Posted 8:08 AM by Blah blah

Yay Adrien Brody! Roman Polanski is Vindicated

HAHA! My Oscar hope and prediction came true! Adrien Brody wins actor award (SF Chronicle). My two favorite movies from 2002 (The Pianist and Chicago) both won big time last night at the Oscars. The Pianist won Best Actor (Adrien Brody), Best Director (Roman Polanski), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Ronald Harwood)! At the BAFTAs (British version of the Oscars), The Pianist won Best Film and Best Director (Polanski). At the Cesars (French Oscars), this film won Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actor (Brody). It also won the Palme d'Or (Golden Palm), the top award at the Cannes Film Festival.

When this film premiered at Cannes, it won an "emotional 20-minute standing ovation...from a 3,500-member audience."

Brody was so excited at his Oscar, he rushed up to the stage and kissed Halle Berry hard on the lips! He is a great, unnoticed actor from New York whose time has come. He is also the youngest Best Actor winner ever, at age 29. He was the only American (I think) in the cast of The Pianist. He stole the night with his impassioned acceptance speech, in which he almost cried thanking his parents. He was the only person to defy the rules and keep speaking far past the allotted 45 seconds. He made a plea for the soldiers in Iraq that stirred the crowd to give him a standing ovation!

This is what I said about The Pianist right after seeing it:

"It gave me the chills. This Roman Polanski film is the most emotionally gripping and horrifying film I have ever seen since Schindler's List. In some ways it's MORE effective than Schindler. The Pianist and its main actor, Adrien Brody, richly deserve Oscars for Best Picture and Best Actor of 2002. No one else comes close. I literally felt that I had just lived through the Nazi Holocaust. At the end of the movie, no one left until they finished playing the music of the last haunting credits. We all watched in stunned silence. This film is more scary than any horror movie I've ever seen."

After I left the theater, I went to the supermarket and marvelled at how much food we have in this country. The movie's starvation and poverty made me hungry, and all I wanted to do was pig out, gain 15 pounds, and bow down to the farmers of America. (Just kidding.)

Roman Polanski still may not return to the U.S, after fleeing to Paris in 1978. As soon as he enters, police may arrest him for his crime from 1978. What a vindication this is for him and for the idea of judging an artist's work independently of his personal life. I believe the same about people like Woody Allen.