It wouldn’t be Oscar season without the usual barrage of complaints: the films are awful; everyone knows what’s going to win; it’s really about nice frocks and aggressive lobbying.
Some of this is still true. As is the case every year, rival distributors have been vying with one another for the unofficial Medal of Machiavellian Mischief. Just look how Harvey Weinstein used one negative review of Philomena to garner another surge of publicity. Within days of Kyle Smith publishing his bizarre notice in the New York Post – something about a “hateful and boring attack on Catholics” – the great spinmeister had distributed an open letter from Philomena Lee, the subject of the film, movingly rebutting the attack. One lemon generated a river of lemonade.
It is also true that the various red-carpet parades have a more significant effect on voting intentions than ever before. Lupita Nyong’o deserves to win the supporting-actress award for 12 Years a Slave . But what nudged her ahead of Jennifer Lawrence – nominated for a one-gag turn in American Hustle – with the Oscarologists was not the superior quality of her performance. The odds narrowed because she won the fashion battles at the Golden Globes and Baftas, and elsewhere delivered the best acceptance speeches. That’s how it goes.
Parade of dross
Take a breath. Some things have changed. Think back to the parade of meretricious dross that used to clog up the best-picture category in the 1980s and 1990s. Driving Miss Daisy ? Out of Africa ? The Last Emperor ? And those were just the winners.
Whisper it quietly: despite shortlisting nine films – four more than in the bad old days – the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has, this year, managed to compile an impressive, varied array of cinematic gems.
Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave combines old-fashioned narrative drive with the director’s characteristic avant-garde flourishes. Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity offers an extraordinary rush of emotion and adrenaline. Spike Jonze’s Her is properly weird and properly touching. Why David O Russell’s ho-hum American Hustle has been so lauded is anybody’s guess. But the current batch of nominees still looks like the best in several decades.
Obviously, foreign-language films remain conspicuous by their absence – Blue I s the Warmest Colour and The Great Beauty both deserve places at the high table – but we can’t expect miracles to happen overnight.
The other surprise is that we still genuinely don’t know what’s going to win best picture. In early autumn, after ecstatic screenings at the Telluride, Venice and Toronto film festivals, 12 Years a Slave and Gravity emerged as the films to beat. It was a neat, complementary battle. McQueen’s film is a historic epic that finally admits the issue of slavery into American cinemas. (You may think that’s nothing new, but just try to name three serious US pictures that address the subject from the slave’s perspective.) Gravity is a sweeping, intelligent space picture that rattles the brain with its uncompromising volume. Those two were locked in a twin struggle until December, when American Hustle somehow managed to make the Derby a three-horse race.
Unreliable pointers
That is pretty much how things have remained. The “reliable pointers” pointed in many unreliable directions. 12 Years a Slave and Hustle won, respectively, best drama and best comedy at the Golden Globes. Then Gravity won with the very reliably pointy Directors Guild of America. 12 Years a Slave won best film at the Baftas, but it took home only one other award – best actor, for Chiwetel Ejiofor – at McQueen’s home tie. Though Hustle has faded a little, any of those three films could still grab the prize.
So what? By the time the final envelope is opened tomorrow night we will have had all the clues we need about the winner. Last year’s weird anomaly, which saw Ben Affleck, director of Argo , not even get a nomination, was an almost unprecedented blip. The best picture almost always wins directing, too, and it usually wins film editing.
But such are the technical achievements of Gravity that almost every Oscar prognosticator – even those predicting a best-picture win for 12 Years a Slave – has the space flick odds-on for film editing and for directing. It’s not nominated as the best original screenplay, so that bellwether is also of little use. If things go as expected, we will still be largely in the dark after four hours of backslapping, in-jokes and cheesy musical numbers.
An intriguing possibility opens up. If Lawrence beats Nyong’o in that still uncertain race, then 12 Years a Slave could become the first film since Mutiny on the Bounty , in 1935, to win best picture and no other awards. Mind you, it does also look strong in the screenplay Derby.
At any rate, Ellen DeGeneres – always goofily charming – has found herself hosting a ceremony that, for those who care even a little about this always compromised gongfest, is worth casting at least one eye towards. Will anybody allude to the Woody Allen scandal? Could Steve McQueen buck the odds and become the first black person to win the directing prize? What on earth will happen in the high-profile best-short-documentary race?
The brave, the insomniac and the obsessed will find out when the sane are still curled up in bed.
