by Mark Kermode
Other howlers in the ‘Oscar, Schmoscar’ hall of historical infamy include the fact that no animated feature has ever been judged the best film of the year, despite the fact that animation has remained the single most diverse, popular and adventurous of all cinema genres for more than a century. These are also the awards which didn’t give the top prize to a horror film until The Silence of the Lambs broke that duck in 1992, and even then they only did so because the distributors managed to persuade Oscar voters that it wasn’t really a horror film at all. Rather, it was an ‘intense psychological thriller’ that just happened to feature some scary bits (including the sight of a serial killer attempting to get his victim to rub lotion on to her body so that her skin would be smoother when he cut it off and wore it as a dress. So, nothing at all like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre then …).
To understand why the Oscars are quite so bland, you simply have to look at the industry that spawned them. Part of the problem is the name – the ‘Academy Awards’ – a misleading title, which has been used to foster the lie that the Oscars are some form of independent celebration of the wonders of international cinema. They’re not (in the same way that the ‘World Series’ is not a sporting event which involves any part of the world other than North America). They are an insider party at which the American motion picture industry slaps itself on the back for being brilliant and for raking in billions of dollars worldwide, while the rest of the world gawps and wonders why the US so often comes out on top. This is not a matter of opinion – it is cold, hard fact. The Oscars are run by the American-based ‘Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ (AMPAS, which was initially founded to ‘mediate labor disputes and improve the industry’s image’), and voted for by members of that institution, who are (for obvious reasons) overwhelmingly American. Just as the BAFTAs are repeatedly accused of having a ‘British bias’ because they’re voted for by members of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, so the Oscars should rightly be referred to as the ‘American Academy Awards’, and recognised as a showcase for US-based productions to which the occasional foreigner will be invited to add exotic spice.
But how do Oscar winners and nominees actually get chosen? Well, as far as the Best Picture category is concerned, what’s meant to happen is that the massed ranks of the American Academy membership cast their learned eyes over all the movies released in the US in the past year, and then coolly and dispassionately select their favourites for possible nomination. Inevitably, most of them can’t actually be bothered to wade through all those boring movies, most of which they imagine are probably utter crap. I get that same feeling sometimes, but the difference is that I have to watch the movies anyway because, hey, that’s my job. And, invariably, some of the very best films of the year turn out to be the ones for which you had the lowest expectations. That’s why it’s necessary to watch all the eligible movies, or at least to watch as many of them as you possibly can, before you cast your vote for an awards ceremony which has such ludicrous significance in the worldwide marketplace.
Yet somehow the American Academy voters (whose average age is something like 107) have become increasingly content to allow the initial selection process for Oscar consideration to be conducted on their behalf by a bunch of unaccountable drunken bozos whose reputation for corruptibility is second to none. I am speaking, of course, of the members of the self-styled Hollywood Foreign Press Association, organisers of the Golden Globes awards – which have unofficially become Round One of the Oscars selection process. Unlike the Academy, whose members are real film-makers, the HFPA is a group of 90-odd Pharisaic hacks who get together once a year to draw up a list of famous people they really want to meet and hang out with. They then proceed to invite these famous people to what is essentially their annual work knees-up, by nominating their crap films for Golden Globe awards. You may think this sounds harsh, but how else do you explain the fact that, despite being a critical and commercial flop, Burlesque was mysteriously nominated for a Golden Globe for ‘Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy’ after members of the HFPA were flown on an all-expenses-paid jolly to Las Vegas to watch Cher perform in live concert? Do you think those two events might possibly be connected? They also gave a similar nomination to The Tourist, despite the fact that it was neither a musical nor a comedy, thus ensuring that Johnny Depp came to their party.
The venality of the HFPA membership is legendary and should have made the Golden Globes the laughing stock of the world; after all, these are the people who gave a New Star of the Year award to Pia Zadora, an actress so lousy that, as the popular gag goes, an ill-judged title role in the stage play of The Diary of Anne Frank prompted an audience member to shout ‘She’s in the attic!’ when the Nazis turned up. When Globes host Ricky Gervais ‘joked’ in 2011 that HFPA members hadn’t only nominated The Tourist because they wanted to meet Johnny Depp but that ‘they also accepted bribes’, the laughter that filled the room was as hollow as Worzel Gummidge’s head.
