74th Academy Awards

The 74th Academy Awards, honoring the best in film for 2001, were held on March 24, 2002, for the first time at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, California. They were hosted by Whoopi Goldberg. The ceremony was historically notable for honoring two African American actors for their Leading Roles. Laura Ziskin (Spider-Man producer) was executive producer for the first time making her the first woman to solo produce the telecast. She also produced the 2007 telecast. The telecast, which was shown in the United States on ABC, is currently the longest to date. Furthermore the tone of this show was quieted by the recent occurrence of the attacks on September 11. Just as the 53rd Primetime Emmy Awards were postponed in 2001, and the Oscar nominations were supposed to come out just two months after the attacks, many wondered if the Oscars would be postponed as well. Frank Pierson, then president of the Academy stated that the Oscars would proceed as scheduled, and to postpone would mean that "the terrorists have won". However, the red carpet festivities prior to the awards were severely curtailed.



A Beautiful Mind is a 2001 American biographical film about John Forbes Nash, the Nobel Laureate (Economics) mathematician. The film was directed by Ron Howard and written by Akiva Goldsman. It was inspired by a bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-nominated 1998 book of the same name by Sylvia Nasar. The film stars Russell Crowe, along with Jennifer Connelly, Ed Harris and Paul Bettany. The story begins in the early years of Nash's life at Princeton University as he develops his "original idea" that will revolutionize the world of mathematics. Later, Nash develops schizophrenia and endures paranoid and delusional episodes while painfully watching the loss and burden his condition brings on his wife and friends. The film opened in US cinemas on December 21, 2001. It was well received by critics, and went on to win four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress. It was also nominated for Best Leading Actor, Best Editing, Best Makeup, and Best Score. The film has been criticized for its inaccurate portrayal of some aspects of Nash's life.



Ron Howard is an American actor and Academy Award-winning film director and producer, known for his roles on sitcoms, movies and television. The naturally red-headed Howard came to prominence in the 1960s as Andy Griffith's son, Opie Taylor, on The Andy Griffith Show, and later in the 1970s as Tom Bosley's son and Henry Winkler's best friend, Richie Cunningham, on Happy Days (a role he played from 1974 to 1980). He attained film success with his role as Steve Bollander in George Lucas' teen movie American Graffiti. Before leaving Happy Days in 1980, Howard made his directing debut with the 1977 project "Grand Theft Auto" (Howard went on to direct several TV movies. His big theatrical break came in 1982 with Night Shift featuring soon-to-be stars such as Michael Keaton and Shelley Long, as well as reuniting Howard with "Happy Days" co-star Henry Winkler. He has since directed a number of high-visibility films, the most acclaimed of which include "Splash", "Willow", "Cocoon", "Apollo 13" (nominated for several Academy Awards), "A Beautiful Mind" (for which he won the Oscar for "Best Director"), and Cinderella Man. His latest film, "The Da Vinci Code", rejoining with "Splash" and "Apollo 13" star Tom Hanks, has been a box office hit earning more than $700 million at the box office, but a critical letdown. On June 7, 1975, Howard wed his high-school sweetheart, Cheryl (née Alley), a writer with a degree in geriatric psychology. They have four children; daughters Bryce Dallas Howard (b. 1981), Jocelyn Carlyle (twin, b. 1985), Paige Carlyle (twin, b. 1985), and son Reed Cross (b. 1987). Their daughters Bryce Dallas Howard and Paige Howard are actresses. In February 2007, Howard became a grandfather when his daughter, Bryce, gave birth to a son.



The ceremony also saw both the Best Actor and Best Actress Oscars awarded to African-American actors for the first time in Academy Award history: Denzel Washington for Training Day and Halle Berry for Monster's Ball. Berry has received Emmy and Golden Globe awards for Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, and an Academy Award for Best Actress in 2002 for her performance in Monster's Ball, becoming the only woman of African-American descent to have won the award for Best Actress. She is one of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood and also a Revlon spokeswoman. She is attempting to expand into the production side of Hollywood. Before becoming an actress, Berry entered several beauty contests, finishing runner-up in Miss USA (1986), and winning the Miss USA World 1986 contest. Her breakthrough feature film role was in the 1991 Jungle Fever. This led to roles in The Flintstones (1994), Bulworth (1998), X-Men (2000) and its sequels, and Die Another Day. She also won a worst actress Razzie award in 2005 for Catwoman, and accepted the award in person. Berry has been married twice. Her first marriage, in 1992 to former baseball player David Justice, ended in divorce in 1996. Berry's second marriage was to musician Eric Benét. They had met in 1997, and married in 2001. The couple separated in 2003. The divorce was finalized in January 2005. In November 2005, she began dating French-Canadian supermodel Gabriel Aubry, who is ten years her junior. The couple met at a Versace photoshoot. Berry confirmed in September 2007 that she was three months pregnant with Aubry's child.



Jim Broadbent won as Best Supporting Actor. Broadbent made his film debut in 1978 with a tiny role in Jerzy Skolimowski's The Shout, and made his television debut the following year. He went on to work with Stephen Frears (for television, and in The Hit (1984)) and Terry Gilliam (in Time Bandits (1981) and Brazil (1985) before establishing himself in Mike Leigh's Life Is Sweet (1990). He proved his ability as a character actor in films including The Crying Game (1992), Enchanted April (1992), Bullets Over Broadway (1994), The Borrowers (1997) and Little Voice (1998) before taking a leading role in another Mike Leigh film, Topsy-Turvy (1999). In 2001, Broadbent starred in three of the year's most successful films: Bridget Jones's Diary, Moulin Rouge!, for which he won a BAFTA and Iris, for which he won an Oscar for his portrayal of John Bayley. He is regarded as one of cinema's most reliable character actors and has a reputation of being very easy to work with. On September 17, 2007 it was announced that he will play Horace Slughorn in the sixth Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.



Jennifer Connelly is an American film actress and former child model. Although she has been working in the film industry since she was a teenager and catapulted to fame on the basis of her appearances in films like Labyrinth and Career Opportunities, she did not receive wide exposure for her work until the 2000 drama Requiem for a Dream, and the 2001 biopic A Beautiful Mind, for which she won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Connelly starred in two films in 2003: Hulk and House of Sand and Fog. Hulk was something of a box office disappointment, but afforded Connelly the chance to work with noted director Ang Lee. House of Sand and Fog, based on the novel by Andre Dubus III, was reminiscent of much of her independent film work of the late 1990s. Connelly appeared in the 2005 horror film Dark Water, which was based on a Japanese film. In 2006, Connelly appeared in two films, both of which were nominated for multiple Academy Awards. She played a major role in an adaptation of the novel Little Children alongside Kate Winslet. Though her role as Kathy Adamson was very important in the novel, the director gave her character less screen time, instead focusing on the characters played by Winslet and Patrick Wilson. She also played a journalist in Blood Diamond opposite Leonardo DiCaprio. She is married to well-known English actor Paul Bettany (born 1971), whom she met while working on A Beautiful Mind. The couple's son, Stellan, was born on August 5, 2003. She also has a son, Kai (born 1997), from her relationship with photographer David Dugan.



No Man's Land is a war drama that is set in the midst of the Bosnian war in 1993. The film is a parable with a tone of ironic black comedy. The film marked the debut of writer and director Danis Tanović. The film is a co-production between companies in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, Italy, France, Belgium and the UK. No Man's Land won Prix du scénario at the Cannes Film Festival, followed by numerous awards, including the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2001, while in competition with French Amélie. Tanović was presented the Oscar by John Travolta and Sharon Stone. Briefly after, Tanović thanked everyone who worked with him on the film and supported its creation. He ended his acceptance speech by saying, "This is for my country".



If I Didn't Have You is a song from the Pixar and Disney movie, Monsters Inc., written by songwriter and singer Randy Newman. Sung by John Goodman and Billy Crystal, the song helped Newman to win his very first Oscar. Prior to this Oscar win, Randy Newman had previously been nominated for 15 Oscars in the Best Score and Best Song categories, without a single win.

73rd Academy Awards

The 73rd Academy Awards ceremony was the last to take place at the Los Angeles Shrine Auditorium. It was hosted by first-time host Steve Martin, who was nominated for an Emmy Award for his presentation. Notable films receiving Academy Awards at the ceremony included Gladiator, which received 12 nominations and 5 awards, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which received 10 nominations and 4 awards. After a three-year streak of high ratings, the annual ceremony received very low ratings for the first time in four years. This is partially due to the popularity of CBS's Survivor which was number one on the Nielsen Weekly Ratings. The awards show dropped to second place for the first time in broadcasting history (42.93 million viewers; with 21.1% of households watching). The second time the ceremony placed below the top happened in 2003 when it was surpassed by American Idol. The Icelandic pop singer Björk arrived in a gown with a fake swan draped across her. It caused an audience reaction that led to several comments by those participating in the Awards Ceremony.



