They’re human too

IT finally happened: an Oscar night with no major surprises, not even one. Which led to the biggest surprise of all: Learning who’s going to win turns out not to be the reason we watch. Not the reason at all.

I don’t mean to suggest that I have the combination to those ominous PricewaterhouseCoopers briefcases or that if I would have been in an Oscar pool -- which, owing to creeping lassitude, I was not -- I would have cleaned up.

It’s rather that if you take the three short-film awards, always in a world by themselves, out of the equation, every single film that won was either the favorite of veteran Oscar watchers or the No. 2 choice. Absolutely nothing came out of the blue.

That’s because, unlike film festival juries, which are one-time-only deals, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, having been around for 80 years, has quite a hefty track record. Given that untold numbers of hours are spent every year minutely scrutinizing the current nominees in light of history and past tendencies, a night like Sunday night was inevitable.

Even the closest thing to a surprise, Tilda Swinton’s “Michael Clayton” victory, was predictable. When a film with numerous nominations has only iffy chances of taking one of the top four awards, voters who favor it will make sure to vote for it in the one category it has the best chance of capturing. For “Juno,” that was original screenplay, and for “Michael Clayton” that was supporting actress, a grouping so evenly matched that those sentiments made a difference.

Yet, predictable though it was, I thoroughly enjoyed Sunday’s event. Even if the winners hadn’t been expected, through the grace of the Internet I could have found out who they were within seconds. What I couldn’t have experienced except by watching were the irreplaceable human moments, the bright flashes of unpredictable emotion that are increasingly difficult to come by in today’s highly regimented movie celebrity world.

As the broadcast’s generous selection of 80th anniversary clips showed, the live-television aspect of the Oscars has always provided the show with its most unforgettable moments, as winners have for decades just come out and said what was on their minds. And this year was no exception.

So here was 98-year-old honorary Oscar winner Robert Boyle responding to a standing ovation by saying, “That’s the good part of getting old. I don’t recommend the other.” Here was an elated, almost shellshocked Glen Hansard, half of the songwriting team that won for “Once,” exulting, “What are we doing here? This is madness.”

And most unexpected of all, here was “Juno” screenwriter Diablo Cody, the queen of arrogant-hipster attitude when she won her Spirit Award on Saturday, allowing herself to be open and vulnerable when she thanked her family through unforeseen tears for “loving me exactly the way I am.”

Many of the best moments inevitably come courtesy of the great actors who, the Oscars remind us, live with their emotions close to the surface, always at their beck and call.

So we had Daniel Day-Lewis going down on one knee (a homage to Jack Palance’s one-armed push-ups?) before Helen Mirren and getting “the closest I’ll ever get to getting a knighthood.” We had Swinton being very much herself with a free-form riff on Oscar and anatomy, and Javier Bardem emotionally saluting his mother in Spanish.

Best of all there was lead actress winner Marion Cotillard, so emotional that she was in tears when her makeup team won its Oscars, who practically went through the roof at her own victory, ending with a cosmic “Thank you, life, thank you, love, and it is true there is [sic] some angels in this city.”

Oscar’s habit of cutting quickly to nominated performers after showing a clip of their work provides another insight into the nature of acting. Often -- witness Day-Lewis, George Clooney and Amy Ryan -- they are seen more or less shaking their heads in wonder at what they’d done.

This is not false modesty but rather an acknowledgment of the way that actors, when they are working at a high level, more or less turn into other people. Like shamans in civilizations that did without theater, they go into altered states they may only imperfectly remember, and it can shake them up to be reminded of where they’ve been. Those kinds of privileged glimpses make the Oscars worth watching no matter who wins, loses or even draws.

kenneth.turan@latimes.com