Oscar goes out

The little man has realized that there is a world outside the tight confines of Hollywood. This year's Oscars told us this all too clearly, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences distributed the statuettes not just evenly but also widely, crossing, in the process, what till the other day looked like insurmountable barriers of language and race.

Steven Soderbergh's drug thriller, Traffic, has a third of its narrative in Spanish. And the odds were stacked against the man: he had two films -- Traffic and Erin Brockovich -- in each of the two top categories, Best Picture and Best Director.

However, it was Ang Lee, the Taiwanese auteur, who by clinching 10 nominations for his Mandarin work, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the highest ever for one in a language other than English, proved that the Academy was finally growing liberal, and beginning to treat cinema as a universal concept. Lee won four Oscars, including those for Best Foreign Language Film and Cinematography. But the Best Picture honor eluded him, and instead went to Ridley Scott's Gladiator, an epic Roman drama of slaves, warriors and royal intrigues.

The 5,700-member Academy might not have given Lee what certainly was his, but it is apparent that Asian cinema in particular is starting to frame and freeze the medium's great strides and moments.

-- The Hindu, New Delhi