Gladiator is a 2000 epic film. It is directed by Ridley Scott and stars Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielsen, Oliver Reed, Djimon Hounsou, Derek Jacobi and Richard Harris. Crowe portrays General Maximus Decimus Meridius, friend of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who is betrayed and murdered by the emperor's ambitious son, Commodus (Phoenix). Captured and enslaved along the outer fringes of the Roman empire, Maximus rises through the ranks of the gladiatorial arena to avenge the murder of his family and his Emperor. The film won five Academy Awards in the 73rd Academy Awards ceremony, including the Academy Award for Best Picture. The film's epic scope and intense battle scenes, as well as the emotional core of its performances, received much praise. The film's success may have helped to revive the historical epic genre, with subsequent films such as Troy, Alexander, 300, and Scott's own Kingdom of Heaven.



Steven Soderbergh is an American film producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, editor, and Academy Award-winning director. It wasn't until Soderbergh came back to Baton Rouge that he conceived the idea for sex, lies, and videotape (1989), which he wrote in eight days. The independent film won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, became a worldwide commercial success and greatly contributed to the 1990s independent film revolution. His commercial slump ended in 1998 with Out of Sight, a stylized adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel, written by Scott Frank and starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. The film was widely praised, though only a moderate box-office success. It reaffirmed Soderbergh's potential, sparking the beginnings of a lucrative artistic partnership between Clooney and Soderbergh. Soderbergh followed up on the success of Out of Sight by making another crime caper, The Limey (1999), from an original screenplay by Lem Dobbs and starring veteran actors Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda. The film was well-received, but not as much as Erin Brockovich (2000), a "Rocky movie" he directed, written by Susannah Grant and starring Julia Roberts in her Oscar-winning role as a single mother taking on industry in a civil action. Later that year, Soderbergh released his most ambitious project yet (with a running time of 147 minutes, the film had 135 speaking parts set in eight different cities), Traffic, a social drama written by Stephen Gaghan and featuring an ensemble cast. Traffic became his most acclaimed movie since sex, lies, videotape, and earned him an Academy Award for Best Director. He was also nominated that same year for Erin Brockovich. He is the only director to have been nominated in the same year for Best Director for two different films by the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes and the Directors Guild of America. It was the first time it had happened at the Oscars in 60 years. Ocean's Eleven (2001), featuring an all-star cast and flashy aesthetics, is Soderbergh's highest grossing movie to date, grossing more than $183 million. The film's star, George Clooney, subsequently appeared in Solaris (2002), marking the third time the two have headlined a film. In the same year, Soderbergh made Full Frontal which was shot mostly on digital video in an improvisional style that deliberately blurred the line between which actors were playing characters and which were playing fictionized versions of themselves. Following up Full Frontal stylistically was Soderbergh next project, K Street (2003), a ten-part political HBO series he co-produced with Clooney. Ocean's Twelve (2004), a sequel to Ocean's Eleven, has followed. The Good German a romantic drama set in post-war Berlin starring Cate Blanchett and Clooney was released in late 2006. The sixth pairing of Clooney and Soderbergh, Ocean's Thirteen, was released in June of 2007.



Russell Crowe is an Academy Award- and Golden Globe-winning New Zealand-born Australian actor. His acting career began in the early 1990s with roles in Australian TV series such as Police Rescue and films such as Romper Stomper. In the late 1990s, he began appearing in US films such as the 1997 movie L.A. Confidential. In the 2000s, he was nominated for three Oscars, and in 2001, he won the Academy Award as Best Actor for his starring role in the film Gladiator. After initial success in Australia, Crowe began acting in American films. He first co-starred with Denzel Washington in Virtuosity in 1995. He went on to become a three-time Oscar nominee, winning the Academy Award as Best Actor in 2001 for Gladiator. Crowe received three consecutive best actor Oscar nominations for The Insider, Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind. Crowe won the best actor award for A Beautiful Mind at the 2002 BAFTA award ceremony. However he failed to win the Oscar that year, losing to Denzel Washington. Within the six year stretch from 1997-2003, he also starred in two other best picture nominees, L.A. Confidential and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, though he was nominated for neither. In 2005 he re-teamed with A Beautiful Mind director Ron Howard for Cinderella Man. In 2006 he re-teamed with Gladiator director Ridley Scott for A Good Year, the first of two consecutive collaborations (the second being American Gangster co-starring again with Denzel Washington, released in late 2007). On 7 April 2003, his 39th birthday, Crowe married Australian singer and actress Danielle Spencer. Crowe met Spencer while filming The Crossing (1990). Crowe and Spencer have two sons: Charles "Charlie" Spencer Crowe (born 21 December 2003) and Tennyson Spencer Crowe (born 7 July 2006).



Julia Roberts is an Academy Award-winning American film actress and former fashion model. She shot to fame during the early 1990s after starring in the romantic comedy, Pretty Woman, opposite Richard Gere, which grossed US$463 million worldwide. She won the Best Actress Academy Award in 2001 for her critically acclaimed turn as the title character in Erin Brockovich and earned Oscar nominations as Best Supporting Actress for Steel Magnolias (1989) and Best Actress for Pretty Woman (1990). Her films, which also include The Pelican Brief, My Best Friend's Wedding, Mystic Pizza, Notting Hill, Runaway Bride, and Ocean's Eleven, have collectively earned box office receipts well over US$2 billion. Roberts's two films released in 2006, The Ant Bully and Charlotte's Web, were both animated features for which she provided only voice acting. Her next film, Charlie Wilson's War, with Tom Hanks and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, directed by Mike Nichols and based on the book by former CBS journalist George Crile was released on December 21, 2007. On June 27, 1993, she married country singer Lyle Lovett; the couple had met only three weeks earlier. The wedding took place on 72-hours' notice and was held in Marion, Indiana, near where Lovett was appearing on tour with his band. Less than two years later, in March 1995, the couple announced their separation. They subsequently divorced. Roberts met her current husband, cameraman Daniel Moder, on the set of her movie The Mexican in 2000 and they began an affair. He and Roberts wed on Fourth of July 2002, at her ranch in Taos, New Mexico. On November 28, 2004, they became the parents of fraternal twins, daughter Hazel Patricia and son Phinnaeus Walter. Their third child, son Henry Daniel Moder, was born on June 18, 2007 in Los Angeles.



Benicio del Toro is an Academy Award- and Golden Globe-winning Puerto Rican actor and film producer. He is best known for his roles as Fred Fenster in The Usual Suspects, Javier Rodriguez Rodriguez in Traffic and Jack 'Jackie Boy' Rafferty in Sin City. In Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, a complex dissection of the North American drug wars - as Javier Rodriguez — a Mexican border cop struggling to remain honest amid the corruption and deception of illegal drug trafficking — del Toro, who spoke most of his lines in Spanish, gave a performance that dominated the film and earned him his first Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.



Marcia Gay Harden is an Academy Award-winning American actress.For her film work, she won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for Pollock (2000), and was nominated in the same category for Mystic River (2003). She is currently shooting a film called Home, in which she will be playing the role of a mother (to her real daughter, Eulala Scheel) as she did in Felicity: An American Girl Adventure (2005). Other notable films include The Imagemaker (1986), her first screen role, in which she played a stage manager; the Coen Brothers' Miller's Crossing (1990), a 1930s mobster drama in which she gained her first wide exposure; the Disney sci-fi comedy Flubber (1997), a popular hit in which she co-starred with Robin Williams; the supernatural drama Meet Joe Black (1998); Labor of Love (1998), a Lifetime Television movie in which she starred with David Marshall Grant; and an all-star adventure-drama of aging astronauts, Space Cowboys (2000). Harden is married to Thaddaeus Scheel, with whom she worked on The Spitfire Grill (1996), and the couple have three children: a daughter, Eulala Grace Scheel, and twins Julitta Dee Scheel and Hudson Harden Scheel.



Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is an Academy Award winning Chinese-language film in the wuxia (chivalric and martial arts) style, released in 2000. A China-Hong Kong-Taiwan-United States co-production, the film was directed by Ang Lee and featured an international cast of ethnic Chinese actors, including Chow Yun-Fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi and Chang Chen. The movie was based on the fourth novel in a pentalogy, known in China as the Crane-Iron Pentalogy, by Wang Dulu. The martial arts and action sequences were choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping. Made on a mere US$15 million budget, with dialogue in Mandarin, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon became a surprise international success. It grossed US$128 million in the United States alone, becoming the highest-grossing foreign-language film in American history. The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and three other Academy Awards, and was nominated for six other Oscars, including Best Picture.



