Each year there are many paths for Oscar to take to wind up in a jungle of utter lameness and ineptitude. Last year it was his lust for a fountain of youth, personified by the insanely unbalanced duo of Franco & Hathaway, which was the hubris opening him to ridicule, contempt and bad ratings. This year, I predict, the path will be one of Attempted Return To Our Glory Days, always a mistake for high school football players, beauty queens, and, I assure you, for Oscar.
This time, borscht belt favorite Billy Crystal will be hosting once again, because he's safe, and Oscar is old and tired. This year we will be travelling back in time as The Artist and Hugo sweep one category after another in the Academy's fierce campaign to remind us how beautiful and simple things were in the old days. (Because Oscar is old, and he's tired.) Nothing against these movies; I like them both very much. I object only because it is not their beauty or skill which is attracting Oscar, but their cuddly, easy-chair comfort, and their shameless flattery of his realm, the Cinema of Olden Times.
In honour of that campaign, Oscar has tipped the scales in using that old safety device of nominating actors for the party-trick called Best Impersonation of a Famous Person. Meryl Streep, Michelle Williams and Ken Branagh, no slouches, to be sure, all benefit from this slickest, easiest road to winning Oscar's attention. (No, wait, I misspoke: it's the second easiest. The easiest is to be a beautiful woman and make yourself ugly by putting on weight or a fake nose. The masculine equivalent is to de-glamorize yourself playing a severe mental or physical handicap.)
And I'm not even going to talk about the Best Actor nominations. No, wait, you're right, I am. This is who ought to be there: Michael Shannon, Michael Fassbender, Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt but not for Moneyball, a role for which he didn't even have to break a sweat, but for the strange, sublime, controversial Tree of Life. We can let Clooney stick around; I haven't seen the Descendants yet but I'll be surprised if he doesn't nail the role just right.
And, no, the Frenchman must go, I'm sorry. I was charmed, I admit it, along with about half the rest of the world (the other half is probably grinding its teeth in curmudgeonly resentment at such blatant display of froth and emotional manipulation via carefully exact doses of whipping cream and cute dog tricks). Despite his suavity and amiable charm, the Frenchman, I'm sorry, must go. I will confess that I am generally harder on the French, cinematically speaking, than I am on most of the world, it's a prejudice of mine, and in particular on French actors. To be a French actor and win me, you almost have to be Vincent Cassel, a man who's probably appalling to spend time with in real life, but he works harder than anyone else in service to each role he plays, and who can resist that? Also, I suspect he has a very clear self-image, which is going to work like gangbusters in A Dangerous Method where he plays Otto Gross, a brilliant and crazy pioneer of psychotherapy who, for one insidious and important evening, held sway over Carl Jung as a sort of evil genius. And, yes, I realize many of you have already seen this film, for which I've been yearning for several months to the point of languishing, chalking little marks up on my cell-wall to count the days, hoping that this will magically bring it manifest at my local cinema, but I live, alas, in a sort of cultural dark-zone where the folks who book the movies do so by communicating with Satan and following his directions precisely in hopes that the human race will soon be dumbed down to the point that we'll all vote Republican.
But back to Oscar and his guest-list: Michael Shannon is not on it, because he's strange and somehow forbidding, and the little gold man wants no hint of approaching midnight to spoil his nice night of glittering nostalgia. With all his great good work this year, it is an absolute crime that Fassbender is absent, but how can Oscar countenance such Stygian sexual shenanigans as one finds in both Shame and A Dangerous Method? He is far too timorous a little statuette for that. "Not this year," I can hear him protesting in a feeble voice, punctuated by little coughs. "Perhaps another year, but this year I could not bear it." He is old, his gold plating is feeling thin and flaky, and the cold comes through so much more easily than it once did. The only hint of crepuscule he has invited to his little party is in the form of Rooney Mara, and she is included on the strict understanding that she is, in truth, a very nice girl, with no piercings whatsoever, and only convincing as an iconoclast outlaw because she is so very talented. In future, he trusts, as she ages, she will use this talent in nice ways, possibly giving spot-on imitations of Katharine Hepburn or Leslie Caron.
I would love it if Oldman won. You've got to love Oldman, the audacious and thankless choices he's made all these years in his continuing and perspicacious quest to make good art. His Smiley is bold, subtle, perfectly thought-out, absolutely controlled. It is a glamourless role, and so requires both courage and quashing of personal vanity. On the other hand, it is a glamourless role, so Oscar will not countenance accompanying him home.
Let's be frank: Oscar's going home with the Frenchman. That guy's going to get up there, do a little soft-shoe, he'll bring the dog out, it'll do that little playing-dead trick and everyone, including me, will go awwwwwww! He'll smile his Douglas Fairbanks smile, his eyes warm as comfortable toast, and we'll all think it's so adorable that he can't really speak any English, can you imagine such a thing in this day and age? Quaint!
And I'll bet you Streep's taking the other one home, because, genius as she is, she's proven herself safe across these many years by both winning and losing with grace and fortitude and never missing a ceremony, always bowing humbly to the gold man's choice whenever he averts his face. As for Best Supporting, I'm guessing Branagh's taking one home for his aping of Oscar-fave Olivier and Viola Davis, an excellent actress who maybe should have won for her powerhouse ten minutes in Doubt, will make everything politically correct by taking the other. I'm not saying she doesn't deserve it; maybe she does, I haven't seen it. Point is, she'll get it whether she deserves it or not because Oscar is playing it nice and easy this year. No waves, no rocking boat. Everyone's happy; no feathers ruffled. We can all go home and have a nice cup of tea. Oscar can wrap up in a down comforter and doze for another year, his conscience strangely untroubled by his lily-livered, chicken-hearted, yellow-bellied choices.
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POSTSCRIPT: Alright, I finally watched the ceremony (I tape it, so I can fast-forward through the speeches and the jokes and the musical numbers) and I apologize to Viola Davis for not realizing she was up for Best Actress. As such, she had no chance of winning against La Streep in her powerhouse year, not so long as there was another black woman up for a Best Supporting Role who could allow Oscar to mark the Political Correctness box on his feeble mental checklist and put it out of his mind. Also, I like to think if I'd realized that Christopher Plummer was up for the Best Supporting Actor I'd have known that he'd wrest the Sentimental Long-time Achievement Award for Hard-Working Theatre-Trained British Actor easily away from Branagh's fist, but hindsight is convenient, and next year I'll pay closer attention. Or, alternatively, maybe none at all.
On the upside, the ceremony was nice and short, wasn't it? At least, it is when you fast-forward through the speeches and jokes, a practice which I heartily recommend. And I love that they don't have songs now! Ye gods, how I always hated the songs. Remember when you had to listen to the Celine Dion music from the Titanic in between those episodes of continued indignity involving James Cameron winning all the awards? That was a bad year. For all its inocuousness, the best I can say about this one is that it was better.
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