Will the Brits get the gongs?

Regal progess: Helen Mirren is primed to win best actress for her performance as the Queen

10 April 2012

The Brits are coming - again," we crowed last week, as we counted up the 10 Golden Globe nominations for British talent. What an omen for Oscars. Yet, though it's a rare year in which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences - and its 6,000 or so members - does not shower Brits with nominations, the year when they actually hand them to us is rarer still. So, the signs might be good for Oscar nominations on 23 January, but how will we do on 25 February, when they give out the gongs? Are the Brits really coming, after all?

It's not as if we haven't faced disappointment before. Remember 1996, when admittedly talented though resolutely arthouse American actress Frances McDormand snatched the best actress Oscar for Fargo from three extraordinary British nominees: Emily Watson, Brenda Blethyn and Kristin Scott Thomas. Or 1997, when Helen Hunt beat four of Britain's finest - Helena Bonham Carter (Wings of a Dove), Judi Dench (Mrs Brown), Julie Christie (Afterglow) and Kate Winslet (Titanic) - for her turn in As Good As It Gets.

It's OK, it seems, for an American to take home the Oscar for playing British - (Gwyneth Paltrow, for Shakespeare in Love, 1998), or even an Australian like Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002). But in the past 15 years, only seven English actors have won, and only one (Emma Thompson, in 1992, for Howards End) in a leading role category.

The roll call of nominations, on the other hand, is long. Stalwart character actors (Tom Wilkinson, Imelda Staunton and Janet McTeer), have sat nervously through the ceremony, along with legends (Maggie Smith and Albert Finney), and all the hottest, young things (Jude Law, Clive Owen and Keira Knightley). This year, the parade of British possibilities is especially impressive. But what are the chances of the Academy snubbing its US compatriots to vote for the Brits?

BEST ACTOR

For once, the best actress category looks more competitive than best actor. Two black actors, Forest Whitaker and Will Smith, are duking it out for their performances in The Last King of Scotland and The Pursuit of Happyness respectively, along with Leonardo DiCaprio who did well this year in The Departed and Blood Diamond and won Golden Globe nominations for both performances.

At the Oscars, however, he can only be nominated for one according to Academy rules. Whitaker is the favourite. Although he has far less screen time than Scottish actor James McAvoy, he is being pushed as lead actor for playing Idi Amin and McAvoy for best supporting actor. Such is the Hollywood game.

The real best actor of 2006, though, is a great Briton. Peter O'Toole plays a dying actor called Maurice who has a late spurt of joie de vivre in Roger Michell's Venus when he meets and falls for a teenage girl. Investing his character with salty humour and heartbreaking pathos, O'Toole gives his best performance in decades in this bleak film, written by Hanif Kureishi, but it is unlikely that too many Academy members will give him their vote. Venus is the kind of small, difficult independent film that many older Academy members will be unlikely to see.

And O'Toole's Maurice is a veritable dirty old man, hardly the inspirational role they like to reward. It would be a late life triumph of sorts for O'Toole if he were to win the Oscar - he's been nominated seven times, dating back to Lawrence of Arabia in 1962 and was finally given an honorary Oscar in 2003 as a compensation for never having won.

Another Brit who is certainly worthy of a nomination but is unlikely to get one is Toby Jones, a perfect Truman Capote in Infamous opposite Sandra Bullock and Daniel Craig. But the film, which was uncannily similar to last year's Capote, has been a flop in the US and Jones didn't even win a Golden Globe nomination, even though many critics think he did a better job than Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Not out of the question for a best actor nomination is Sacha Baron Cohen for Borat. Once in a while, the Academy will recognise a great comic performance and Baron Cohen has won the hearts of US critics. He recently shared the best actor prize with Forest Whitaker as voted on by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and is the frontrunner to win the Golden Globe for best actor in a musical or comedy. Stranger things have happened.

