Tarnishing the Oscars

10 April 2012

It is all over, bar the endless prize-giving, the weepy paeans of thanks ("You love me" - "Best Actress" Sally Field) and the winners' chest-thumping triumphalism ("King of the world!" - "Best Director" James Cameron). The last of the votes from the 6,000-odd electorate entitled to vote Oscars to themselves were delivered at 5pm on Tuesday.

This Sunday, in a new, 3,300-seat, purpose-built pantheon erected, appropriately for this gorge-rising celebration of consumerism, above a shopping mall, the man from Price-WaterhouseCoopers, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Ampas) accountants, will hand over the envelopes, one by one, to the star presenters.

"And the winner is ..." will be repeated 40-odd times in the $17 million showbiz-fest of self-love that today passes for professional esteem. In their 74th edition, the Hollywood Oscars are not what they used to be - a once small, almost domestic ceremony among stars who went home to bed early, where the only money changing hands was between celebrities and their car valets. They have become a repugnant affront to dignity, talent - even honesty.

Not that they are rigged. Though accountancy ain't what it used to be, post-Enron, Price-WaterhouseCoopers' bean-counter is probably the night's one incorruptible character. Everyone and everything else is to be distrusted. Especially the system that determines who gets what goodies. Did you ever know an election on this scale that refused to tell us what the turnout is? Even Mugabe does that. But Ampas also refuses to divulge how many votes separate a winner from the losers. Such figures might deflate egos (and fees). The Best Film award is the only one that all the electors nominate.

Separate talent guilds, rife with power politics, nominate the other categories. The bulk of the membership, it's believed, no longer deigns to see the eligible movies in cinemas. Those who earn their lush living on the big screen now judge their peers at home on the small one, thanks to the hundreds of videos/DVDs sent to them by contenders whose companies lay out an estimated $50 million in "discreetly" fishing for votes that will add hundreds of millions more to box-office grosses. The voters even include publicists, whose only contribution to the glory of the industry is one of hype. Easy to conjecture whom they may vote for: their clients or those they hope will be clients.

There's no check that Ampas members see even a single film. A Hollywood star - one of the few I know personally - once asked me to mark her card. "I haven't time to look at the videos. And the servants don't understand English." In one category only - the Best Foreign Film, where voters have to sign in for the screenings - is there any check. Most contenders in this category can't afford to courier videos to voters across the world, and I'd guess the cinema turnout is small: but Ampas is keeping schtum.

The truth is, the Oscars are now in radical need of total retooling. To put it bluntly, even inelegantly, they have become a pissing contest between a few ultra-powerful, ultra-rich film conglomerates which want to get richer and more powerful still by winning the most. Dream-works SKG, Miramax-Disney, AOL-Warner are the axis of arrogance cropping up year after year, all busting their budgets to gain an edge on one another. (The trade weekly Variety alludes to one Oscar contender this year as allegedly blowing nearly $10 million on promoting its chances.)

ALL this should be ended, out of self-interest, if not financial sanity, before it turns the stomachs of the world's media and they begin to hate the event as rabidly as their own news-hungry appetites currently consume it. The Oscars should be reduced to Ground Zero, then rebuilt on fairer lines. For a start, bring in people who do see the movies, all the movies, and whose vanities (admittedly present) are not such as light a bonfire by which to make their reputations rise, soufflé-like, over the three-to-four hour TV marathon once called simply the Oscarcast , but, in keeping with the night s overweening kudos, now dubbed the Kudocast .

Call in film critics the world over through their national websites. Let them nominate and vote, stage their own Virtual Oscars ceremony, to be telecast on the eve of Ampas s big night. We might sometimes agree with the Oscar awards. But so what? Six thousand-plus Ampas voters can't be wrong in every category.

Based on the same films Ampas members saw - or didn't - how would I cast my votes this year?

For Best Film, my choice would be The Pledge, Sean Penn's sobering drama of a man's obsession with the detection of a killer and how, instead, it leads to his own mental disintegration. Its pessimism, plus an ambiguous ending, was probably "too European" for Oscar voters who traditionally favour upbeat certainties. The film didn't get a single nomination.

The hot money is currently on Russell Crowe for Best Actor. I'd prefer a win for Tom Wilkinson, in Todd Field's In The Bedroom. Yes, he's an Ampas nominee, too, but to my mind far superior to Crowe. His seamless performance as a loving father inflicting his own wild justice on his son's murderer compresses into human dimensions the rage of post-9/11 Middle America.

For Best Actress a split prize. (Well, why not?) I'd vote for Renée Zellweger (also an Ampas nominee), impeccably anglicised as the office temp plagued by all the worries of too much flesh and too little love in Bridget Jones's Diary; and also Tilda Swinton, impeccably Americanised as the mother standing by her son in the thriller The Deep End.

For Best Foreign Film, no contest: Michael Haneke's erotic pyscho-drama, The Piano Teacher. A movie that was cold to the touch but involved the senses to an inflammatory degree.

OSCAR voters sometimes don't vote the Best Director award to the director of the Best Film and vice versa. Thus, this year, In The Bedroom's Todd Field doesn't get a Best Director nod and Mulholland Drive's David Lynch doesn't get a Best Film nod. I'd solve this illogicality quite simply. Let the director accept the prize for the Best Film: at present, this is the privilege unfairly accorded to the producer.

For Best Supporting Actor and Actress, my choices are Tony Shalhoub, the city-slick lawyer in The Man Who Wasn't There, and Kelly Macdonald, the much-put-upon lady's maid in Gosford Park.

I wouldn't ask any star-presenter of my Virtual Oscars to open the envelope and declaim pompously: "And the winner is ..." All that I'd ask of my own independent academy of film critics would be to combat the pronouncements of the preening Academy celebrities, all hellbent on a night's orgy of self-congratulation, and say simply and humbly: "And the winner should be ..." That would be honour enough.

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