The Globes would be nothing but a horrible joke were it not for the fact that their position in the so-called ‘awards calendar’ means that they have an unhealthy power over Oscar voting. Since American Academy members don’t have time to watch all the eligible releases, they tend to wait until the Golden Globes shortlist is announced and then make their selection from that random field. Thus a group of toadying numbskulls effectively get to control the first stage of Oscar voting, thereby elevating their otherwise utterly irrelevant standing in the world and (more importantly) skewing the results of the most prestigious entertainment awards ceremony in the world. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the list of Golden Globe nominees for the past ten years and then compare it to the list of Oscar contenders for the same period. You’ll be astonished how closely they match up.
The other thing you should be astonished by is how often one name turns up in connection with Oscar winners – that of American movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. Along with his brother Bob, Harvey was a founding member of Miramax, which started life as a punchy American independent studio with a talent for distributing niche-market movies but ended up becoming part of Disney’s ‘House of Mouse’ empire. Between 1992 and 2003, Miramax had at least one film nominated for Oscar’s Best Picture category every year, sometimes more. In 1999, the company had a whopping 23 nominations in one ceremony. After leaving Miramax the brothers moved on to form The Weinstein Company, where they continued to work their strange awards-courting magic. If you want to win an Oscar, then there is no greater ally in the world than Harvey Weinstein; nor is there any greater adversary. His Oscar campaigns are infamous: they make headlines; they make enemies; they get results. Jack Mathews, film critic for the New York Daily News, once wrote an open letter to Harvey claiming: ‘Your campaigns are obnoxious. They’re tainting the Oscar process.’ As if such a thing were possible! But so notorious are Harvey’s strategies for awards season that whenever mud starts being thrown around come Oscar time, all eyes turn to him. Many believed, for example, that he was responsible for the press stories about John Nash’s alleged anti-Semitism that surfaced when A Beautiful Mind did battle with Miramax’s In the Bedroom for Best Picture in 2002. And when the British movie Slumdog Millionaire was hit with allegations of child-labour exploitation in 2009, Weinstein (who was backing rival Best Picture bid The Reader) told the press: ‘What can I say? When you’re Billy the Kid and people around you die of natural causes, everyone thinks you shot them …’
His battles (or non-battles?) with Slumdog aside, Weinstein has long held the key to Oscar glory for Brits. It was Harvey and The Weinstein Company who backed the comparatively low-budget drama The King’s Speech, turning it into a Best Picture-winning blockbuster with worldwide takings in excess of $368 million. Looking back at the list of (allegedly) British movies that have scored big at the Oscars over the past 25 years, it’s hard to find one with which he was not somehow involved – be it The Crying Game, The English Patient or Shakespeare in Love. Indeed, on the basis
of the Oscars’ scoresheet, you could be forgiven for concluding that native New Yorker Harvey Weinstein is the British film industry. No wonder Colin Firth thanked him.
Weinstein is certainly a divisive figure, and anyone who’s been on the wrong side of him (myself included) knows that his conduct can be what Dougal the dog would call ‘not at all British’. But without him there would have been far less opportunity for the sort of nationalist flag-waving that happens every time an (apparently) British movie wins Best Picture at the Oscars, allowing everyone to quote Colin Welland’s ‘The British are coming!’ battle cry from 1982, when Chariots of Fire stormed the American Academy Awards. And if you’re going to judge the state of a nation’s cinema by the size of its Oscar cabinet, then the awful truth is that Weinstein offers a rare ray of sunshine amidst a prevailing climate of doom, despondency and despair. Because if there’s one thing the Brits love more than a winner, it’s a loser – hence the endless stories about the ‘end of the British film industry’ that have become such a staple of our national press.
