Best Actress?

It's Oscars time again. A time when the great and the good (and bad) of the cinema world come together to celebrate their achievements of the previous twelve months. 

I guess it’s only fair that after writing a blog entry on the category of Best Actor that I do the same for the ladies. The role of leading lady in a film has always been iconic and, when you think back over the years, there have been so many that have lit up the silver screen ever since Janet Gaynor walked off with the first Oscar in 1927/28. Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, Vivien Leigh, Ingrid Bergman all led the way during the next forty years, inspiring a further generation of female stars. Meryl Streep has enjoyed a love/hate relationship with this particular statuette nominated a staggering fourteen times over the years, winning once. Ok, clearly more hate than love when you read that statistic. Indeed since winning at the second attempt for Sophie’s Choice in 1982, Streep has had to endure that awful moment of smiling graciously in defeat no fewer than eleven times. But, as with the boys, there have been some who have become more famous for their acceptance speech than for the actual role they won the gong for. Here’s my top three.

For my first selection I’m going to go back to 1985. Most critics would generally agree that it wasn’t  a particularly great year for film releases but a brief glance down the list still allows you to pick out some famous flicks. Zemeckis brought out the first instalment of his now iconic Back to the Future trilogy. Mad Max went Beyond Thunderdome with Tina Turner along for the ride and Pee-wee went on a Big Adventure...ok ignore the last one. But the lack of classic films should still not take away the gloss from individual performances and in 1985 the Best Actress category still looked strong. Jessica Lange was there as Patsy Cline in Sweet Dreams, Anne Bancroft played Mother Superior in Agnes of God and our old friend Meryl was there again with another fine performance as Karen Blixen in Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa.

But the stand out performance that year was clearly Whoopi Goldberg, who announced herself to the world with a superb debut performance in Spielberg’s period drama The Colour Purple. Very few actors can have been as convincing in their first film as Goldberg who was mesmerising as Celie Harris Johnson, a young African-American girl subjected to brutal treatment by her husband before making good her life in the Deep South. It should have been a fairytale victory for Goldberg but she surprisingly lost to veteran Geraldine Page, who finally won after eight previous unsuccessful nominations. Page, playing Carrie Watts in The Trip to Bountiful, took a long time to make it to the stage that night explaining later that she had not expected to win in the twilight of her long career dating back to the 1950s – she was probably as shocked as Whoopi.

For my second pick I’m moving us on exactly twenty years. In 2005 five actresses were attempting to follow on the standard set by Charlize Theron and Hilary Swank in the previous two years. Their performance in Monster and Million Dollar Baby had set the bar high and, for me, only one of the five that year came close. Theron was there again in North Country, but was never in serious content ion. Nor were Judi Dench or Felicity Huffman in Mr. Henderson Presents and Transamerica respectively. But Keira Knightly was superb in Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice and should have walked off with her first Academy Award. There have been many renditions of Miss Elizabeth Bennett on the silver and small screen but not many better than Knightly’s who has mastered the role of the English rose perfectly. There is, obviously, the argument that at some stage she will become somewhat typecast in this genre but, in 2005, she should have been honoured with her first gold statuette. Unfortunately for Knightly she came up against the legacy of one of America’s greatest singer/ songwriters.

Johnny Cash had died in 2003 after a career spanning almost fifty years and so, when 20^th Century Fox decided to make a film charting his early life it was certain to do well. I’m not disputing for one second the quality of Reece Witherspoon’s performance in Walk the Line but, it is frustrating when nostalgia clouds the judgement of the Academy – and the critics. In the cold light of day Knightly was superior to Witherspoon and deserved more. 

For my final choice I was tempted to launch a verbal assault on Natalie Portman winning with the completely ridiculous film that was The Black Swan. Has there ever been a more pointless and quite frankly mind numbingly boring film as that? Oh hold on...American Beauty. The world would have been a much safer place if neither of those two had made it to our screens but, when i looked at the competition, Portman was up against absolutely nothing so, although i could have argued why she shouldn’t have been recognised as Best Actress, I would have struggled to find a worthy winner anywhere. I could also have questioned the decision to allow Halle Berry to take to the stage in 2001 and attempt to make an even more cringe worthy speech than Gwyneth Paltrow after winning for the average Monster’s Ball. 