"Things Have Changed" is a song from the film Wonder Boys, written and performed by Bob Dylan. The song won the Academy Award and the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song. Director of Wonder Boys Curtis Hanson also created a music video for "Things Have Changed," filming new footage of Bob Dylan on the film's various locations and editing it with footage used in Wonder Boys as if Dylan were actually in the film.

72nd Academy Awards

The 72nd Academy Awards ceremony (also known as Oscars 2000) took place at Los Angeles' Shrine Auditorium, and was Billy Crystal's seventh time hosting the Awards. The ceremony attracted 46.53 million viewers, an audience 3.7% bigger the previous ceremony. The Academy Award ceremony was dominated by the movie American Beauty, which was nominated in 8 categories, and won 5 awards (including Best Director, Best Actor and Best Picture). This was the first to receive a noteworthy certification TV-14 partially due to the showing of many American Beauty clips featuring scenes of sex, innuendo, and violence. Also the Oscar nominated song "Blame Canada" (from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut) was performed though it had offensive material (performer Robin Williams cleverly "hid" the single word). The first Oscar show to have a TV rating was 1997 but was rated TV-PG. This was also one of the longest Oscar productions on record clocking in at just over four hours. Twenty-two cameras covered the event for ABC Television, including six jib arms, two steadicams, one akela crane, and for the first time a rail-cam. There were nearly 200 microphones and over 600 moving light fixtures. The show had nine days of rehearsals. This was the first time a woman held the title of producer on an Oscar telecast. Producer Laura Ziskin would helm the show in 2002 and 2007.


American Beauty is a 1999 comedy/drama film that explores themes of romantic and paternal love, freedom, sexuality, beauty, self-liberation, existentialism, the search for happiness, and family against the backdrop of modern American suburbia. It was the feature film debuts for writer Alan Ball and director Sam Mendes, and starred Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening; all four were nominated for Oscars, and the film won five in total including Best Picture.


Sam Mendes won as Best Director. As a film director, he is best known for his debut film, American Beauty, for which he won an Academy Award for Directing. His other movies as Director include Road to Perdition and Jarhead. After a string of romances with actresses, including Cameron Diaz, Calista Flockhart, Jane Horrocks, and Rachel Weisz, Mendes married English actress Kate Winslet on May 24, 2003 in Anguilla in the Caribbean. Their first child, Joe Alfie Winslet-Mendes, was born on December 22, 2004. Mendes also has a stepdaughter, Mia Honey Threapleton, from Winslet's first marriage to assistant director Jim Threapleton.


The male awards for acting went to Kevin Spacey as Best actor for American Beauty and Michael Caine as Best Supporting Actor for The Cider House Rules. The Best Actress Oscar went to Hilary Swank. Her Hollywood film career began with a small part in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) and then a major part in The Next Karate Kid (1994), where she played Julie Pierce, the first female protégé of the sensei Mr. Miyagi. She has become known for her two Academy Award-winning performances: first as Brandon Teena, a transgender man in the movie Boys Don't Cry, and a struggling waitress-turned-boxer, Maggie Fitzgerald, in Million Dollar Baby. In September 1997, Swank was cast as single mother Carly Reynolds on Beverly Hills, 90210. She was initially promised it would be a two-year role, but saw her character written out after 16 episodes in January 1998. As it turned out, the firing was the best thing to happen to Swank, as it freed her to audition for the role of Brandon Teena in Boys Don't Cry. Swank dropped her body fat down to seven percent in preparation for the role. Many critics hailed hers as the best female performance of 1999; her co-star of the film, Chloë Sevigny, had her performance singled out for praise also, Swank and Sevigny were often ranked as the best two leads of 1999 in film. The performance ultimately won her the Golden Globe and Oscar for Best Actress. She subsequently won the Best Actress Oscar and Golden Globe again for playing a boxer in 2004's Million Dollar Baby, a role for which she underwent training and gained 19 pounds of muscle. Swank's Oscar success meant that she had joined the ranks of Vivien Leigh, Helen Hayes, Sally Field, and Luise Rainer as the only actresses to have been nominated twice and win both times (both times she won over fellow actress and nominee Annette Bening). She is also the third-youngest double Best Actress Oscar winner (after Luise Rainer and Jodie Foster.)Swank married actor Chad Lowe on September 28, 1997. The two met in 1992, on the set of Quiet Days in Hollywood, a direct-to-video film. Swank infamously forgot to thank Lowe during her acceptance speech after winning her first Oscar in 2000, and she spent nearly every public appearance afterward making up for it. Upon winning her second Oscar in 2005, Lowe was the first person she thanked. However, in January 2006, the couple separated.


Angelina Jolie is an American film actress and a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Refugee Agency. She is often cited by popular media as one of the world's most beautiful women and her off-screen life is widely reported. She has received three Golden Globe Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and an Academy Award. Though she made her screen debut as a child alongside her father Jon Voight in the 1982 film Lookin' to Get Out, Jolie's acting career began in earnest a decade later with the low budget production Cyborg 2 (1993). Her first leading role in a major film was in Hackers (1995). She starred in the critically acclaimed biographical films George Wallace (1997) and Gia (1998), and won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the drama Girl, Interrupted (1999). Jolie achieved international fame as a result of her portrayal of videogame heroine Lara Croft in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), and since then has established herself as one of the best-known and highest-paid actresses in Hollywood. She had her biggest commercial success with the action-comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005). Divorced from actors Jonny Lee Miller and Billy Bob Thornton, Jolie currently lives with actor Brad Pitt, in a relationship that has attracted worldwide media attention. Jolie and Pitt have three adopted children, Maddox, Pax, and Zahara, as well as a biological daughter, Shiloh. Jolie has promoted humanitarian causes throughout the world, and is noted for her work with refugees through UNHCR.


All About My Mother (Spanish: Todo sobre mi madre) is an award-winning 1999 film written and directed by the Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar. The film deals with complex issues such as AIDS, transvestitism, sexual identity, gender, religion, faith, and existentialism, but always with his classical tragicomedy touch, the film presents these serious issues with an edge of dark humour. All About My Mother was widely regarded as Almodóvar's finest and most mature film to date. It won the 1999 Academy Award for Best Foreign-language Film and seven Goya Awards including Best Film, Best Director and Best Actress in a Leading Role for Argentinean actress Cecilia Roth.


"You'll Be in My Heart" was the main single from the 1999 Disney animated feature Tarzan. Written and performed by Phil Collins, it appears on Tarzan: An Original Walt Disney Records Soundtrack as well as various other Disney compilations. A version of the single performed by Glenn Close also appears on the soundtrack."You'll Be in My Heart", eventually peaking at #21, was Collins's first appearance to the American Top 40 charts since 1994's "Everyday". The track went on to win the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song and the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Collins performed the song live at that year's ceremony.

71st Academy Awards

The 71st Academy Awards ceremony was the last to take place at Los Angeles County Music Center, held on March 21st 1999, and was Whoopi Goldberg's third time hosting the Awards. It was the first time the ceremony took place on a Sunday. The ceremony ran extremely long, due largely to extended acceptance speeches. Notable films included Shakespeare in Love, which received 13 nominations and won 7 awards, Saving Private Ryan, which received 11 nominations and won 5 awards, and Life Is Beautiful, which received 7 nominations and won 3 (including Best Actor and Best Foreign Language Film). The 71st Academy Awards saw the show's first "official" pre-show, as the Academy attempted to compete with the likes of E!'s Joan Rivers and other red carpet denizens. The show attracted 45.61m viewers, a 18% decline to the previous years 57.25 million, yet a high rating compared to most other ceremonies. This was the first time that two people have been nominated for Academy Awards for playing the same person in different films - Queen Elizabeth I - played by Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth and Judi Dench in Shakespeare in Love. This would mark the final time the show would originate from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, a venue the Academy Awards called home for nearly thirty-years.


Shakespeare in Love is an award-winning 1998 romantic comedy film. The film was directed by John Madden and co-written by playwright Tom Stoppard, whose first major success was with the Shakespeare-influenced play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. The film is largely fictional, although several of the characters are based on real people. In addition, some of the characters, lines, and plot devices are references to Shakespeare's plays. Shakespeare in Love won a number of Academy Awards in 1998, including Best Picture and Best Actress (for Gwyneth Paltrow). It was the first comedy to win the Best Picture award since Annie Hall (1977).