The idea that the British film industry is in terminal decline is as old as the hills, with the French leading the charge in terms of cheap put-downs and pompous jokes (quelle surprise!). It was François Truffaut who complained of ‘a certain incompatibility between the terms “cinema” and “Britain”’, while Jean-Luc Godard quipped sardonically that ‘To despair of British cinema would be to admit that it exists.’ (Oh, that world famous French sense of humour.) One may retort that this is pretty rich coming from a nation which thinks that Jerry Lewis is a comic genius, and whose own major contribution to world cinema has been the image of Jacques Tati riding a bicycle while smoking a pipe. But that would be petty and cheap.
Yet, despite claims to the contrary, Britain continues to produce world-beating film-makers and actors upon whose talents a large section of the international cinema market depends. In 2011, all eyes may have been on The King’s Speech but for my money the most significant British presence at the Oscars that year was the Best Picture nomination for Inception, from home-grown writer/director Christopher Nolan. It’s well known that many of the biggest and best Hollywood blockbusters have been built on the backbone of British craftsmanship, with our writers, directors, actors, musicians and technicians earning a worldwide reputation that is second to none. This has long been a sore point for our transatlantic cousins. In the eighties, Ridley Scott got himself into hot water whilst filming Blade Runner in Hollywood when he complained to the British newspaper the Observer that American crews weren’t up to the standards of their UK counterparts. Frustrated by the levels of red tape that abound on stateside sets, Scott commented that if he asked a British crew to do something, they were much more likely to say, ‘Yes Guv’nor’, and just get on with it. The next day, Scott arrived on set in Hollywood to find his American crew dressed in T-shirts emblazoned with the logo ‘Yes Guv’nor MY ASS!’ (Scott and his British cohorts responded with T-shirts which read ‘Xenophobia Sucks’.)
Incidentally, when was the last time you read an interview with a director saying they’d really love to work with more French crews?
In truth, the movie industries of Britain and America are inextricably intertwined: British film-makers cross the pond to work on American movies, while Hollywood studios base their most prestigious productions at UK studios such as Shepperton, Pinewood and Leavesden. Sadly, there’s little that’s newsworthy about this long-standing arrangement, so no one pulls out ‘The British are coming!’ headlines when Inception or The Dark Knight strikes it big in the Oscar nominations. But when a movie which looks quintessentially ‘British’, such as The King’s Speech, achieves equivalent success, everyone suddenly starts writing articles about the state of our national cinema as if it somehow exists in isolation. And, we are all told, the Oscar triumphs of movies like The King’s Speech can only serve to enhance the international standing of our indigenous industry, and make it easier to get home-grown films made in the future. But is that really true? And is the portrait of ‘successful’ British movies as painted by the Oscars really reflective of the diversity of UK film-making? Or is it, in fact, merely a picture-postcard of cabbages and kings?
To answer this question one need look back no further than January 2007, when Stephen Frears’s TV movie The Queen became national news after picking up six Oscar nominations, including a Best Actress nod for Dame Helen Mirren. In the UK all eyes were on The Queen, although arguably the most important British nominee at the Oscars that year was Paul Greengrass in the Best Director category, for his stunning docu-drama United 93. It is perhaps significant that, in terms of mainstream cinema, it took a British film-maker to interpret and mediate the terrible events of 9/11, an American tragedy which somewhat wrong-footed the great stateside auteur Oliver Stone. When trailers for United 93 first played in New York, audiences famously balked, shouting ‘Too soon!’ at the screen, clearly fearing the worst. Yet when United 93 finally opened (with the cooperation of many who had lost relatives in the tragedy), it was clear that not only had Greengrass been respectful, but also that he had managed to forge a genuine work of art from the rubble of a horrendous tragedy. In stark contrast to Stone’s more melodramatic World Trade Center, which seemed almost overawed by its subject matter, Greengrass’s rigorous film overcame initial audience anxieties to find solid support in the US, where the wounds it addresses still run deep. If there was any justice, it would have been United 93 (a UK/French/US co-production), rather than The Queen, battling it out in the Best Picture category and showing the world what the cream of British cinema really looks like. Yet it was The Queen that ticked the royal boxes and found itself competing for the big prize.