Instead I’m going to choose Helen Hunt, everyone’s favourite tornado chaser. Unfortunately for Hunt, Twister was the pinnacle of her career and her victory in 1997 is still a mystery to me. In fact I have to be hoinest and say As Good As it Gets is a complete mystery to me! Did the Academy act out of embarrassment that year? The iconic Jack Nicholson, in 1997, had only won one Best Actor Oscar and so, to right a wrong, they decided it was going to be his year. If so the tidal wave of support, initially for Nicholson, swept the entire film towards undeserved success, including Hunt.

I’ll resist the temptation to say Kate Winslet should have won as Rose in Titanic because, over the years since Cameron’s blockbuster shattered awards records, the same critics that marvelled at it have now unfairly pronounced it as ridiculous. Instead I’ll go for Judi Dench as Mrs. Brown. I say this despite the fact that I’m not a massive fan of hers – especially her role as M in the Bond franchise, but in this film she is tremendous. Her chemistry with Billy Connolly ensured the film was a success and Dench, who has lost out on three further occasions since, should have gone home with the Oscar that night. 

Get involved! Leave a comment after reading this blog and let us all read your nominations in the category discussed. Also don’t forget to take part in our poll on which film will win Best Picture this year!

Best Actor?

It's Oscars time again. A time when the great and the good (and bad) of the cinema world come together to celebrate their achievements of the previous twelve months.

After listing my top three films to miss out on a Best Picture Oscar I think it fair that I do the same with Best Actor. There have been, of course, so many fantastic actors who have made the short walk to the podium to accept the gong thereby placing themselves at the very top of their profession. Sydney Poitier, Tom Hanks and Spencer Tracy are only a few of the greats to have graced our screens. But for every Hanks, there is a Cage, for every Poitier there is a Spacey.

Here are my top three how on earth did that happen moments within the Best Actor category.

Cast your mind back to February 1989..if you’re old enough. In the previous twelve months you would have watched Morgan Freeman portray perhaps his most iconic character in the unforgettable Driving Miss Daisy. Tom Cruise has pulled at your heart strings with an incredible performance as a paralysed Vietnam veteran in Born on the Fourth of July and Kenneth Branagh (I know he takes it all too seriously but sometimes it works) has brought Shakespeare to the silver screen as Hamlet. Not only that, but Robin Williams had also shown us how teachers (in the films!) can actually inspire their pupils to great things in Dead Poets Society. Which one of these performances in films that have stood the test of time to this day won the ultimate accolade for their work? The answer..none of them. Daniel Day-Lewis (in my opinion one the best actors of all time before people complain) walks off with the gong for his performance in My Left Foot. He was good, no question, but hardly worthy of victory against the other performance I’ve mentioned. Daniel Day-Lewis incidentally has been nominated in this category four times in his career – winning twice. Ironically his two defeats have been for far superior performances than the two in which he was victorious.

It is hard to believe that in the near 90 years of Academy Award history, no man has won more than two Best Actor awards. One of these men is Tom Hanks. His successes in Philadelphia and Forrest Gump made him the first man since Spencer Tracy in the 1930s to win in consecutive years in 1993 and 1994. Incredibly, nearly twenty years later, perhaps the best actor of his generation has failed to make it a treble. He should have though, in 1997, when his performance in Saving Private Ryan was truly outstanding. In perhaps the ultimate film within the genre of war, Hanks played the role of Captain John Miller with his usual panache showing that, no matter what the role, he has the ability to be believable. If there was to be a challenger that year , it should have Edward Norton in American History X but even he was cast aside in favour of Roberto Benigni (Google him if you think I’ve made him up) who won for his part in Life Is Beautiful. Good film, good role for Benigni – who also directed it – but in no way superior or even equal to Hanks. After losing again in 2000 for Cast Away, Hanks hasn’t been close since but surely he will win that elusive third Oscar in the near future.

