Who wants an Oscar?

10 April 2012

Early November and Hollywood is abuzz with next year's Oscar race. Every newspaper ad and TV trailer boasts about a film's chance of nomination. Every week now, there is the release of a so-called "prestige" movie, carefully timed to capitalise on the frenzy of the season.

With the Oscar ceremony set for 27 February and the nominations announced on 25 January, time is running out for screenings to 6,000 voting members of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voters.

According to Oscar rules, to qualify, a film has to play for one week in a cinema in Los Angeles county before the end of the year, but distributors aren't taking chances and are opening most of their big guns now. In the next month, big end-of-year titles such as Alexander, Finding Neverland, Closer and A Very Long Engagement hit US theatres, sometimes just in a handful of cinemas, sometimes in thousands across the country.

The pre-Awards business is big business for Hollywood. Win key nominations and your film can generate millions of dollars in extra box-office and video revenues, added value for your library and that all-important stamp of quality that brings lustre to the company. Take last year: although The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King swept the board, the lowbudget-independent Monster snagged a best actress Oscar for Charlize Theron and grossed more than $30 million in the US - a spectacular figure for such a small, dark film. Not to mention another $20 million or so outside North America. Without the Oscar, the film might never have got out of the starting gates.

The complexion of the Oscar race is ever-changing. Last year, Return of the King led the field from the start and was a slamdunk victor on the night. This year, no clear frontrunner has emerged, although the category attracting the fiercest competition is best actor.

Leading the pack is Jamie Foxx, whose extraordinary performance as Ray Charles in the biopic Ray is garnering great reviews. Looking strikingly similar to Charles, Foxx embodies the singer in all his characteristics - musical genius, blind man, womaniser and heroin addict.

The Academy favours showcase performances such as Foxx's from actors playing real people, especially if they alter their appearance - remember Nicole's prosthetic nose as Virginia Woolf in The Hours, Geoffrey Rush's facial tics as David Helfgott in Shine or an unglamorous, overweight Theron as Aileen Wuornos in Monster.

As well as Foxx, this year should see nominations for Javier Bardem as the quadriplegic Ramon Sampedro in the Spanish-language The Sea Inside. Acting only with his face, since his character's body is paralysed, Bardem won the best actor prize at the Venice Film Festival for playing a man who lobbied the Spanish government for his right to die.

Then there's the ever-popular, effortlessly versatile Johnny Depp sporting a flawless Scottish accent as JM Barrie in the period weepie Finding Neverland. Depp was nominated last year for Pirates of the Caribbean and it is generally thought to be "his turn" now, as it was Sean Penn's last year.

Other "real people" performances creating Oscar talk are Liam Neeson as bisexual sex scientist Alfred Kinsey in Kinsey, Gael Garcia Bernal as the young Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries, Colin Farrell as the blond Macedonian emperor in Alexander, and Leonardo DiCaprio as the enigmatic millionaire Howard Hughes in The Aviator. And let's not forget Jim Caviezel, who has an outside shot at a prize for playing Jesus in The Passion of the Christ. It's certainly one of the most physical performances of the year.

Comic actors fare less well, though their work is often more challenging. Bill Murray is trying again after failing at the final hurdle with Lost in Translation last year. He plays Steve Zissou, a zany Jacques Cousteauesque oceanographer searching the high seas for a mythical "jaguar shark", in Wes Anderson's eagerly awaited The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. And the perennial non-nominee Jim Carrey is giving it another shot with his "serious" performance in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is being repitched to Academy members to refresh their memories since it was in cinemas earlier in the year.

There are also two "drunk" performances which stand a good chance, following in the tradition of alcoholic-role winners from Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend, Elizabeth Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? and Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas. Paul Giamatti, passed over for nomination last year as his wonderful cartoonist Harvey Pekar in American Splendour, can surely not be overlooked again, this time playing a failed writer and Merlotobsessive in the delicious comedy Sideways.

And John Travolta - twice nominated, for Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction - gets down and dirty this year, as a white-haired liquorswigging ex-professor squatting in a New Orleans house in A Love Song for Bobby Long. It's a classy, attention-grabbing star turn and, as with Depp, it may be Travolta's time for recognition.

With so many contenders, publicists, marketing specialists and distributors are aggressively pitching their actors all over town. Public appearances are de rigeur at question-and-answer sessions after screenings, at specially thrown shindigs, at premieres, and on every chat show on TV. Visibility is key to keep the performer in the voters' minds. As in a political campaign, all tricks are employed, clean or dirty, from handwritten notes sent to voters to electioneering phone calls to badmouthing the validity of the competition.

British stalwart Imelda Staunton was in the US pounding pavements for Vera Drake this month, although she and her director Mike Leigh took no prisoners at public appearances where their terse and pithy responses in public Q&As were hardly the stuff of traditional pre-Oscar gushing. Staunton's harrowing performance as the goodhearted abortionist has already won her the best actress prize at the Venice Film Festival - and she will surely give other best actress hopefuls a run for their money.

Actress possibles are, though, a little thin on the ground this year, which may prove a boon for unlikely genres such as action (Uma Thurman as an ass-kicking assassin in Kill Bill Volume 2) and foreignlanguage movies (Catalina Sandino Moreno as a Colombian drug mule in Maria Full of Grace). Besides

Staunton's, more traditional "Oscar"-type performances include Annette Bening's, who took on an English accent to play a theatre diva in Being Julia. She is the only memorable thing in Istvan Szabo's lacklustre adaptation of W Somerset Maugham's novella.

Another sterling Brit is Kate Winslet, who has already nabbed three Oscar nominations at the tender age of 29. Winslet is up for both best actress for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and best supporting actress for Finding Neverland and could easily land her fourth and fifth nods this year.

And Frenchwoman Audrey Tautou, who charmed Americans as Amelie, is also generating good word-of-mouth for playing a lame girl searching for her missing fiancé at the end of the First World War in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's French epic A Very Long Engagement, which is getting a vigorous awards push in LA and New York.

Whatever the outcome, the winners of those little gold-plated men are made for life. They are actors who will for ever be known as "Academy Award-winning", which isn't just good for their egos, but ramps up their pay cheques and takes them to a new elite level of celebrity. For that reason, these actors will fight for a chance to sob on the Oscar stage. If you thought winning an Olympic gold medal was tough, welcome to Hollywood.

Mike Goodridge is US editor of Screen International.

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