Oscars

Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, predicted to win big at this year’s Oscars, is not a terrible film. It’s a slight, sentimental Grapes of Wrath-ish journey through the Discourse, with essential Discourse stop-offs at an Amazon warehouse and the rust belt. It belongs in the New Yorker, not on screen. As with almost every film to win big since No Country for Old Men 13 years ago, you just think: the ‘highest honours in filmmaking’? For that? Amid all the change that’s being trumpeted at this year’s Oscars — more women directors, more ethnic minorities — the one thing missing is any discussion about why the awards are such a lousy guide to great cinema.

‘Art is dead,’ declared Mark Steyn recently. He was referring to the new rules — copied from the Baftas — whereby to qualify for the Oscars your movie must have the correct quota of gay/ethnic minority/transgender/etc people. This, he argued, will lead to the kind of leaden, politicised, phoney art we associate with communist regimes in the Soviet era and which, not so long ago, we used to find eminently mockable. If British and American producers want to lose money on TV shows and movies that no one wants to watch, then good luck to them. All that matters is that there’ll be enough brave dissenters out there to say: ‘Sod the awards.

The selection of a film for family viewing is a precise and delicate art, particularly with us all now confined to quarters in intergenerational lockdown. Should the film-picker misjudge the terrain on ‘scenes of a sexual nature’, the entire family will be condemned to sit, agonised, through the dreaded onset of rhythmic heavy breathing and beyond, until finally someone cracks and mumbles ‘this is a bit racy’ while reaching for the fast-forward button. On the other hand, some of the full-throttle kids’ films seem designed to test adult sanity to its limit.

First, Britney Spears was caught trying to pass off a 'Food Network' meal as her own cooking, then James Corden was caught on camera not driving the car on 'Carpool Karaoke', and now I find out ghostwriters are behind the acceptance speeches we just saw this awards season? Say it ain't so! After watching Brad Pitt’s acceptance speech at the Academy Awards last week, I commented to my wife how funny he was all awards season long and she showed me a Vulture article that suggests that Pitt doesn't write his speeches himself. The piece claims his 'representatives contacted at least one outside speechwriting agency to consult about engaging their services'.

The film world is atoning for its crimes against diversity. On screen, strong women are supplanting Disney princesses. Superheroes, once uniformly white and male, are turning multicultural. Gay intrigue is edging out heterosexual romance. Away from the camera, bankable stars force studios to employ minority personnel by adding 'inclusion riders' to their contracts. Film-makers must repent ancient mis-speaks, beg forgiveness and denounce peers accused of transgressions. Abuse allegations against Woody Allen may be unproven, but actors who have taken his shilling disown him and donate their tarnished earnings to #TimesUp. Unsurprisingly, the current awards season reflects these rectifications. Of the eight nominations for best picture Oscar, six boast diversity credentials.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a true story based on the 2008 memoir of Lee Israel, the writer who turned her hand to forging literary letters and who became, as she puts it, ‘a better Dorothy Parker than Dorothy Parker’. So it’s that story, but it also isn’t. That story is here but the real story, I would say, is about loneliness and alcoholism and two outsiders who, in a Midnight Cowboy sort of way, form a friendship at a desperate time. And it is rivetingly moving on this count, as are the performances from Melissa McCarthy (Oscar-nominated) and Richard E. Grant, also Oscar-nominated. (Great, although it does now look as if his work on Spice World will never be recognised. A pity, but there you are.

Matteo Garrone’s Dogman, which is Italy’s entry for the foreign language Oscar next year, is bleak, unflinching, oppressive, masculine (very), violent (shockingly) and basically everything you’d expect me to hate. Except I didn’t. It is out of the ordinary. It has a magical central performance. It is tense, as you wait for the little man to face down the big man, if he does. Plus there are lots of lovely dogs, which always helps, and none are harmed. Aside, that is, from the yapping chihuahua thrown into a freezer to shut it up. So there is that, too.

There is a culty YouTube video shot three years ago on the laptop camera of Ruben Ostlund. It shows the film director listening live as the nominations for the Academy Awards are announced from Los Angeles. The tension mounts as they approach the foreign film category. Alas, Force Majeure from Sweden isn’t nominated. Ostlund disappears off screen to sob and mewl. This year, there was a sequel to the video, but with a happier ending: the director’s latest film The Square was nominated for an Oscar. These mini-movies, like the rest of Ostlund’s oeuvre, are funny but subtly savage. He is a provocateur who trades in discomfort. You watch with your toes knotted. In Play (2011) a group of black teenagers inflict psychological torment on two white kids and (to complicate things) an Asian.

You would have to be quite odd not to approve of the sudden surge of solidarity amongst Hollywood stars of the female persuasion. (Though I did wonder, when Frances McDormand called so movingly during her Oscar-winner speech ‘Meryl, if you do it everyone else will!’ whether she meant ‘Suck up to Weinstein for years’ or ‘Give Polanski a standing ovation’ - because Streep certainly led the liberal sheep in those fields.) But still - Ancient Mariner on the oceans of objectionability that I am - I do miss the days when ‘actress’ was shorthand not for ‘whore’ but for ‘bitch.’ These days, female actors want to be seen to be building each other up rather than tearing each other down.

Tomorrow night, TV viewers will take to their couches for a night of Hollywood glamour, razzmatazz and gross hypocrisy. A bunch of vain halfwits who make millions waving guns around or taking off their clothes will preach to us about gun control and sexual morality. Yes, it’s the 493rd annual Oscar Awards. I have the envelope in my hand, ladies and gentlemen, and there’s enough coke in it to see us through the after-party after the after-party. And the Oscar goes to… Best Picture: ‘Harvey’s Fall’. Harvey is a piggish producer who hangs out with the Clintons and assaults women in hotel rooms. Suddenly, he vanishes. Ben Affleck plays his son, an alcoholic gambler, who tours the rehab facilities of Arizona looking for clues.

Reading the lip-smacking reports of the latest troubled celebrity relationships  (Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux definitely high and dry, Cheryl Cole and Liam Payne allegedly on the rocks) I couldn’t help musing that stars - and more specifically, the place they occupy in our mass psychological landscape - have very much changed since the first mass-market celebrities emerged. The film stars of the fledgling Hollywood truly were worshipped as higher beings; a tribe of Pathan Indians opened fire on a cinema when they were denied entry to a Greta Garbo film while women committed suicide when Valentino died. Their marriages were regarded as heavenly unions; their romantic sunderings as tragedies.