And so to my final choice, the one I believe to be the biggest shock over the years. I considered Jamie Foxx in 2004 for somehow defeating the inspirational Don Cheadle to win for his performance in Ray and our friend Kevin Spacey for stealing what should have been Russell Crowe’s in 1999. Did Al Pacino really win for his performance in A Scent of a Woman in 1994? Yes. Did the unbelievably ridiculous Nicholas Cage win in 1996 for Leaving Las Vegas? It hurts me to type this but YES he did! But for me the biggest travesty in this category came in 1991 when Jeremy Irons took the accolades for his role of Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortunes. This easily forgettable film (be honest, you’re checking it on Wikipedia now) did allow Irons to display his ability to play the moody and controversial characters he has been famous for throughout his career but it was hardly a career defining moment. That year Gerard Depardieu but in the performance of his life in Cyrano de Bergerac and Robert De Niro was excellent in Awakenings but everyone nominated should have been no more than spectators in the Costner Show.

His mercurial epic Dances with Wolves rightly won him Best Director but his own performance as Lieutenant John J. Dunbar should have seen him become the first man to win both awards in the same year. The film, similar to his individual performance, has stood the test of time and never fails to hit home each and every time I watch it. Costner, however, has become one of those guys people love to hate. It has often bothered me why this is so? Is it simple jealousy that he is clearly good at his job and, at a relatively young age, showed he good direct equally well? The same happened to Mel Gibson and, more recently, Clooney. But that is maybe a debate for another blog entry!

Get involved! Leave a comment after reading this blog and let us all read your nominations in the category discussed. Also don’t forget to take part in our poll on which film will win Best Picture this year!

Worst Films to win Best Picture Oscar

It's Oscars time again. A time when the great and the good (and bad) of the cinema world come together to celebrate their achievements of the previous twelve months. Even the most disinterested spectator could probably rhyme off the main categories; Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor/Actress etc... Sometimes we agree (The King’s Speech), sometimes we don’t (The English Patient). Sometimes we are pleased for the winner (Sean Penn), sometimes we are amazed they have been given a part in a film at all (Nicholas Cage). But in many ways that is why we watch. We, the cinema going, ticket buying members of the general public love to watch films and then debate endlessly about whether it was any good. 

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve left a film in disbelief at just how awful it was, only to hear people around me proclaiming it as the best film they have ever seen! So, with this in mind, I’ve decided to focus not on the films that have collected the prized gold statuettes but, rather, those that have lost. 

There have been many fantastic films that have failed to win the Oscar since 1927/28, but many of these instances can be explained fairly easily. For example many might be surprised to learn there was no Best Picture Oscar for Jaws in 1975, Taxi Driver the following year or E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in 1982. Three films that, years later, often finish quite high on the familiar polls for best films of all time. But each of these films found itself competing with films of an equal calibre for the title that year. For Jaws there was no shame in losing to One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Rocky delivered the knockout blow to Scorsese’s iconic psychological thriller and E.T. went home with his tail between his legs (did he have a tail? Not sure...) to his own planet after finding Gandhi too iconic a human being to defeat. A brief look through the records and you can find so many more examples of this with 1990 perhaps the worst year to have released a film hoping for an Academy Award when the epic Dances with Wolves had to fight off Ghost, The Godfather Part III, Awakenings  and Goodfellas for the gong!

But for every unlucky loser there is another that leaves you positively scratching your head in disbelief. I’m still struggling to understand how The English Patient was ever described as a Best Picture but its competition that year, fortunately for Anthony Minghella, was weak.  For me then I was able to narrow it down to three. 