The Best Director award went to Steven Spielberg for Saving Private Ryan. The Best Actor award went to Roberto Benigni. Benigni's first film as director was Tu mi turbi (You upset me, 1983). On the set he met the Cesenate actress Nicoletta Braschi, who was to become his wife, and who has starred in most of the films he directed. In 1984, he played in Non ci resta che piangere ("Nothing left to do but cry") with the very popular comic actor Massimo Troisi. The story was a fable in which the protagonists are suddenly thrown back in time to the 15th century, just a little before 1492. They start looking for Columbus in order to stop him from discovering the Americas (although for very personal love reasons), but are not able to reach him. Beginning in 1986, Benigni starred in three films by American director Jim Jarmusch. Down By Law (1986) Night on Earth, (1991) and Coffee and Cigarettes (2003). In 1993, he starred in Son of the Pink Panther, directed by veteran Blake Edwards. There, he played Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau's illegitimate son who is assigned to save the Princess of Lugash. A serious role was in Federico Fellini's last film, La voce della luna (1989). In earlier years Benigni had started a long-lasting collaboration with screenwriter Vincenzo Cerami, for a series of films which scored great success in Italy: Il piccolo diavolo ("The little devil", with Walter Matthau), Johnny Stecchino ("Johnny Toothpick"), and Il Mostro ("The Monster"). Benigni is probably best known outside Italy for his 1997 tragicomedy Life Is Beautiful (La vita è bella), filmed in Cortona and Arezzo, also written by Cerami. The film is about an Italian Jewish man who tries to protect his son's innocence during his internment at a Nazi concentration camp, by telling him that the Holocaust is an elaborate game and he must adhere very carefully to the rules to win. Benigni's father had spent two years in a concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen, and La Vita è bella is based in part on his father's experiences. In 1998, the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and Benigni personally won the Best Actor. The Best Foreign Language Film is awarded to the film itself, but Academy rules stipulate that the director will accept the award. The score by Nicola Piovani also won an Oscar. Famously, in the midst of being so giddy with delight, he climbed on the back of the seat for his procession to the stage and applauded the audience after he was told he had won one of his Oscars. The next year's ceremony, when he read the nominees for the Academy Award for Best Actress, host Billy Crystal playfully appeared behind him with a large net to restrain Benigni if he got excessive with his antics again. Benigni played one of the main characters in Asterix and Obelix vs Caesar as Detritus, a corrupted Roman tax collector who wants to kill the Caesar and claim the throne of the Roman Empire.


Gwyneth Paltrow is an Academy Award-winning American actress. Paltrow starred in Se7en (1995), opposite Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman. The film was hugely successful commercially and critically. Then in 1996 she starred in Emma, where she received strongly positive critical acclaim, particularly in the UK for her impressive English accent, as well as in Europe and Asia. Two years later, Paltrow starred in Shakespeare in Love, a fantasy of how William Shakespeare might have written Romeo and Juliet. The film received critical acclaim, earned more than US$100 million in domestic box office receipts, and received numerous awards. Shakespeare in Love won the Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture-Musical or Comedy and Best Screenplay, as well as the Academy Award for Best Picture. Paltrow also won the award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role from the Screen Actors Guild. Later that year, Paltrow won the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role. After her Oscar win Paltrow starred in other movie roles such as A Perfect Murder. In 2000 Paltrow starred in The Talented Mr. Ripley which earned over $80 million domestically, and received positive reviews. She then starred in Bounce with Shakespeare in Love costar Ben Affleck, which was moderately successful, both critically and commercially. Since then, she has had a relatively low-profile, yet steady, film career with a few critically acclaimed film roles, including Proof (2005) and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). On December 5, 2003, she married Chris Martin of the British rock group Coldplay in a secret wedding ceremony in Southern California. Paltrow gave birth to their first child, Apple Blythe Alison Martin, five months later, on May 14, 2004, in London. Her second child, Moses Bruce Anthony Martin, was born on April 8, 2006 in New York City's Mount Sinai Hospital.


James Coburn was an Oscar-winning American actor. Coburn became famous in the 1960s and 1970s as the "tough guy" in a variety of films, first mostly with his friends Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn and Charles Bronson (with whom he co-starred in The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape). A villainous part in the hugely successful Charade (1963) and a character role as a one-armed Indian tracker in Major Dundee (1965) gained him much notice. In 1966, he finally became a bona-fide star with the release of Our Man Flint, a James Bond spoof released by 20th Century Fox as competition. In 1973 he teamed up with radical director Sam Peckinpah for the film Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (they had first worked together in 1965 on Major Dundee). But an MGM producer tried to sabotage the production causing the film to be drastically edited when it opened. Both Peckinpah and Coburn were disappointed and delved into Cross of Iron, a critically-acclaimed war epic which performed poorly in the US but was a huge hit in Europe. He then appeared in films such as Young Guns II (1990), Sister Act 2 (1993), Maverick (1994), The Nutty Professor (1996), and Payback (1999), mostly in small but memorable roles. For appearing as the abusive father of protagonist Nick Nolte in Affliction, he received an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 1998. He died suddenly on November 18, 2002 at the age of 74, of cardiac arrest, while listening to the radio. He was survived by his wife Paula Murad, a son, and a stepdaughter.


Judi Dench is an Academy Award-, Golden Globe-, Tony-, three-time BAFTA-, and six-time Laurence Olivier Award-winning English actress. In 1995 she became known to an international audience after taking over the role of 'M' (James Bond's boss) with the James Bond films, starting with GoldenEye. It could be argued that she helped reinvigorate the franchise with her fresh, sharp, and unexpected interpretation of the role. She has won multiple awards for performances on the London stage, including a record six Laurence Olivier Awards. She also won the American Tony award for her 1999 Broadway performance in the role of Esme Allen in David Hare's Amy's View. Alongside her numerous award winning performances, she has also managed to take on the role of Director for a number of stage productions. Dench won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress as Elizabeth I in the film Shakespeare in Love. Judi Dench has frequently appeared with her close friend Geoffrey Palmer, in the series As Time Goes By and in the films Mrs. Brown and Tomorrow Never Dies, both filmed in 1997. Judi Dench has also lent her incredible voice to many animated characters, narrations, and various other voice work. Dench's more recent film career has been extremely successful. She successfully garnered six Oscar nominations in nine years for Mrs Brown in 1997; her Oscar-winning turn in Shakespeare in Love in 1998; for Chocolat in 2000; for the lead role of writer Iris Murdoch in Iris in 2001 (with Kate Winslet playing her as a younger woman); for Mrs Henderson Presents (a romanticised history of the Windmill Theatre) in 2005; and for 2006's Notes on a Scandal, a film for which she received critical acclaim, including Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations. In 1971, Dench married British actor Michael Williams and they had their only child, Tara Cressida Williams (aka "Finty Williams"), on 24 September 1972, who has followed the family's theatrical tradition to become an accomplished actress in her own right.


Life Is Beautiful (Italian: La vita è bella) is a 1997 Italian language film which tells the story of a Jewish Italian, Guido Orefice (played by Roberto Benigni, who also directed and co-wrote the film), who must learn how to use his fertile imagination to help his son survive their internment in a Nazi concentration camp. The first half of the movie is a whimsical, romantic comedy and often slapstick. Guido (Roberto Benigni), a young Italian Jew, arrives in Arezzo where he sets up a bookstore. Guido is both funny and charismatic, especially when he romances Dora (Italian, but not Jewish), portrayed by Benigni's actual wife Nicoletta Braschi), whom he steals – at her engagement – from her rude and loud fiancé. Several years pass, in which Guido and Dora have a son, Joshua (written Giosuè in the Italian version. Portrayed by Giorgio Cantarini). In the film, Joshua is around five years old. However, both the beginning and ending of the film is narrated by an older Joshua. In the second half of the movie, Guido, Guido's uncle, and Joshua are taken to a concentration camp on Joshua's birthday. Dora demands to join her family and is permitted to do so. In an attempt to keep up Joshua's spirits, Guido convinces him that the camp is just a game – a game in which the first person to get 100 points wins a tank. He tells Joshua that if you complain for hunger you lose points, while quiet boys who hide from the camp guards earn points. He convinces Joshua that the camp guards are mean because they want the tank for themselves and that all the other children are hiding in order to win the game. He puts off every attempt of Joshua ending the game and returning home by convincing him that they are in the lead for the tank. Despite being surrounded by rampant death and people and all their sicknesses, Joshua doesn't question this fiction both because of his father's convincing performance and his own innocence. Guido maintains this story right until the end, when – in the chaos caused by the American advance drawing near – he tells his son to stay in a sweatbox until everybody has left, this being the final test before the tank is his. After trying to find Dora, Guido is caught, taken away, and is shot by a Nazi guard, but not before making his son laugh one last time. Joshua manages to survive, and thinks he has won the game when an American tank arrives to liberate the camp, and he is reunited with his mother.The movie made the Cannes Film Festival in 1998, winning the Grand Prize of the Jury. It then went on to win Academy Awards for Best Music, Original Dramatic Score and Best Foreign Language Film. Benigni won Best Actor in both the foreign film category and overall for his role. The film was additionally nominated for Academy Awards for Directing, Film Editing, Best Picture, and Best Original Screenplay.


