Is this the year Brits sweep the Oscars?

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10 April 2012

Hollywood is trying to restore some lustre to the 2009 Oscars after a dismal awards season last year. Then, the writers' strike led to the cancellation of the Golden Globes and the lowest TV ratings for the Oscars in recent history but this year should see the glamour return, with red carpets filled by the likes of Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Leonardo DiCaprio.

What's more, the race between the films is likely to be one of the most competitive in years, with huge Hollywood epics vying with tiny non-American independents — and for British talent the prospects for the main prizes have rarely looked brighter.

The best actor award is certain to fall to an American yet, when the shortlist is announced on 22 January, Kate Winslet could have two chances, while newcomer Sally Hawkins and Kristin Scott Thomas are both due recognition. In the picture stakes, Danny Boyle's heart-warming Slumdog Millionaire is a serious contender, while Sam Mendes, Stephen Daldry and Christopher Nolan are also worth watching for the director's award.

For the next two months — from Sunday's Golden Globes ceremony in Beverly Hills until the Oscars ceremony — the studios and stars will be going all out to impress the Academy voters. The leaders of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) are still campaigning to strike in time to disrupt the Oscars ceremony, although the idea of industrial action in such a bleak climate has split union opinion. Studios have been firing staff by their hundreds, prompting outrage at some of the more profligate spending in the pursuit of Oscar glory — Paramount is spending many millions to ensure nominations for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

While studio bosses will keep an eye on the bottom line, film-goers can look forward to hot competition, lashings of old-fashioned star quality and a potential Oscar rush for Britain. The supporting actor category seems like a race already run, with the late Heath Ledger taking every critics' award going for The Dark Knight and sure to add an Oscar. But will the best men and women walk away with the big prizes?

BEST ACTOR
Three names are likely to dominate the field: Sean Penn, Mickey Rourke and Frank Langella. Penn, who won the Oscar in 2003 for Mystic River, gives perhaps his finest performance in Milk (not released in the UK until 23 January), as legendary San Francisco politician Harvey Milk who fought for gay rights until his assassination in 1978. Warm and charming in a way that he rarely is on screen, America's leading method actor captures the humour and endearing personality of Milk, while making his passionate campaign for civil rights utterly compelling.

In any other year, he would have it in the bag. But then how could anyone have predicted Mickey Rourke's astonishing comeback performance in The Wrestler (UK opening, 16 January)? As Randy "The Ram" Robinson, a washed-up fighter struggling with life after a heart attack, Rourke bares it all from his crazily muscled, steroided body to his craggy, misshapen face to a sadness in his soul which is sometimes majestically moving. Hardly Hollywood's most well-behaved actor, Rourke has an Oscar nomination in the bag.

Then there's the veteran Frank Langella, recreating his Tony-winning performance as Richard Nixon in the film of Peter Morgan's stage play Frost/Nixon (UK release, 23 January). Langella is simply towering as the disgraced ex-president, on the one hand charming, on the other menacing as he dances around the houses with ingénu broadcaster David Frost over responsibility for Watergate. Langella has some leads on Rourke and Penn — he's 70, has never won an Oscar (nor a nomination) and he's due some love from Hollywood.

And talking of overdue, Clint Eastwood has never won an acting Oscar. The 78-year-old, who admittedly has a bagful of the golden statues for his producing and directing work, delivers his best onscreen performance as a bigoted old man learning some life lessons from
his Asian neighbours in Gran Torino
(20 February). He has hinted that this is his final performance, and could be a sentimental favourite.

In the race between those four, other contenders might just have to take a back seat. Brad Pitt is finally getting some awards recognition for playing a man who ages backwards in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (6 February) but this won't be his year and Leonardo DiCaprio gives his best performance to date as the cowardly husband in Revolutionary Road, but he has plenty of good work in his future and voters might give him a miss this year.

Others in the race include Richard Jenkins as the retiring professor in The Visitor, which British cinemagoers won't see until the summer, Benicio Del Toro for Che Guevara in Che and Josh Brolin who breathed life and not a little compassion into George Bush in W.
Who should win: Sean Penn, Milk.
Who will win: Sean Penn, Milk.

BEST ACTRESS
In this category young ingénues battle Hollywood titan Meryl Streep, who will surely be in the Oscar running for her stern Brooklyn nun at the heart of a possible school scandal in the film of stage sensation Doubt (6 February). Though the most nominated, with 14 previous nods, chances are she'll win this time. It would be her first Oscar for 26 years, since she has been successful only twice before, for Kramer vs Kramer in 1979 and Sophie's Choice in 1982.