Why? The simple answer is that the Americans love a good crown. Just look at the evidence …
In the year that Mirren won Best Actress for playing Elizabeth II in The Queen, her strongest competition came from Dame Judi Dench, who had previously won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love. No matter that Dench had been on-screen for less than ten minutes (making hers one of the shortest winning performances in Oscar history) – for several of those minutes she was wearing a crown, and that was enough for Oscar voters. Dench had previously picked up an Oscar nomination playing Queen Victoria in Mrs. Brown, directed by Shakespeare in Love helmsman John Madden. Like The Queen, Mrs. Brown began life as a low-key UK television project, but went on to garner an Oscar-nominated theatrical release after the US distributors played up its royal subject by retitling it Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown.
Are you starting to see a trend here?
By coincidence, the year that Dench won her Oscar for playing Queen Elizabeth I, Cate Blanchett picked up a Best Actress nomination for playing a younger version of the same character in the British movie Elizabeth. By the time Mirren made her way on to the Oscars stage in 2007, she had already won two royally appointed Golden Globes for her portrayals of Queen Elizabeths I and II in Elizabeth I, a TV production, and The Queen. Accepting the second award, Mirren declared that the honour rightly belonged to Her Actual Majesty, claiming that it was the real Elizabeth with whom the audience had fallen in love. Watching her Oscar acceptance speech, in which she invited the duly star-struck audience to toast HRH, it was hard to shake the image of ‘Brenda’ herself fondling the statuette and waving graciously to her loyal (former) subjects.
But while Oscar loved Mirren’s regal turn, it’s significant that the American Academy found no space to recognise and acknowledge Michael Sheen’s role in The Queen. So prominent was his spot-on portrayal of Prime Minister Tony Blair that the film could quite justifiably have been called Her Majesty, Mrs. Blair. Sadly, Oscar voters seem to have confused fiction with reality and decided that Teflon Tony was unworthy of their vote.
The message here is clear: when it comes to British movies the Americans love royalty. Moreover, Oscar voters have a particular weakness for British period dramas in which a palace dweller forges a lasting friendship with
a commoner, preferably overcoming a disability en route. You want proof? OK, try this. In the nineties, Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown took around $10 million in US theatres and became an Oscar contender by telling the heart-warming story of a frosty queen who overcomes crippling bereavement by befriending and taking the advice of a beardy ‘gillie’ whom no one else likes; in the noughties, The Queen took $56 million in US theatres and became an Oscar-winning hit by telling the heart-warming story of a frosty queen who overcomes crippling unpopularity (as a result of her apparent inability to display bereavement) by taking the advice of an upstart politician whom no one else trusts; and in 2010, The King’s Speech took $138 million in US theatres and became an Oscar sensation after telling the heart-warming story of a frosty king who overcomes a crippling speech impediment by befriending and taking the advice of an upstart speech therapist of whom no one else has heard … from the colonies!
Now, I really liked The King’s Speech, not least because its central role of a man wracked by inner torment allowed Colin Firth to make good on the edgy promise he first displayed in Welsh director Marc Evans’s sadly little-seen psychological thriller Trauma, for which he should rightly have been garlanded with awards years ago. Firth was a worthy Best Actor winner at the 2011 Oscars (although he did a better acceptance speech at the BAFTAs) but the fact remains that if you asked a computer to devise a mathematical equation for a British movie that was entirely tailored to meet Oscar’s expectations, it would probably come up with something very similar to (if nothing like as good as) The King’s Speech.
The downside of Oscar’s infatuation with royalty is the blind spot it causes for so many other British movies. In the same year that The Queen was finding such favour with Oscar voters, Ken Loach’s far superior Palme d’Or winner The Wind that Shakes the Barley was passing entirely under the American Academy’s radar. Why? Well, perhaps Loach’s famous lack of respect for the Crown (‘the Royal Family is an absurd anachronism that encourages the worst things’) offers some explanation. Indeed, so unlikely did an Oscar nod for Loach seem that the US distributors of The Wind that Shakes the Barley didn’t even bother to release the film in time for American Academy consideration. Instead, producer Rebecca O’Brien was quoted as saying: ‘We’ve already won the only prize that European and world film-makers truly covet [the Palme d’Or], so why try and compete with the majors at something they are much better at?’