"When You Believe" is an Academy Award-winning song composed by Stephen Schwartz for the DreamWork's animated feature The Prince of Egypt, and produced as a single with additional music by writer-producer Babyface. It was the main theme of the film and was released as a single by American divas Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey as the soundtrack's first single in 1998"When You Believe" won the 1999 Academy Award for "Best Original Song" and was nominated for a Golden Globes for "Best Original Song".

70th Academy Awards

The 70th Academy Awards, held at the Shrine Auditorium on March 23rd 1998, were noted for their high ratings and the 11 wins racked up by the Best Picture, Titanic. Billy Crystal hosted the ceremony for the sixth time, and received an Emmy award for his performance. Although the evening was dominated by Titanic, the picture notably did not receive any awards for its actors' performances. Other pictures picked up the acting awards; Good Will Hunting, which was nominated for 9 awards and won 2; L.A. Confidential, which was nominated for 9 awards and won 2; and As Good As It Gets, which was nominated for 7 awards and won 2. Due to the popularity of Titanic, which was still the #1 movie at the box office at the time, the show earned its highest ratings ever in history based on audience size (57.25 million), though the highest rated show based on percentage of households watching was in 1970.



Titanic is a 1997 American romantic drama film directed, written, produced and edited by James Cameron about the sinking of the RMS Titanic. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as two members of different social classes who fall in love aboard the ill-fated 1912 maiden voyage of the ship. The main characters and the central love story are fictional, but some supporting characters (such as members of the ship's crew) are based on real historical figures, and shots of the real wreck lying at the bottom of the Atlantic are used in the film's opening sequences. The film was both a critical and commercial success, winning eleven Academy Awards including Best Picture, and became the highest grossing film of all time, with a total worldwide gross of US$1.8 billion. Titanic holds the record for the highest-grossing film of all time in North America, with $600 million. The previous North American record holder, Star Wars (another 20th Century Fox film), earned a total of $461 million. Adjusted for inflation, Titanic is in sixth place. The film also holds the record as the highest-grossing movie of all time worldwide with $1.8 billion. The second-place worldwide holder, Return of the King, is over $700 million short of Titanic's record. It tied All About Eve for having the most Oscar nominations in history, with 14. It won Best Picture and Best Director. It also picked up best costume design, visual effects, sound, sound effects, original dramatic score, film editing, song, art direction, and cinematography. Kate Winslet, Gloria Stuart and the make-up artists were the three nominees that failed to win. James Cameron's original screenplay and Leonardo DiCaprio were not nominees. It was the second movie to win eleven Academy Awards, after Ben-Hur.


James Cameron is an Academy Award-winning Canadian/American director, producer and screenwriter. He is noted for his action/science fiction films, which are often highly innovative and financially successful. Thematically, James Cameron's films generally explore the relationship between man and technology. Cameron directed the film Titanic, which went on to become the top-grossing film of all time, with a worldwide gross of over US$1.8 billion. He also created the Terminator franchise. He started in the film industry as a screenwriter, then moved into art direction and effects for films such as Battle Beyond the Stars and Escape from New York. Working with producer Roger Corman, Cameron landed his first directorial job in 1981 for the film Piranha II: The Spawning, shot at Grand Cayman Island for the underwater diving sequences, and in Rome, Italy for most of the interior scenes. During his stay in Rome, he fell ill and had a nightmare about a machine emerging from a fire to kill him. While recovering, Cameron materialized the idea for The Terminator. He finally completed a screenplay, and decided to sell it so that he could direct the movie. However, the production companies he contacted, while expressing interest in the project, were unwilling to let a first-time director make the movie. Finally, Cameron found a company called Hemdale Pictures, which was willing to let him direct. Initially, for the role of the Terminator, Cameron wanted someone who wasn't exceptionally muscular, and who could "blend into" a normal crowd. Lance Henriksen, who had starred in Piranha II: The Spawning, was considered for the titular role, but when Arnold Schwarzenegger and Cameron first met over lunch to discuss Schwarzenegger playing the role of Kyle Reese, both came to the conclusion that the cyborg villain would be the more compelling role for the Austrian bodybuilder; Henriksen got the smaller part of LAPD detective Hal Vukovich and the role of Kyle Reese went to Michael Biehn. In addition, Linda Hamilton first appeared in this film in her iconic role of Sarah Connor, and later married Cameron. During the early 1980s, Cameron wrote three screenplays simultaneously: The Terminator, Aliens, and the first draft of Rambo: First Blood Part II. While Cameron would continue with The Terminator and with Aliens, Sylvester Stallone eventually took over the script of Rambo: First Blood Part II, creating a final draft which differed radically from Cameron's initial version. Cameron next began the sequel to Alien, the 1979 film by Ridley Scott. Cameron would name the sequel Aliens, and would again cast Sigourney Weaver in the iconic role of Ellen Ripley (the sole survivor from the first film). Cameron's next project stemmed from an idea that had come up during a high school biology class. The story of oil-rig workers who discover otherworldly underwater creatures became the basis of Cameron's screenplay for The Abyss, which cast Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Michael Biehn. For the film Titanic, Cameron cast Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, and Billy Zane. Cameron's budget for the film reached about $200 million, and it became the most expensive movie ever made. Before its release, the film was widely ridiculed for its expense and protracted production schedule. During the 1998 Academy Awards, the film won a record-tying 11 Oscars. Among them were Best Picture and Best Director. Unable to make Spiderman, Cameron moved to television and created the story of Max Guevara, a new superheroine. Dark Angel, was influenced by cyberpunk, biopunk, current superhero genres, and third-wave feminism. Co-produced with Charles H. Eglee, Dark Angel starred Jessica Alba as Max Guevara, a genetically enhanced transgenic super-soldier created by the super-secretive Manticore organization. It also starred Michael Weatherly as Logan Cale, and noted actor John Savage (of The Deer Hunter) as Colonel Donald Michael Lydecker. While a success in its first season, low ratings in the second led to its cancellation. Cameron himself directed the series finale, a two-hour episode wrapping up many of the series' loose ends. Cameron has been married five times: Sharon Williams (1978-1984), Gale Anne Hurd (1985-1989), Kathryn Bigelow (1989-1991), Linda Hamilton (1997-1999, one daughter), Suzy Amis (2000-, one son, two daughters).


Jack Nicholson won as Best Actor and Helen Hunt as Best Actress, both for the movie As good as it gets. Helen Hunt is an Emmy-, Golden Globe-, and Academy Award-winning American actress, widely known for her role in the television sitcom Mad About You and her Academy Award-winning role in As Good As It Gets. In the 1990s, after the lead female role in the short-lived My Life and Times, Hunt became well-known to television audiences in Mad About You, winning Emmy Awards for her performance in 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999. Hunt has also had a successful film career, with roles in movies such as Cast Away and the 1996 blockbuster Twister. After winning an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1998 for her performance in As Good as It Gets, she took time off from movie work to play Viola in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night at the Lincoln Center in New York City. In 2000, Hunt returned to the screen in four films: Dr. T & the Women with Richard Gere, Pay It Forward with Kevin Spacey & Haley Joel Osment, What Women Want with Mel Gibson, and Cast Away with Tom Hanks. Hunt was married to actor Hank Azaria from 1999 until 2000. She has been in a relationship with Matthew Carnahan since 2001 and they have a daughter, Måkena Lei Gordon Carnahan, born in 2004.


Robin Williams is an American actor and comedian who has done television, stage and film work. In part, his big break was from playing Mork from Ork, which was highlighted on Mork & Mindy. Soon afterward he became a film star who is still active as an actor and headlining comic. His first starring roles, Popeye (1980) and The World According to Garp (1982), were both considered flops, but his performance in Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) got Williams nominated for an Academy Award and established a screen identity. Many of his roles have been comedies tinged with pathos, for example The Birdcage and Mrs. Doubtfire. Williams has also starred in dramatic films, earning himself two subsequent Academy Award nominations: First for playing an unorthodox and inspiring English teacher in Dead Poets Society (1989), and later for playing a troubled homeless man in The Fisher King (1991); that same year, he played an adult Peter Pan in the movie Hook. Other acclaimed dramatic films include Awakenings (1990), What Dreams May Come (1998), and Jakob the Liar (1999). In 1997, he won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for his role as a psychologist in Good Will Hunting. However, by the early 2000s, he was thought by some to be typecast in films such as Patch Adams (1998) and Bicentennial Man (1999) that critics complained were excessively maudlin. This apparently prompted Williams to take radically unconventional roles, beginning with a role as a lowlife kiddie show host in the dark comedy Death to Smoochy, followed by One Hour Photo in a watershed performance as an obsessed film developer, Insomnia as a sociopathic writer, and The Final Cut, which is more in tune with Williams as a protagonist. In 2006 Williams starred in The Night Listener, a thriller. His first marriage was to Valerie Velardi on June 4, 1978, with whom he has one child, Zachary Pym (Zak) (born April 11, 1983). The marriage ended in 1988. On April 30, 1989, he married Marsha Garces. They have two children, Zelda Rae (born July 31, 1989) and Cody Alan (born November 25, 1991).


