Peter Jackson’s fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings and an army of New Zealanders reigned supreme over the Oscars on Sunday, sweeping 11 trophies and making Academy Awards history.
The twang of the New Zealand accent pervaded the stage at Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre as Kiwis accepted awards, mostly for the last in the Rings trilogy of films.
”There’s nobody left to thank in New Zealand,” quipped Oscars host Billy Crystal after the umpteenth New Zealander linked to the hobbit spectacular went up to claim a statuette.
And an American television commentator said: ”I think the only person in New Zealand who didn’t win an Oscar tonight was Keisha Castle-Hughes,” the youngest-to-date best-actress Oscar nominee at 13, who lost out to South Africa’s Charlize Theron.
However, Oscars officials said they did not know how many of the recipients were New Zealanders as the awards were not tracked by nationality.
Rings, made in New Zealand, picked up Oscars for best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay, best original song, best visual effects, best costume design for the double-nominated New Zealander Ngila Dixon and best original musical score for Howard Shore.
It also won for film editing and for best art direction, best sound mixing and best make-up. Many of the recipients of the golden statuettes hailed from New Zealand.
Other Kiwi winners paid tribute to Jackson and to the author of the Rings books, JRR Tolkien, while Jackson paid tribute to New Zealand authorities for facilitating the marathon 16-month shooting of the film there.
”Right now I feel like I could do it all over again,” Jackson said, praising his ”tremendous” team backstage after receiving his statuettes for best director and best picture, as a producer of the film.
Pundits said the 5 800 Oscar voters had waited until the end of the movie series to reward the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, which first began playing on screens in December 2001.
The first film in the trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, earned 13 Oscar nominations in 2002 but won only four, for best visual effects, best make-up, best original score and best cinematography.
It is only the second time in Oscar history that all three films in a trilogy have all been best-picture nominees. The first was Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather series.
The second film in the series, The Two Towers, received six nominations last year but won only two: visual effects and sound editing.
That made the Kiwi presence at the 76th Academy Awards so overwhelming that other winners felt obliged to point it out.
”I have an Australian accent,” stressed Russell Boyd, as he picked up best cinematography Oscar for his work on Aussie director Peter Weir’s epic Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.
Producer Denise Robert, receiving the best foreign-language film statuette for Canada’s The Barbarian Invasions, expressed a similar sentiment.
”We are so thankful that Lord of the Rings did not qualify in this category,” she said.
Jackson’s latest awards will bring to six the number in his household along with those he and his wife Fran Walsh won for various aspects of the film trilogy at previous Oscars.
”I want to put one beside my son’s bed and one beside my daughter’s bed,” he said.
”We grew up loving this book. We had no idea we were going to go grey trying to make the movie,” said scriptwriter Phillipa Boyens as she accepted the Oscar for best adapted screenplay along with Walsh.
”The person who we absolutely must thank is JRR Tolkien — without him we wouldn’t be here,” she said of the British author.
The movies, released over three successive Christmases, marked one of the biggest gambles in cinematic history, as Jackson convinced New Line cinema to give him a record budget of $270-million to shoot all three films simultaneously over a hectic 16 months.
The statistics surrounding the mega-film are staggering.
It used 20 602 extras; 48 000 props and weapons; 15 000 original costumes; 1,8-million metres of film; 300 handmade knotted wigs; and 12,5-million hand-linked rings for chain mail.
New Line Cinema fretted about its huge investment, not knowing whether the first film would be a success and realising that failure would doom the whole series.
But the movies thrilled the discerning fans of Tolkien’s books and have taken a combined total of nearly $3-billion dollars at the box office, leaving New Line and Jackson smiling broadly.
Jackson wants more hobbits
Meanwhile, reports Marc Lavine, Jackson said on Sunday that while the Oscars success of Lord of the Rings probably marked the highpoint of his career, he still wanted to tackle more hobbit tales.
”I want to carry on making good movies,” he said at the Oscar ceremony. ”But the challenge is not to make films bigger and better than Lord of the Rings. The challenge is just to make entertaining movies no matter what genre and size they are.”
He said there was ”a seven-year-old kid in me that used to make films in my parents’ back garden and I never dreamed I would be here and I’m here.
”And if this is the only time it ever happens in my life, then I’ve done it and I’m incredibly proud and incredibly grateful.”
Despite his awareness that he will probably never receive greater acclaim than now, and despite the strain on him from the Rings project, Jackson said would like another shot at the hobbit-forming stories of author JRR Tolkien.
But he said the likelihood of a film based on Tolkien’s The Hobbit depended on the outcome of a legal battle between Hollywood studios New Line, which made the Rings films and has the rights to make The Hobbit, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which has the distribution rights for The Hobbit.
”We are at the mercy of that relationship being sorted out between these two studios, and if that was done I’d really like to make it.
”If I was going to do it, I would want it to feel like it was part of the trilogy. I’d want Ian McKellen back as Gandalf and I’d want it to feel like it was part of the mythology of the Lord of the Rings,” he said. — Sapa-AFP