I’ll start with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in 2008. A superb film, loosely based on a short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s, which came across as a sort of Forrest Gump tale with a twist. Even those who were a little sceptical of the plot beforehand (I was one) soon found themselves engrossed in the unusual life of Mr. Button (Not Jenson). For such a well thought out, superbly produced and brilliantly acted film to lose to Slumdog Millionaire felt almost criminal. Unfortunately it showed how fickle such awards can be as Bollywood had become the ‘in’ thing during the previous few years. Add to that the idea that the actors in the film were actually poor, neglected slum dwellers (they weren’t by the way...) and you are onto a winner. Alternatively, there may also have been a reluctance to accept that Brad Pitt could star in a film worthy of winning Best Picture as, it seems, he is still struggling to shake off some early career howlers in much the same way as his ‘bestie’ George Clooney did until recently.

A similar travesty occurred the following year – my second most shocking loser in this category. This one, I’m certain, will be viewed as far more controversial but let me give it a go <puts hard hat on>. Many excellent films were released in 2009 including The Blind Side, starring Sandra Bullock (who won Best Actress for her role) and District 9 which, although sci-fi isn’t to everyone’s taste, was a superbly constructed story, magnificently produced and with a largely unknown cast to boot. But 2009 should have been the year of Cameron. His sci-fi fantasy epic Avatar will long be remembered as a ground breaking leap in film making which succeeded in transporting the audience far away into another world. Again I know sci-fi is an acquired taste but the same could be said of all genres and what is unquestionable is that Cameron more than achieved what he set out to create. As many will recall, however, it lost out to The Hurt Locker <checks hard hat is securely fastened>. The story of a bomb disposal team serving in Iraq in 2004 was almost a shoe-in for Best Picture before a single person had watched it. Made in a fiercely patriotic nation in the midst of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and reading daily of the tragic deaths of soldiers on foreign battlefields, this film would clearly prove popular with the masses. Unfortunately the film just isn’t as good as people like to think it is. Even within its own genre it struggles to rival Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Platoon or even Black Hawk Down. Excluding Jeremy Renner the acting is distinctly average and, for me, it succeeds only by virtue of the situation in which it was set and, more importantly, released. In a decade no one will remember this film – very few will have forgotten Avatar. Before I remove my hard hat I may as well throw in one final observation. In over 80 years of Academy Awards no woman had ever won Best Director – until The Hurt Locker. It really, seriously couldn’t lose could it? <grabs hard hat and runs for his life...>

My final film is the one I would select as the ultimate shock loser in the Best Picture category. Ten years before Avatar was robbed  American Beauty stole the show at the 72^nd Academy Awards. Seriously. It really did. It was actually nominated for a staggering eight awards and somehow won five! I sense disbelief here but if you don’t believe me look it up! If you are feeling really brave you could even watch the film and try to figure out how on earth it ever won anything because, I’m sorry to say people, it is rubbish. Not average...rubbish. I hear you shouting “How can a rubbish film win five Oscars?” I’ll tell you how – advertising. DreamWorks realised that it had made a film that would fall short again but, only twelve months on from the shock of Saving Private Ryan losing out to Shakespeare in Love, it decided to act. It pumped a small fortune into promoting the film long after its initial release which, at that point, had been completely dismissed by most critics as nothing more than another run-of-the-mill fare. But the power of the American dollar came shining through and, by February 2000, American Beauty was suddenly being heralded as a great film highlighting everyday American society. If that’s the case I’ll stay where I am.

What should have won? The Green Mile by..er..a country..mile. I’m not normally a big fan of Stephen King books but, regardless of the origin of the story, the film was brilliantly made and, as usual with Tom Hanks, full of great performances. Even Mr. Jingles was more worthy of an Oscar than Kevin Spacey. In fact basically every other film nominated that year was far superior in every facet of film making than American Beauty. The Cider House Rules, The Insider, The Sixth Sense were all more worthy winners than Sam Mendes’ mundane tale of a middle aged man bored with his life and fancying his teenage daughter's best friend. Who actually cares? I don’t. There were better films not even nominated that year such as Any Given Sunday, Magnolia or The Talented Mr. Ripley. An awful decision by the Academy but at least it gave Kevin Spacey another few minutes in the limelight before making those silly airline adverts.

Get involved! Leave a comment after reading this blog and let us all read your nominations in the category discussed. Also don’t forget to take part in our poll on which film will win Best Picture this year!

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