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'American Beauty' wins at taboo-trouncing Oscars

LOS ANGELES: Once taboo sexual subjects - homosexuality, sex with juveniles, women who live as men - took centre stage at the Oscars on Sunday as "American Beauty" swept the main awards and "Boys Don't Cry" made a new star out of an unknown actress.

"American Beauty," a tale of a dysfunctional family with its twin plots of repressed homosexuality and adult fantasies of sex with a 16-year-old girl, was named the year's best film, becoming after "Sunset Boulevard" the second film narrated by a dead man to win an Oscar.

Besides being named best film, "American Beauty" won Oscars for Sam Mendes for best director, Kevin Spacey for best actor, Conrad L. Hall for best cinematographer and Alan Ball for best original screenplay.

The theme of sexual politics figured heavily in many of this year's Oscars. Besides "American Beauty" and "Boys Don't Cry," "The Cider House Rules" won Oscars for best adapted screenplay for novelist John Irving and a best supporting actor award for Michael Caine, who plays a doctor who does abortions long before they became legal.

Irving also added a political note, thanking the National Abortion Rights Action League and Planned Parenthood in his acceptance speech.

In an upset, "One Day in September," a documentary about the slaughter of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, beat the widely popular "Buena Vista Social Club," a documentary that fuelled world-wide interest in Cuban jazz and was a major commercial and critical success.

Spain's famously colourful director Pedro Almodovar won his first Oscar for "All About My Mother" in the best foreign-language film category.

The Academy Award for best song went to Phil Collins, for "You'll Be in My Heart," from Disney's animated feature "Tarzan."

-Reuters