http://www.desipundit.com/baradwajrangan/2009/02/21/between-reviews-a-one-dog-race/
A ONE-DOG RACE
FEB 22, 2009 - THE MOST TANTALISING ASPECT OF THIS YEAR’S Academy Awards
ceremony is the question mark that hovers over host Hugh Jackman. That he can
command our attention for three-something hours is amply evidenced by
Australia. It wasn’t difficult to see why Nicole Kidman fell for him because we
did too, swept along by the raffish charm and the very real conviction he
brought to a part that, in lesser hands, would have been laughed right off the
screen. But even with those considerable skills of showmanship, can Jackman
enliven an Oscar night that promises to be so dauntingly predictable? Now that
Slumdog Millionaire has been honoured with just about every Best Picture award
instituted in the solar system, will Jackman be able to carry us through these
three-something hours, till the point where the final envelope is opened and
the winner is announced as… Slumdog Millionaire?
If Jackman fails, the only possible hope for a nail-biting show could be Harvey
Weinstein. In 1998 – incidentally, the year another Indian hope was in the
running for an Oscar: Shekhar Kapur, with his Elizabeth – this co-founder of
Miramax and The Weinstein Company caused the auditorium to judder under the
impact of one of the most seismic upsets in movie history, when Shakespeare in
Love trumped preordained favourite Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture.. Will
Weinstein – in the running this year with The Reader, another film with a tony
literary pedigree – be able to work a similar kind of unctuous black magic on
the voters? After all, we’ve seen, over the years, that the Academy is as
vulnerable to ennoblement as uplift, so could the high-minded pieties of The
Reader nudge aside the high spirits of Slumdog Millionaire?
Last year’s show, in contrast, was a ticking-clock Hitchcock thriller, with No
Country for Old Men and There Will Be Bloodup for the big prize. The Coens were
the obvious front-runners, their doughty commitment to the cause of American
independent cinema having resulted in an apparently endless line of memorably
idiosyncratic, iconoclastic films. It was time. But with the shattering
masterpiece that was Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson had crafted what appeared to
be the Great American Movie, and it seemed for a while – even if common sense
informed us otherwise – that it was going to be a fight to the finish. And yet,
with careers founded largely on the fringes of mainstream Hollywood, neither
the Coens nor Anderson were what you’d term sentimental favourites with the
Academy, so there was the glancing notion that the heartwarming, wisecracking
Juno might saunter off with Best Picture.
This year, however, the Slumdog juggernaut looks unstoppable. Among the other
Best Picture nominees, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, where Brad Pitt
buried his sunshiny handsomeness under layers of old-age makeup, is the kind of
film that’s usually compensated with acting awards. (That was indeed the case
with The Hours, also up for Best Picture, where Nicole Kidman buried her
porcelain beauty under layers of middle-age makeup.) Frost/Nixon is a smallish
period film with a political backdrop, and like Good Night, and Good Luck
before it, a place in the final five is clearly reward enough. The most recent
antecedent of the provocatively gay-themed Milk is Brokeback Mountain, but that
was the year the Academy genuflected before the high-minded pieties of Crash –
and that brings us to The Reader, which, at this point, appears the only
picture capable of outshouting “Jai Ho” with a “Heil!”
Since the 1990s, when Schindler’s List and The English Patient were applauded
by the Academy, films set against the hellish horrors of the World Wars haven’t
had a good run at the Best Picture race. In the millennium, worthy efforts like
The Pianist, Letters from Iwo Jima and Atonement have crawled through the
trenches to make it to the final five, but each was thwarted by films that were
equally dark (Chicago, The Departed, No Country for Old Men) and yet brightened
by the opportunities they provided for restitution (long overdue recognitions
for the resurrected musical, Martin Scorsese, and the Coens). Apart from the
wiles of Weinstein, the best shot The Reader may have is that it has on its
head the hands of Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, two beloved producers
the Academy was recently bereaved of, and that it has been directed by
perennial Oscar bridesmaid Stephen Daldry, a three-time nominee for Best
Director.
Besides, The Reader does feature the most serious of themes: the Holocaust. But
then again, if the Academy is seen as a consortium that likes to make a grand
statement, Slumdog too is accompanied by the baggage of the terror attacks on
Mumbai last year, which (however unintendedly) bestowed a burning-issue
topicality on an odd little film set in a curious corner of the world. More
importantly, it has won Best Picture not just at the BAFTA and the Golden
Globes, but also from the Writers Guild of America, Producers Guild of America,
Directors Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild, all of which comprise
Academy Awards voters. So unless Hugh Jackman has employed a crack team of gag
writers, we may be in for an extremely tedious Oscar night, alleviated solely
by the prospect of witnessing AR Rahman clutching to his breast the most
coveted film award in the planet.