Kim Basinger is an Academy Award-winning American film actress and former fashion model. In 1976, after a five-year stint as a cover girl, Basinger decided to put her modeling career on hold and move to Los Angeles to begin a career in acting. After appearing in small parts on a few TV shows such as "McMillan & Wife" and "Charlie's Angels", her first starring role was a made-for-TV movie, Katie: Portrait of a Centerfold (1978) in which she played a small town girl who goes to Hollywood to become an actress and winds up becoming a famous centerfold for a men's magazine. She was a Bond girl in Never Say Never Again (1983), where she starred opposite Sean Connery. She did a famous pictorial for Playboy magazine in 1983, which Basinger has said led to good opportunities, such as Barry Levinson's The Natural (1984), co-starring Robert Redford, for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination as Best Supporting Actress. Academy Award winning writer-director Robert Benton cast her in the title role for the film Nadine (1987). Other directors repeated her in their films, such as Blake Edwards for The Man Who Loved Women (1983) and Blind Date (1987)) and Robert Altman for Fool for Love (1985) and Prêt-à-Porter (1994). Her most prominent appearances include 9½ Weeks (1986), Batman (1989) and Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential (1997) for which she received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, as well as the Golden Globe and Screen Actor's Guild Award. Hanson would cast her once more as Eminem's mother in the hit film 8 Mile (2002). Basinger married makeup artist Ron Snyder-Britton in 1980. They met on the film Hard Country, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1988. She met her second husband actor Alec Baldwin when both played romantic lovers in the 1991 flop, The Marrying Man. They married on August 19, 1993 and appeared in another flop, the remake of The Getaway (1994). They also played themselves on an 1998 episode of the The Simpsons (which also includes Ron Howard), where Basinger corrects Homer Simpson on the pronunciation of her last name and also polishes her Oscar statutette. They have a daughter, Ireland Eliesse "Addie" Baldwin (born October 23, 1995), but the couple separated in 2000.


Character is a 1997 Dutch/Belgian film, based on the best-selling novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk and directed by Mike van Diem. The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 70th Academy Awards. The film stars Fedja van Huêt, Jan Decleir, and Betty Schuurman.


"My Heart Will Go On" is the theme song of the 1997 blockbuster film Titanic. With music by James Horner and lyrics by Will Jennings, it was recorded by Céline Dion. Originally released in 1997 on Dion's album Let's Talk About Love, it went to number one all over the world, including the United States, United Kingdom and Australia."My Heart Will Go On" won the 1997 Academy Award for Best Original Song. It dominated the Grammy Awards of 1999, winning Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture or Television. "My Heart Will Go On" won also the Golden Globe Award in 1998.

69th Academy Awards

The 69th Academy Awards, held at the Shrine Shrine Auditorium on March 24th 1997 and hosted by Billy Crystal, were dominated by movies produced by independent studios, financed outside of mainstream Hollywood, leading to 1997 being dubbed "The Year of the Independents". All but one of the nominees for Best Picture were low-budget independent movies The big winner at the ceremony was Anthony Minghella's The English Patient, which had received 12 nominations and won 9 awards including Best Picture. Other notable movies to be honoured at the ceremony included Fargo, which had been nominated for 7 awards and won 2, Shine, which had been nominated for 7 awards and won just one, and Jerry Maguire, which had been nominated for 5 awards and also won just one. The Awards marked one of the greatest upsets in Oscar History as most had predicted Lauren Bacall would win Best Supporting Actress for "The Mirror Has Two Faces." Instead, the Oscar went to Juliette Binoche for "The English Patient." The ceremony attracted a low 40.83m, the lowest audience without dipping below the 40 million mark (later surpassed by the 40.54m who watched in 2002).


The English Patient is a 1996 film adaptation of the novel by Michael Ondaatje. The film, directed by Anthony Minghella, won nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Ondaatje worked closely with the filmmakers to preserve his artistic vision, and has stated that he is happy with the film as an adaptation. The film garnered widespread critical acclaim and was a major award winner as well as a box office success; its awards included the Academy Award for Best Picture, the Golden Globe Award and the BAFTA Award for Best Film. Juliette Binoche won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, nosing out Lauren Bacall for The Mirror Has Two Faces (it would have been Bacall's first Oscar win, and in her acceptance speech Binoche commented that Bacall ought to have won). Anthony Minghella took home the Oscar for Best Director. Kristin Scott Thomas and Ralph Fiennes were nominated for Best Actress and Best Actor. In all, The English Patient was nominated for an impressive 12 awards and ultimately walked away with 9.


Anthony Minghella is an Academy Award-winning British film director, playwright and screenwriter. He is currently the chairman of the British Film Institute. His 1990 feature Truly, Madly, Deeply, a drama he had written and directed for the BBC's Screen Two anthology strand, bypassed its expected TV broadcast and received a cinema release. In order to make the film, he had turned down an offer to direct another episode of Inspector Morse, which he had thought would be a much higher-profile assignment. In 1996, he won the Academy Award for Directing for The English Patient. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Adapted Screenplay for 1999's The Talented Mr. Ripley and 2003's Cold Mountain. Minghella is married to Hong Kong-born choreographer Carolyn Choa.


Geoffrey Rush is a Golden Globe, BAFTA, Emmy, AFI and Academy Award winning Australian actor. He is the first Australian-born person to win an Academy Award for acting. Rush's film debut was in the Australian film Hoodwink in 1981. His next film was in Gillian Armstrong's Starstruck, the following year. In 1996, he starred in Shine, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor, becoming the first Australian actor to win an Oscar since Peter Finch. From that point on, his film career skyrocketed. In 1998, he appeared in three major films: Les Misérables, in which he played Inspector Javert; Elizabeth, in which he played the suspicious Sir Francis Walsingham; and Shakespeare in Love in which he played Philip Henslowe, the acting company manager who remained calm in the midst of chaos (and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor). In 1999, Rush departured from his usual dramatic stint and took the lead role as Steven Price in the horror flick House on Haunted Hill. In 2000, he received his third Academy Award nomination, for Quills, in which he played the Marquis de Sade. Rush's career continued at a fast pace, with nine films released from 2001 through 2003. He starred in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, as Captain Hector Barbossa, also appearing in its sequels, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Rush played actor Peter Sellers in the television film The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. For this performance, he won an Emmy Award for Best Actor in a Mini-series or Movie. In 2005, he starred in Steven Spielberg's film Munich as Ephraim, a cold Mossad officer. Since 1988, Rush has been married to actress Jane Menelaus, with whom he has a daughter, Angelica (b. 1992) and a son, James (b. 1995).


Frances McDormand is an Academy Award-winning American film, stage, and television actress. McDormand's film debut was in Joel and Ethan Coen's first film, 1985's Blood Simple. In 1985, McDormand, the Coen brothers, Holly Hunter, and director Sam Raimi shared a house in the Bronx. McDormand appeared in several theatrical and television roles during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. She has gained renown and critical acclaim for her dramatic work, and is a respected actress, having been nominated for Academy Awards four times. In 1988, she was nominated for a Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Mississippi Burning; in 1996, she won the Academy award for Best Actress for her performance as police chief Marge Gunderson in Fargo; in 2000, she earned her second nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her portrayal of a concerned mother in Almost Famous. In 2006, McDormand received her third Best Supporting Actress nod for her performance in 2005's North Country, although she lost to Rachel Weisz. She also had a role in the film Friends with Money, a dark comedy co-starring Jennifer Aniston, Catherine Keener and Joan Cusack, and directed by Nicole Holofcener. McDormand has been married to director Joel Coen since 1984, and the two adopted a son from Paraguay, Pedro McDormand Coen, in 1994. They live in New York City. McDormand has starred in five of the Coen Brothers films, including a minor appearance in Miller's Crossing, a secondary role in Raising Arizona and lead roles in Blood Simple, The Man Who Wasn't There and Fargo, for which she won an Academy Award.