WHO SHOULD WIN: PETER O'TOOLE, VENUS

WHO WILL WIN: FOREST WHITAKER, THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND

BEST SCREENPLAY

Two British writers look set for Oscar nominations this year in different screenplay categories. Peter Morgan (who also wrote Frost/Nixon) is guaranteed a nomination and is favourite to win the Oscar for his original screenplay for The Queen, and Patrick Marber is likely to be nominated in the adapted screenplay for his pithy script of Zoe Heller's Booker-shortlisted novel, Notes on a Scandal.

Chief competition to Morgan is Guillermo Arriaga from Mexico, for his ambitious triptych Babel and Michael Arndt for Little Miss Sunshine. Meanwhile Marber is facing off against William Monahan for his adaptation of Hong Kong cop thriller Infernal Affairs into The Departed and Bill Condon for his film script of the stage musical Dreamgirls.

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

WHO SHOULD WIN: PETER MORGAN, THE QUEEN

WHO WILL WIN: PETER MORGAN, THE QUEEN

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

WHO SHOULD WIN: WILLIAM MONAHAN, THE DEPARTED

WHO WILL WIN: WILLIAM MONAHAN, THE DEPARTED

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Although Michael Sheen won the supporting actor prize from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association recently for his Tony Blair in The Queen, the American competition in this category is so stiff that he will probably be squeezed out in the final frame.

And that competition includes some big names the Academy is bound to favour. Brad Pitt won a nomination before in 1995 for 12 Monkeys, but he hasn't given anything like an awards-worthy performance since, until this year's Babel. He should comfortably make it to the final five.

Then there's Ben Affleck, as the Fifties actor George Reeves, whose ambitions for stardom are defeated when he becomes known as TV's Superman in Hollywoodland. Affleck was the surprise winner of the best actor prize at the Venice Film Festival and he is due a comeback after Gigli and the fiasco of his relationship with Jennifer Lopez.

The favourite to win is another Dreamgirls star, Eddie Murphy, playing a philandering Sixties soul star whose career is on the downward spiral. Murphy sings and dances up a storm, as well as handling some emotional scenes of drug abuse and confrontation with his manager and his girlfriend. Besides, Murphy's films have made billions of dollars for Hollywood and he has never won a single nomination. It's his time. Other candidates are Adam Beach in Flags of Our Fathers and Tobey Maguire in The Good German.

WHO SHOULD WIN: MICHAEL SHEEN, THE QUEEN

WHO WILL WIN: EDDIE MURPHY, DREAMGIRLS

BEST ACTRESS

It will be hard for the Academy to deny Helen Mirren her due for The Queen. It would take some shocking faux pas on the Dame's part between now and 23 January - an anti-Semitic rant, maybe, or a physical attack on a TV producer. She has two Oscar nominations to her name (Gosford Park and The Madness of King George), is now 60 and long overdue her Academy Award.

Besides the fact that her performance has won every critics' award going and a Golden Globe nomination, she is an LA resident married to American director Taylor Hackford and much admired on a local level. Hand that woman an Oscar.

Mirren's biggest competition comes from another dame - and a good friend of hers - the evergreen Judi Dench, playing a scheming schoolteacher with lesbian overtones in Notes on a Scandal. Dench is likely to score her sixth Oscar nomination in 10 years for the role although in the year of Mirren, she will walk away empty-handed. The venerable Dench won a supporting actress Oscar in 1998 for just a few minutes of screen time as Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare In Love, but she has never won for a leading role.

Another oft-nominated English actress, Kate Winslet, should also make the final five for her part as an unhappy suburban housewife in Little Children. Winslet, who is only 31, has four nominations under her belt and many thought she should have won for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in 2004. This year, she will no doubt lose again, but most in Hollywood assume that she will be a winner in the future.

The other main contenders are Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada and Penelope Cruz in Volver. Outsiders include two foreigners doing English - Naomi Watts in The Painted Veil and Renée Zellweger in Miss Potter - and one English actress doing American - Sienna Miller in Factory Girl.

