BRITS DRESS TOP OSCAR SUCCESS

RIDLEY Scott’s ‘Gladiator’ may have scooped five awards but the British director failed to pick up best director award in a night of disappointment for the British industry.
However, the epic, filmed partly in UK using British film technicians, picked up awards for best picture, actor in a leading role, visual effects, sound and costume design.
The first British success of the night went to Janty Yates, costume designer on 'Gladiator'. In her acceptance speech she said: “A huge thank you to Ridley Scott for his vision and his incredible inspiration, but this doesn’t belong to me alone. It belongs to a huge costume crew which worked so hard in Malta, Morocco and the UK.”
The costume department had to fashion 500 gladiator tunics in rough linen, which each had to be distressed. In all, Yates, along with wardrobe supervisor Rosemary Burrows, Assistant Designer Samantha Howarth and their crew, had to fashion more than 10,000 costumes for the speaking cast and the thousands of extras. Burrows was also responsible for setting up wardrobe facilities which were used for warehousing, and for giving up to 2,000 extras per day the space in which to dress and have their hair and makeup done. In England, this included mud baths for the soldiers, in order to provide the proper amount of battle grit.
In the second success of the evening, Rob Harvey, a Co-Director of Lola Post Production in London with Grahame Andrew, picked up the Oscar for ‘Best Visual Effects’ for his work on ‘Gladiator’. Harvey shares the prestigious award with John Nelson, Neil Courbould and Tim Burke. Supervising the digital post-production of the film from London, the most notable scenes occur during the vast German battle, the set design which reconstructed the grandeur of the Roman Colosseum, and the sequence used to restore Oliver Reed's final performance to the film, after Reed’s untimely death in Malta during filming.
The Honorary Academy Award went to British Cinematographer Jack Cardiff for lifetime achievement. Cardiff is best known for films such as ‘A Matter of Life and Death’, ‘The Red Shoes’, ‘The African Queen’, ‘The Vikings’ and ‘Black Narcissus’ for which he got his only Oscar.
Julie Walters and Dame Judy Dench both missed out in the best supporting actress category for their respective parts in ‘Billy Elliot’ and ‘Chocolat’.
British composer Rachel Portman missed out on her chance to add to her collection of Academy Award’s for her score for the film ‘Chocolat’. She had picked up an Award in 1997 for her score for ‘Emma’. (AMcE / CD)