Cuba Gooding, Jr. is an Academy Award-winning American actor. Gooding first appeared in a commercial for the clothing line Bugle Boy during the 1980's. His first major film role was in director John Singleton's 1991 film, Boyz N The Hood, a well-reviewed film about inner city youths. Prior to this, he appeared in many TV shows, including a recurring role on MacGyver. He also had a very minor part in the 1988 Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America. Following the success of Boyz N The Hood, he was cast in a series of roles, both leading and supporting, including the 1996 film, Jerry Maguire, for which he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Gooding produced the murder mystery, A Murder of Crows, with longtime friend and partner Derek Broes, and the movie has gained cult status among murder mystery buffs. Gooding's subsequent career has included box office successes like Men of Honor (2000), Snow Dogs (2002), and a supporting role as Navy Cross awardee Dorie Miller in the 2001 film, Pearl Harbor. In 2006, Gooding appeared in the crime drama Dirty, which received a limited theatrical release, as well as the direct-to-DVD, 24-esque political drama End Game, playing a Secret Service agent who uncovers a conspiracy after a presidential assassination. Gooding has been married to Sara Kapfer since 1994; the two have known each other since 1986. Together, they have three children: sons Spencer Gooding (born in 1994)and Mason Gooding (born in 1996), and a daughter, Piper Gooding (born in 2005).


Juliette Binoche is an Academy Award-winning and Golden Globe-nominated French film actress. Affectionately nicknamed "La Binoche" by the French press, Binoche is well known worldwide for her roles in popular, award-winning films such as The English Patient (1996) and Chocolat (2000) as well as internationally successful arthouse films including Three Colors: Blue (1993) and Caché (2005). In August 1986, she portrayed Tereza in Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being based on the Milan Kundera novel. This was Binoche's first English language role and was a worldwide success with critics and audiences alike. After this success, Binoche decided to return to France rather than pursue an international career. In 1996, Binoche appeared in A Couch in New York by Chantal Akerman. The film was a flop, but another 1996 film, The English Patient, based on the acclaimed novel and directed by Anthony Minghella, was a worldwide hit. It garnered nine Academy Awards, including Best Supporting Actress for Binoche. 2000 saw Binoche appear in four successful, but different, roles. Firstly was La Veuve de Saint-Pierre by Patrice Leconte which saw Binoche nominated for a César Award for best actress. Next she appeared in Michael Haneke's Code Unknown, a film which was made following Binoche's approach to the Austrian director. Back on screen, Binoche was the heroine of the Lasse Hallstrom film Chocolat for which she won a European Film Award for Best Actress and was nominated for an Academy Award and a BAFTA. Binoche then teamed up with Michael Haneke again for Caché in 2005. The film was an immediate success, winning best director at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. Binoche was nominated for a European Film Award for Best Actress for her role. Binoche's next film was Bee Season with Richard Gere. Mary (2005) saw Binoche collaborate with Abel Ferrara for an investigation of modern faith and Mary Magdalene's position in the Catholic Church. The film was an immediate success, winning the Grand Prix at the 2005 Venice Film Festival. Binoche has two children: Raphaël (born on September 2, 1993), whose father is André Halle, a professional scuba diver, and Hana (December 16, 1999), whose father is fellow French actor Benoît Magimel, with whom Binoche starred in the 1999 film Children of the Century. Binoche is currently romantically involved with Argentine writer/director Santiago Amigorena.


Kolya is an award-winning 1996 Czech film drama about a man whose life is reshaped in an unexpected way. The action takes place during the last years of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia, at a time when the Soviet bloc begins to disintegrate. František Louka, a middle-aged Czech man dedicated to bachelorhood and the pursuit of women, is a concert cellist struggling to eke out a living by playing funerals at the Prague crematorium. He has lost his previous job at the philharmonic orchestra due to having been half-accidentally blacklisted as "politically unreliable" by the authorities. A friend offers him a chance to earn a great deal of money through a sham marriage to a Russian woman to enable her to stay in Czechoslovakia. However, the woman uses her Czechoslovak citizenship to emigrate and join her boyfriend in West Germany. Due to a concurrence of circumstances that remain partly unclear, she has to leave behind her Russian-speaking five-year-old son, Kolya, for the disgruntled Czech musician to look after. Gradually, a bond forms between Louka and Kolya. The movie won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.


"You Must Love Me" is a song by American singer Madonna from the 1996 soundtrack to the film Evita. The song was released as a single in October 1996. The track is the only new song for the movie that was not included on the original stage version of the musical. The song united lyricist Tim Rice and composer Andrew Lloyd Webber after thirteen years of not working together on any new songs. The song was written specifically for the film and was included in the stage production for the first time when the musical was revived in June 2006 at London's Adelphi Theatre. The song won an Academy Award for Best Original Song From A Motion Picture at the Oscars in March 1997. Madonna also performed the song at the awards. The song also won a Golden Globe Award as Best Original Song.

68th Academy Award

The 68th Academy Awards was held on March 25, 1996 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, California. The show was hosted by Whoopi Goldberg. The ceremony was watched 48.28 million viewers, with 30.0% households watching. Despite controversy from the NAACP concerning what was deemed as a lack of attention to African-American actors by the Academy, this show was one and only time an African-American was hired to produce the show to date. Key moments in this presentation included Christopher Reeve making his first public appearance onstage after becoming paralyzed, the performance of the troupe Stomp, the sextet Take 6, and a lifetime achievement award to Kirk Douglas recovering from a stroke. A special tribute to Gene Kelly was also produced.

Braveheart won 5 Oscars including Best Picture. Braveheart is a 1995 historical action-drama movie produced and directed by Mel Gibson, who also starred in the title role. The film was written for screen and then novelized by Randall Wallace. Gibson portrays a legendary Scot, William Wallace, who gained recognition when he came to the forefront of the First War of Scottish Independence by opposing Edward I of England (portrayed by Patrick McGoohan) and subsequently abetted by Edward's daughter-in-law Princess Isabelle (played by Sophie Marceau) and a claimant to the Scottish throne, Robert the Bruce (played by Angus Macfadyen). The film won five Academy Awards at the 68th Academy Awards, including the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director, and had been nominated for an additional five. Produced by Icon Productions for Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox, the film's success may have helped to revive the historical epic genre, with subsequent films such as Gladiator, The Patriot, Alexander, Troy, Kingdom of Heaven and 300.


Mel Gibson is an American-Australian actor, director, producer and screenwriter. Born in the United States, Gibson moved to Australia when he was 12 years old and he later studied acting at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney. After establishing himself as a household name with the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon series, Gibson went on to direct and star in the Academy Award-winning Braveheart. Gibson's direction of Braveheart made him the sixth actor-turned-filmmaker to receive an Oscar for Best Director. In 2004, he directed and produced The Passion of the Christ, a blockbuster movie that portrayed the last hours of the life of Jesus. Gibson's good looks made him a natural for leading male roles in action projects such as the "Mad Max" series of films, Peter Weir's Gallipoli, and the "Lethal Weapon" series of films. Later, Gibson expanded into a variety of acting projects including human dramas such as Hamlet, and comedic roles such as those in Maverick and What Women Want. His greatest artistic and financial success came with films where he expanded beyond acting into directing and producing, such as 1993's The Man Without a Face, 1995's Braveheart, 2004's Passion of the Christ and 2006's Apocalypto. Gibson got his breakthrough role as the leather-clad post-apocalyptic survivor in George Miller's Mad Max. In 1984, he starred as Fletcher Christian in The Bounty. Gibson moved into more mainstream commercial filmmaking with the popular buddy cop Lethal Weapon series, which began with the 1987 original. In the films he played LAPD Detective Martin Riggs, a recently widowed Vietnam veteran with a death wish and a penchant for violence and gunplay. He is partnered with a reserved family man named Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover). Gibson stated that when the Braveheart script arrived and was recommended by his agents, he rejected it outright because he thought he was too old to play the part. After careful thought, he decided to not only act in the film, but to direct it as well. Gibson received five Academy Awards, Best Director and Best Picture, for his 1995 direction of Braveheart. In the movie, Gibson starred as Sir William Wallace, a 13th century martyr of Scottish nationalism. In 2004 Gibson directed The Passion of the Christ which was based on the last twelve hours of the life of Jesus Christ according to the Four Evangelists and Roman Catholic Sacred Tradition. It was rendered multilingually in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Latin. Gibson co-wrote the screenplay with writer Benedict Fitzgerald and financed the film himself. The filming took place on location in Matera, Italy and Cinecittà Studios in Rome. Prior to making the film, Gibson constructed a traditionalist Catholic chapel on his California estate. It became the eighth highest-grossing film in history and the highest-grossing rated R film of all time. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Original Music Score, Best Cinematography, and Best Makeup at the 77th Academy Awards and won the People's Choice Award for Best Drama. Gibson's next historical epic, Apocalypto, was released to theaters on December 8, 2006. The film is set in Mesoamerica, during the fifteenth century. It focuses on the decline of the Maya civilization which reached its zenith around 600 AD, collapsed around 900 AD, and fell into a period of competing city states until the Conquistadors invaded. Dialogue is spoken in the Yucatec Maya language. It features a cast of actors from Mexico City, the Yucatán, and some Native Americans from the United States. Gibson met his wife Robyn Moore in the late 1970’s soon after filming Mad Max when they were both tenants at the same house in Adelaide. At the time, Robyn was a dental nurse and Mel was an unknown actor working for the South Australian Theatre Company. On June 7, 1980, they married in a Catholic Church in Forestville, New South Wales. They have one daughter, six sons, and one grandchild. Their seven children are Hannah (born 1980), twins Edward and Christian (born 1982), William (born 1985), Louis (born 1988), Milo (born 1990), and Thomas (born 1999).