WHO SHOULD WIN: HELEN MIRREN, THE QUEEN

WHO WILL WIN: HELEN MIRREN, THE QUEEN

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Chief British hope in the supporting actress category is Emily Blunt, the 23-year-old star of My Summer of Love, who got her Hollywood break as Meryl Streep's bitter and neurotic assistant in The Devil Wears Prada. Blunt scored a double at the Golden Globe nominations (also supporting actress nod in the TV category for Gideon's Way), a rare achievement signalling her status as a fast-rising star.

While there are other British possibilities - sensational newcomer Jodie Whittaker in Venus, Emma Thompson in Stranger Than Fiction, Frances de la Tour in The History Boys, Helen McCrory, as Cherie Blair, in The Queen - the competition for this category is fierce enough that most of the Brits will be squeezed out.

Favourite to win, and frankly almost as much of a certainty as Helen Mirren, is brassy American newcomer Jennifer Hudson who is getting cheers from US audiences for her largerthanlife turn as Effie White, the overweight singer who is thrown out of the group, in Dreamgirls.

Also hot is Cate Blanchett, playing a middle-class English art teacher engaging in an illicit affair with a 15-year-old pupil in Notes on a Scandal, and Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi for playing the deaf and dumb girl in Babel.

Hudson should take the prize. A runner-up in American Idol, the US equivalent of Pop Idol, she was one of 700 singers who auditioned for the plum role of Effie and she burns up the screen, singeing costars like Jamie Foxx and Beyoncé Knowles in the process.

WHO SHOULD WIN: JENNIFER HUDSON, DREAMGIRLS

WHO WILL WIN: JENNIFER HUDSON, DREAMGIRLS

BEST DIRECTOR

The only serious British contender in this category is Stephen Frears for The Queen and, while he may be nominated, he stands little chance against big Hollywood guns like Martin Scorsese, who is favourite to win, finally, for The Departed; Clint Eastwood, for both Flags of Our Fathers and his Japanese-language Letters from Iwo Jima; and Mexican Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu for Babel.

Frears is one of those British directors whose offhand public manner has won him few admirers in the superficial world of public appearances and platitudes that is Hollywood during Oscar season. The Queen is also considered by too many a performance movie. Nevertheless he is widely admired and was nominated for a Golden Globe, so he could easily make the shortlist.

WHO SHOULD WIN: STEPHEN FREARS, THE QUEEN

WHO WILL WIN: MARTIN SCORSESE, THE DEPARTED

BEST PICTURE

The Academy takes its best picture category very seriously, and the real best pictures rarely win. Voters like to select a film which represents Hollywood and the entertainment values it represents. Sometimes that means they will honour a lavish epic like Gladiator, sometimes a meaningful message piece such as Crash, sometimes a tearjerker like Million Dollar Baby.

This year, the political climate in the US could dictate their choice. It's time for Hollywood to make a statement about the world and that means that Babel could steal it. Babel has all the trappings of a best picture movie - it's emotional, epic and political, without being partisan. It features big movie stars - Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett - but also embraces other languages and cultures. With the nation starting to react strongly against Bush's foreign policy, voters might see the choice of Babel (bizarrely pronounced "Babble" in the US) as a statement.

Then again, there are few films as deliriously entertaining as Dreamgirls and voters may opt to celebrate Bill Condon's razzle-dazzle showbiz musical melodrama over Babel, as a reminder to the world of what Hollywood can do that no other film culture can. Then there's The Departed, Martin Scorsese's cop thriller which many think is his best film in years. Or Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima, a poetic statement on the insanity of war. Or the low-budget comedy Little Miss Sunshine, the little film that became one of the year's biggest hits.

The only English film to figure in the race for the Oscar is The Queen and its chances for a slot in the final five are high. Ultimately, however, it is unlikely to win the big trophy. It may be the most precise, brilliantly written, wonderfully acted film of the year, but for Hollywood, that has never mattered.

It has several strikes against it: it's entirely foreign, made on a relatively low budget, deals with a specific English story and consists mainly of conversation and telephone calls. Another queen film is more likely to appeal to the Academy next year, when Cate Blanchett returns as Elizabeth I in the sumptuous $75 million epic The Golden Age. Now that sounds more like best picture material.