouching Tiger' triumph at Oscars
Advertiser Staff and News Services
It was the "Gladiator" and the "Tiger." Caesar's Rome and the emperor's China. Coliseum spectacle and martial arts fantasy.
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For more Academy Awards coverage and a complete list of Oscar winners, see the full Associated Press coverage.
Last night at the 73rd Academy Awards, Ridley Scott's "Gladiator" took five awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor (for Russell Crowe). And Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," which premiered in the Islands at last fall's Hawai'i International Film Festival — well ahead of the rest of the country — won four awards, including Best Foreign Language Film.
The wins confirm the status quo — the predictable victory of a spectacle-type film with a hunky star and a right-over-might storyline. But "Crouching Tiger's" prominence is seen as evidence that, at last, a broad American audience is willing embrace a foreign-language film with as much enthusiasm as one in their own tongue.
Associated Press
The upset of the night also involved "Crouching Tiger": Steven Soderbergh, rather than the favored Ang Lee, walked off with the best-director Oscar for "Traffic." Soderbergh's sprawling exploration of the futility of the U.S.-Mexico drug war won a total of four awards.
Oscar winners, from left, Benicio Del Toro, Marcia Gay Harden, Julia Roberts and Russell Crowe shared a moment at the 73rd annual Academy Awards ceremony last night in Los Angeles.
In what amounted to a formality, Julie Roberts won the Best Actress award for her role in "Erin Brockovich."
