Originally posted by conscience
Actually, Billy Crystal himself did this at the 2000 Academy Awards (1999 films). And it is supposed to be ad-libbed. Notables (Michael Clark Duncan: "I see white people", Michael Caine: "I loved Jaws 4", and Judi Dench: "Oh, this thong is killing me!", Jack Nicholson: "I'm still the coolest guy in the room."

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Last year Steve Martin did the jokes about Hollywood being full of (something along those lines) --- straight people (Harrison Ford), gay people (Jack Nicholson), and who he has slept with (Nicole, Renee, Diane Lane, Ernest Borgnine, Ted Danson & Mary Steenburgen etc.)

Originally posted by Giles
that's a really sad and simple minded response to a female director who had a flawed personality and history, but has made some of cinema's most important films of their time.

Originally posted by baracine
Shouldn't Elijah Wood have been ask to present an Oscar or has that been done before?

Originally posted by Groucho
When he was a kid, he had to "pinch hit" for Macaulay Culkin, who dropped out at the last minute one year.

Originally posted by BJacks
"Flawed personality and history?" Ha, that's a gentle way of putting it. Leni Riefenstahl was an adament Nazi (who used concentration camp inmates as extras), and her "important films" consisted of glorying Hitler's ideology. Just because they were artful in their proganda doesn't mean she should be saluted in memoriam during the Oscars. And the fact that the applause quickly died down shows that most people there agreed.

Originally posted by Giles
"Leni Riefenstahl was an adament Nazi (who used concentration camp inmates as extras)" - what's your source for that statement?

Riefenstahl, born in 1902 and alive at this writing in fall 1999, presents an extremely problematic case — an artist of unparalleled gifts, a woman in an industry dominated by men, one of the great formalists of the cinema on a par with Eisenstein or Welles whose two major works were funded by, and intended to glorify, the Nazis. Triumph of the Will (1935), a deification of Hitler, and Olympia (1938), a paean to the "body beautiful" in the guise of a record of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, are studied in film schools as supreme examples of the documentary form. Riefenstahl’s status as a filmmaker is unquestioned, even when her motives are obscured. She says she was never a Nazi party member, and never anti-Semitic. At Nuremberg, she was labeled a sympathizer but not an activist. On the other hand, her denial of using gypsy concentration camp members as extras in her film Tiefland is undermined by a requisition list, shown in close-up in The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, that names these people and the purpose for their brief transfer from the camp to her sets.

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Like many Germans living in economic despair at the time, she found der Fuhrer charismatic and lauded his efforts to build "national socialism," by her own words unaware of his ultimate intentions. Granted the dream of every filmmaker — an unlimited budget — to photograph the annual Nazi Party rally of 1934, she created Triumph of the Will, an inestimable propaganda tool in building the myth of Hitler-as-savior.