Academy Awards

In 1951, Danny Kaye, who died earlier this month, took the stage to serve as the emcee for the Academy Awards. He promptly addressed the perennial problem of the Oscars - the length of the show. Everything, Kaye noted wryly to the audience, had been tried to cut down the length of acceptance speeches - "trapdoors, disappearing microphones and an ex-blocker from Penn State. To no avail. " And Kaye had his own idea for encouraging brevity. "The academy asks that your speech be no longer than the film itself," he pleaded.

The Last Emperor reigned supreme on Oscar night, but the man behind the throne didn't even have a seat in the house. For several major winners, especially Sean Connery, Cher, Michael Douglas and Bernardo Bertolucci, victory on Monday meant vindication. For David Puttnam, the ousted head of Columbia Pictures who sponsored and nurtured The Last Emperor, the nine-Oscar sweep registered by Bertolucci's magnificent epic was surely a bittersweet victory. For Coca-Cola, the conglomerate that owns Columbia and fired Puttnam because he chose to make movies such as The Last Emperor, the avalanche of Academy Awards represents what can only be called a richness of embarrassments.

Wait a minute - maybe Brokeback Mountain isn't the groundbreaking, earthshaking, history-making entertainment event of the moment, even if it does win best picture and a raft of other Oscars tonight. There was another movie that nabbed a few Academy Awards, including best picture, 37 years ago: a dark, sad, controversial tale about the bond between two men. One of them wore a big hat and big boots and spoke with a Texas drawl. There's a pretty explicit gay sex scene. And by the end of the picture - SPOILER alert here - somebody's dead.

QUOTE "It'll be a stall-in. " - Rick Wilson of the gay rights group Queer Nation, saying the organization plans to block cars going to the ceremony. SOME OSCAR TECHNICALITIES A FEW AWARDS THE ACADEMY NEVER DREAMED OF As you may know, each year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presents a bunch of "technical" Oscars before granting the more glamorous ones. Many of these awards are given to movies competing in obscure but nonetheless important categories.

In a year when the Oscars were scattered and the show's entertainment was thin, this edition of the Academy Awards was remarkable not so much for who won, but for who did not. The most compelling aspect of this year's show was the attention paid to the snubbed, and the aura of unpleasantness that seemed to hang about the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion. "Driving Miss Daisy" won best picture, a best actress award for Jessica Tandy and the most statues overall, but did not dominate the awards the way some oddsmakers had predicted.

While the value of an Oscar is priceless, the price tag of an Academy Award campaign is dear. Yet the win isn't about the statuette alone; it's also about the film's enhanced earnings potential. This year, the average bill for the Oscar hunt of a multiple nominee is $10 million to $15 million, according to Tom O'Neil, whose website, goldderby.com, is the gold standard for all things Oscar. Ever since 1999, when mogul Harvey Weinstein ambushed contender Saving Private Ryan with his $15 million ad blitz for Shakespeare in Love , Oscar spending has exploded.

The last time Oscar held court on Hollywood Boulevard, Ben-Hur cleaned up. The event was televised in black-and-white, and "bomb sweeps" weren't a negotiating point. Now - 42 years later, and six months since the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington - the Oscar telecast is returning to the heart of Hollywood, in the new Kodak Theatre. But not before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences resolved a post-Sept. 11 squabble with real estate developers over the issue of clearing nearby stores for security sweeps in the hours preceding the March 24 ceremony.

Academy Award-winning composer-arranger Joe Renzetti grew up and found fame in South Philly. Producer-director Steve Rash spent his childhood in rural Texas where he attended college first as a music major and later studied television, film and radio. Despite their different backgrounds, the two men, who now live in Bucks County, have found success working together. Rash, 42, directed The Buddy Holly Story, which was nominated for three Academy Awards and for which Renzetti won an Oscar for musical adaptation.

Fargo, the dark, comic film about a bungled kidnapping in the Midwest, won six Independent Spirit Awards Saturday at a ceremony honoring independent film in Santa Monica, Calif. The Gramercy Pictures film, up for seven Academy Awards tonight, won for best feature film, director Joel Coen, actress Frances McDormand, actor William H. Macy, screenplay and cinematography. Another Oscar contender, actor-director Billy Bob Thornton, took the best-first-feature award for Sling Blade.