Powerful if a little mannered, Streep's performance is the kind that is beloved by Oscar voters. The queen of the screen wears no make-up, her hard, angular face framed tightly by her stiff headgear. She sniffs and snoops around the school, throwing punishment around to pupils and teachers alike and engages in a battle with Father Philip Seymour Hoffman that you know she is going to win from the outset. Having steered Mamma Mia! to grosses of more than $500 million, Streep is on top of the business and it is time to reward her with another Oscar.

If Kate Winslet didn't have two eligible films this year, Streep might have had a fully fledged fight on her hands for the best actress prize.

Winslet is in the best actress race for Revolutionary Road and in the supporting actress category (although it's arguably a leading role) for The Reader. Hollywood also realises that Winslet is overdue an Oscar.

The precocious 33-year-old has five nominations under her belt already and she gives another knockout performance as the trapped housewife in Revolutionary Road (30 January). The Academy voters, however, might favour her for playing a former SS guard in The Reader. Creating one of the year's most complex characters in Hanna Schmitz, Winslet is more precise and uncompromising here.

Coming up close behind Streep and Winslet are Oscar newcomers Anne Hathaway and Sally Hawkins. Hathaway, Streep's young co-star in The Devil Wears Prada, came into her own this year as a recovering drug addict visiting her family home for a wedding weekend from hell in Rachel Getting Married (23 January), while British actress Hawkins got the Mike Leigh treatment in Happy-Go-Lucky and should snag an Oscar nomination like Brenda Blethyn and Marianne-Jean Baptiste (Secrets and Lies) and Imelda Staunton (Vera Drake) before her. She already has a Golden Globe nod and was named best actress of the year by the New York and Los Angeles critics groups.

Other actresses who should be in contention include Angelina Jolie, as a desperate mother searching for her lost son in Changeling; Kristin Scott Thomas, uncompromising as a woman out of prison after a long stretch for killing her son in I've Loved You So Long; and Melissa Leo for her bruising performance as a trailer-park mom who gets involved in smuggling illegals into the US in Frozen River.
Who should win: Sally Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky.
Who will win: Meryl Streep, Doubt.

BEST DIRECTOR
England's own Danny Boyle has to be the lead contender for the director Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire. His Indian opus has won so many fans in Hollywood that he has taken a dramatic early lead as favourite. An almost perfect match for the film-maker's visceral style, seen before in films such as Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, it is also his most emotionally satisfying and visually exciting film to date — one bearing the signature of a visionary director.

Boyle's biggest competition will come from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button director David Fincher. His near three-hour epic expanded from an exceedingly short story by F Scott
Fitzgerald has received mixed reviews, but it has been a big box office success in the US, principally with a female audience attracted as much to star Brad Pitt as to the romance of the story, which was hardly the director's priority with his earlier films, Seven, Fight Club and Zodiac. It's a directing tour-de-force and indication that Fincher is one of the very best around.

Several Brits could enter the fray against Boyle and Fincher. Christopher Nolan delivered one of the year's most audacious directorial visions in Batman blockbuster The Dark Knight. And two more Brits — Sam Mendes with Revolutionary Road and Stephen Daldry with The Reader — have already tucked Golden Globe nominations under their belts, making them Oscar nomination favourites too.

Also in the running are Ron Howard for Frost/Nixon, Gus Van Sant for Milk, Clint Eastwood for either Changeling or Gran Torino, and — for sheer chutzpah — Baz Luhrmann for Australia.
Who should win: Danny Boyle.
Who will win: Danny Boyle.

BEST FILM
In a year of economic insecurity, Hollywood might look to its own in 2009 and favour the big budget Benjamin Button, backed by both Paramount and Warner Bros, over Slumdog Millionaire, which was made for a fraction of its budget and independently financed by UK and Indian sources.

Button bears some comparison with 1994 best picture Forrest Gump: it was written by the same writer, Eric Roth, follows the same pattern of skipping through 20th-century historical events and blends drama with stunning special effects. Plus it is drenched in the whimsy and sentimentality of Gump, qualities always beloved of Hollywood.

Perhaps the year's best film, Wall-E, will be sidelined to the animated feature category, although Disney is pushing hard to have the film recognised for the biggest award, too. Its chances are not great, however, since its own 1991 classic Beauty and the Beast is the only animated film ever nominated for best picture.
Other hot favourites for the shortlist of five include Frost/Nixon, Milk, Revolutionary Road and The Reader.
Who should win: Slumdog Millionaire.
Who will win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Mike Goodridge is US editor of Screen International

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