AFTERMATH:THE ACADEMY AWARDS

The short month of February just zipped past. I was busy trying to see all the nominated films most of the month, so I let my reviews slide. Now I'm back and happy to see that I was spot on in my early prediction of who would win for Best Actor: Forrest Whitaker in "Last King of Scotland", and Best Actress: Helen Mirren for "The Queen." I was sorry Eddie Murphy ("Dreamgirls") lost to Alan Arkin, the raunchy Granpa in "Little Miss Sunshine", but felt good that Arkin's film won something sunce it lost for Best Picture; it also won for Original Screenplay. And yes, Alan Arkin deserved his Oscar after a long notable film career. I saw the film when it first came out, loved it, but did not see the tide of accolades or viewership coming.

The disappointment for me was Scorsese's "The Departed" winning for Best Picture. Yes, he won deservedly for Best Director after having been shunned for decades. He broke ground early on in his career with "Mean Streets" paving the way for the likes of Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs". Still, there have been tons of violent, bloody films in the past few years. Some good, most of them bad. I'd like to have seen Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Babel" win. It had violence; still, it was a film for the times, showing a complex dramatic interweaving of cultures connecting four countries, whereas Scorsese's "Departed" is a throwback to mob films beginning with Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson in the '30s, which have continued to this day. It is well known that Scorsese adapted the Hong Kong film, "Infernal Affairs," for his Oscar winner. It was awarded an Oscar for Adapted Screenplay. In it, DiCaprio and Damon gave outstanding performances of undercover, shady cops. Wahlberg, too, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. A shame that little was said about Martin Sheen's intense, understated performance as the police department head, DiCapro and Damon's boss. Yet, what message does "Departed" 's win say to the rest of the world? That America is a country that revels in and lauds art forms depicting mob revenge killings, bad cops, corrupt law enforcement? (I will not go into the image America's politics has conveyed to to the rest of the world since Fall 2001.) However, "Babel" did win for Best Original Score, composed by Gustavo Santoalalla.

Ironically, I saw "The Lives of Others" only a few days before the awards but didn't think it would win for Best Foreign film over "Pan's Labyrinth" which I'd seen twice, or "Letters from Iwo Jima." If you have not seen "Pan's" yet, do not wait for the DVD unless you have a monster, wall-panel TV. Its scope is overwhelming. Mexican director Guillermo del Toro managed a skillful, seamless interweaving of a little girl's fantasy-life with her helpless involvement with the tail-end of Spain's Civil war through her mother's untimely marriage to her brutal, fascist step-father, a captain in one of Franco's small, military outposts in the mountains. The film did win and rightly so for Makeup, Art Direction, and Cinematography. "Lives of Others" is a suspenseful drama about the German Stasi in East Berlin a few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall and involves a Stasi spy who bugs a playwright and his doomed actress lover's apartment and in doing so, gains a heart, but loses status.

Other noteworthy films: "Letters from Iwo Jima" won for Sound Edititng. Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" Best Documentary, and Melissa Etheridge's "I Need to Wake Up" from that film gained the gold man for Original Song, beating out three "Dreamgirls" tunes. Sophie Coppola's wonderful, wildly imaginative "Marie Antoinette" received an Oscar for Costume Design; "Children of Men" a remarkable, futuristic film, starring Clive Owen had been nominated for Cinamatography, Fim Editing, and Adapted Screenplay (from a P.D. James mystery), but came away empty. It was one of the best films of 2006. All are worth the price of a ticket. See them all.