Nicolas Cage is an Academy Award-winning American actor and an exemplar of method acting. He has also worked as a director and producer, through his production company Saturn Films. As of 2007, Cage has been nominated twice for an Academy Award as Best Actor in a Leading Role, winning the award for his performance in Leaving Las Vegas. Through his father, Cage is the nephew of director Francis Ford Coppola and actress Talia Shire, as well as the cousin of director Sofia Coppola and actors Robert Carmine and Jason Schwartzman. Cage's two brothers are Christopher Coppola, a director, and Marc "The Cope" Coppola, a New York radio personality. His other nomination was for playing real-life screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and Kaufman's fictional twin Donald in Adaptation. Most of his financial successes have come from his forays into the action-adventure genre. In his second highest grossing film to date, National Treasure, he played an eccentric historian who goes on a dangerous adventure to find treasure hidden by the Founding Fathers of the United States. Other action hits in which Cage has starred include The Rock, in which he played a young FBI chemical weapons expert who infiltrates Alcatraz Island in hopes of neutralizing a terrorist threat, Face/Off, a John Woo film where he played both a hero and a villain, and World Trade Center, director Oliver Stone's film regarding the September 11, 2001 attacks. Cage has been married three times: Patricia Arquette (married on April 8, 1995 – divorce finalized May 18, 2001) Cage proposed to her on the day he met her in the early 80s. Arquette thought he was strange, but played along with his antics by creating a list of things Cage would have to do to "win her hand", including obtaining the autograph of reclusive author J.D. Salinger. However, when he seriously started working through the list of demands, Arquette became scared and avoided him. They met again many years later and went on to marry. Lisa Marie Presley (married on August 10, 2002 and separated after four months in December 2002; their divorce was finalized on May 16, 2004) — the daughter of Elvis Presley, of whom Cage is a fan and based his performance in Wild at Heart on. He later said they shouldn't have been married in the first place. Alice Kim, a former waitress who previously worked at the Los Angeles restaurant Kabuki, met Cage at Los Angeles based Korean Nightclub, Le Privé. She is mother to his son, Kal-El (born October 3, 2005). She had a minor role in the 2007 movie Next which he produced.



Susan Sarandon is an American actress. She has worked in films and television since 1970 and has won an Academy Award for her role in Dead Man Walking. She is also noted for her political activism for liberal causes. In 1969, Sarandon went to a casting call for the motion-picture Joe with her then husband Chris Sarandon. Although he did not get a part, she was cast in a major role of a disaffected teen who disappears into the seedy underworld (the film was released in 1970). Five years later, she appeared in the cult favorite The Rocky Horror Picture Show. That same year, she also played the female lead in The Great Waldo Pepper, opposite Robert Redford. Her most controversial film appearance was in The Hunger in 1983, a modern vampire story which turned out to be a critical and box office flop. The film has gained some cult status for a rather graphic lesbian love scene between Sarandon and co-star Catherine Deneuve. It was the first mainstream American film to feature such a scene between two star actresses. However, Sarandon did not become a "household name" until her breakthrough in the 1988 film Bull Durham. which became a huge commercial and critical success. Sarandon received five Academy Award nominations for best actress, in Atlantic City (1981), Thelma & Louise (1991), Lorenzo's Oil (1992), and The Client (1994), finally winning in 1996 for Dead Man Walking. Her other movies include Stepmom (1998), Anywhere but Here (1999), Cradle Will Rock (1999), The Banger Sisters (2002), Shall We Dance (2004), Alfie (2004), Romance & Cigarettes (2005) and Elizabethtown (2005). While in college, she met and married fellow student Chris Sarandon in 1967. They divorced in 1979 and she retained her married name as her stage name. In the mid-1980s, Sarandon dated director Franco Amurri, with whom she had a daughter in 1985, actress Eva Amurri. Since 1988, Sarandon has been in a relationship with actor Tim Robbins, whom she met while filming Bull Durham. The couple have two children: Jack Henry (born 1989) and Miles Guthrie (born 1992). Sarandon and Robbins are often involved in the same social and political causes.


Kevin Spacey is an American actor (film and stage) and director. Spacey grew up in California, and began his career as a stage actor during the 1980s, before being cast in supporting roles in film and television. He gained critical acclaim in the early 1990s, culminating in his first Oscar for 1995's The Usual Suspects (Supporting), followed by a Best Actor Oscar win for 1999's American Beauty. Spacey has since spent time working on stage productions in London, and has remained in the public eye, starring in several major Hollywood films, including Se7en, Pay It Forward, L.A. Confidential, and his portrayal of Lex Luthor in Superman Returns. Some of Spacey's earlier roles include a widowed eccentric millionaire on L.A. Law, the made-for-television film The Murder of Mary Phagan (1988) opposite Jack Lemmon, and the Richard Pryor/Gene Wilder-starring comedy See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989). Spacey earned an avid fan following after playing the criminally insane arms dealer Mel Profitt on the television series Wiseguy. He quickly developed a reputation as a character actor, and was cast in bigger roles, including one-half of the bickering Connecticut couple in the dark comedy The Ref (1994), a malicious Hollywood studio boss in the satire Swimming with Sharks, and the put-upon office manager in the all-star ensemble film Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), gaining him positive notices by critics. In 1995, Spacey appeared in Se7en, and as the enigmatic criminal Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects. His role in The Usual Suspects launched him to A-list status and won him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. In 1996, he played an egomaniacal district attorney in A Time to Kill. Spacey won universal praise and an Best Actor Oscar for his role as a depressed suburban father who re-evaluates his life in 1999's American Beauty; He played a physically and emotionally scarred grade school teacher in Pay It Forward, a patient in a mental institution who may or may not be an alien in K-Pax, and singer Bobby Darin in Beyond the Sea. Spacey's most recent film role is as the villainous Lex Luthor in the Bryan Singer-directed superhero film, Superman Returns. It has recently been confirmed that he will reprise the role in the upcoming sequel, scheduled for 2009.


Mira Sorvino is an Academy Award- and Golden Globe Award-winning American actress. She recently guest starred on an episode of House M.D. When the 1993 film Amongst Friends entered pre-production, she was hired as third assistant director, then was promoted to casting director, then to assistant producer, and was finally offered a lead role. Positive reviews opened doors for her. After small but showy roles in Robert Redford's Quiz Show and Whit Stillman's Barcelona, her portrayal of a squeaky-voiced, foul-mouthed prostitute in Woody Allen's 1995 film Mighty Aphrodite won her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Other credits include Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (opposite Lisa Kudrow) and At First Sight with Val Kilmer. In recent years, she has starred in lower budget and independent films. In 2005, she received a Golden Globe nomination for her role as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in the Lifetime film Human Trafficking. She met actor Christopher Backus—fourteen years her junior—at a friend's charades party in August 2003: they were engaged within a month. On June 11, 2004, they married in a private civil ceremony at a Santa Barbara, California courthouse, then later had a hilltop ceremony in Capri, Italy. Their daughter, Mattea Angel, was born on November 3, 2004 and their son, Johnny Christopher King, was born on May 29, 2006.


Antonia (released as Antonia's Line in the English-speaking world) is a 1995 film by Dutch director, writer, and feminist Marleen Gorris. The film, described by its director as a "feminist fairy tale," tells the story of the matronal Antonia (Willeke van Ammelrooy) who, after returning to the anonymous Dutch village of her birth, establishes and nurtures a close-knit matriarchal community. Spanning nearly forty years, it follows Antonia as she takes over the family farm, befriends a recluse, takes in the village simpleton, and provides a home for a retarded young woman who has been raped by a brother. The film covers a breadth of liberal topics, with themes ranging from death and religion to sex, intimacy, and love. It won the 1996 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the Toronto International Film Festival People's Choice award, and the Nederlands Film Festival Golden Calf award.


"Colors of the Wind" by composer Alan Menken and lyricist Stephen Schwartz was the 1995 Oscar-winner for Best Original Song from the Disney animated feature film Pocahontas. It also won the Golden Globe in the same category as well as the Grammy Award for Best Song Written for a Movie. The song poetically presents the Native American viewpoint that the earth is a living entity where mankind is connected to everything in nature. The song was performed within the movie's narrative by Judy Kuhn as the singing voice of Pocahontas. Singer/actress Vanessa Williams recorded a version for the end credits which was successfully released as a single and became one of Williams' biggest hits in 1995, earning a gold single for sales of 500,000 copies.