After about an hour of lying in my fold-out bed last night, positively fuming, I came to the conclusion that I have been giving the Oscar’s far more credit than they were ever due. Granted, they aren’t nearly as embarrassing a spectacle as the Grammy’s (no Oscar winner has ever been as comparatively horrendous as “My Humps” or Milli Vanilli), but that’s like saying you’re the not the least stable person at Betty Ford. I consider it to be not opinion, but irrefutable fact, that Mickey Rourke’s performance as Randy “The Ram” Robinson in The Wrestler and Anne Hathaway’s portrayal of Kym in Rachel Getting Married were the two best turns in a film this year. I still believe this to be so, even though Sean Pean won for his role as Harvey Milk in Milk and Kate Winslet won for some Nazi woman in The Reader (nobody saw the damn film so I don’t feel I need to IMDB her character name because I doubt anyone gives a shit). The reason for this misappropriation of little gold men is the very same reason why the Oscar’s are absolute shit and those reasons are two-fold, as I will now demonstrate:
- Reason #1: Biopic Fever.
The academy has always had a ridiculous jones for any film depicting a historical figure, regardless of said film’s merits, which I will say are normally quite good. However, there is no rationalizing the fact that 10 of the 18 best actor/actress awards meted out this decade have gone to actors portraying real-life personages. For the purposes of posterity I will list them here in chronological order: Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich, Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, Charlize Theron as Aileen Wuornos, Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles, Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote, Reese Witherspoon as June Carter Cash, Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin, Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II, Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf, and this year with Sean Penn as Harvey Milk.
This trend is almost more unnerving than the Academy’s predilection towards rewarding any actor willing to play a character with a serious mental or physical handicap. Can’t you just imagine academy voters sitting in their little home theaters, prattling on like women in line at a retirement home dining hall? “I met June Carter Cash back in 1968 at the Grand Ole Opry and it’s like looking in a mirror!” “Well, I was at a book signing for Breakfast At Tiffany’s and Truman spoke just like that young man in the picture is speaking. It’s uncanny!” “I met Idi Amin at the Ritz-Carlton in ’82 and he acted just the way that Forest man plays him.”
The Academy acts as though there is no greater achievement than resurrecting someone from the dead, but in fact, playing a historical figure is much easier than a truly original character. Starring in a Biopic is like writing a research paper. You have thousands of pages of biographies documenting their lives, videos and recordings telling you exactly how they moved and spoke, not to mention the fact that all of the inner motivation for your character has already been spelled out for you by scholars who have devoted their lives to the person in question. Playing a completely fictional role requires the actor to find their own driving force for the character and to develop their own mannerisms and idiosyncrasies to bring the person to life. At a certain point BioPics just become exercises in advanced mimicry.
Shiva the Destroyer, harbinger of doom on Oscar night
-Reason #2: The Property of Accumulated Nominations.
I’m not going out on a limb here by saying that based on their bodies of work, Kate Winslet is a far better actress than Anne Hathaway. One was in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the other was in The Princess Diaries. The former starred in Little Children while the latter foisted The Devil Wears Prada upon the world. Before last night, Kate Winslet had been nominated for three Best Actress Oscars and one for Best Supporting Actress, winning none of them. The reason why Kate Winslet won for The Reader is much the same as why Russell Crowe won for Gladiator instead of A Beautiful Mind or The Insider and Denzel Washington won for Training Day rather than The Hurricane. Both men were snubbed in previous years and proceeded to win the award for their less remarkable performances.
Winslet’s win this year is in the same vein as the Academy didn’t want to give such a talented actress the shaft for the 5th straight time and decided to give her the award based more on her consistently brilliant work rather than on individual performance. As proof positive of this, it was a matter of much debate amongst critics as to whether the academy nominated the right Kate Winslet film this year, many citing her portrayal of April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road as the superior performance. This is a testament to her chops as a thespian, but it doesn’t mean she was this year’s best actress. I have a feeling that when people look back on 2008, far more will remember Anne Hathaway’s tormented addict causing her family’s dysfunction than Kate Winslet having an affair with a young boy in 1940’s Germany.
That is my rationale for why the Oscars once again sloughed off the best performances of the year and you can disagree with them if you like. My point is not to denigrate the superb performances of Mr. Penn and Ms. Winslet, but rather to point out the tragically formulaic approach that the Oscar’s have been reduced to. If I could find a historically relevant retarded man with a limp to play, even I might have a shot at being nominated for an Oscar. However, the academy did get Slumdog Millionaire right and that’ll have to do for now. After all, they’re not quite the Grammy’s yet.
