This year's Oscars signal a remarkable cultural renaissance for America in the twilight of the Bush era, writes the NS film critic, Ryan Gilbey
There is good news and bad news about the 80th Academy Awards, held in Los Angeles last Sunday. The bad news is that the winner of Best Picture, and a further three prizes, was the Coen brothers' facile thriller No Country for Old Men. You can just imagine a flash-forward to 2058, when film historians are laughing at some of the biggest errors in Oscar history: "Can you believe they gave Best Picture in 1942 to How Green Was My Valley over Citizen Kane? And to Ordinary People rather than Raging Bull in 1981? And - get this! - to No Country for Old Men instead of There Will Be Blood in 2008. What were they thinking?"
Given the opportunity to reward the most audacious and challenging American film since The Thin Red Line (which itself lost out at the 1999 Oscars to Shakespeare in Love), the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences resorted to its default setting and handed the bling to the safest bet. In truth, there was never any other horse in the race. The teen pregnancy comedy Juno got the cheeky upstart vote; its writer, the devilishly named Diablo Cody, triumphed in the Best Original Screenplay category, which usually smiles kindly upon cultural phenomena that have no chance of being Best Picture (past winners include The Crying Game, Pulp Fiction and The Usual Suspects). The conscientious thriller Michael Clayton was nominated to evoke the crusading spirit of the 1970s. And Atonement slipped in because it's delivered entirely in RP accents, which officially excuses it in American eyes from being an absurd and trivial work.
There Will Be Blood was always going to bag a Best Actor prize for Daniel Day-Lewis, but it will be a pity if the film comes to be seen as his achievement alone. Thankfully it also won Best Cinematography (for Robert Elswit), but the prize that it most richly deserved - Best Director, for the incomparable Paul Thomas Anderson - went to the Coens in a transparent case of rewarding decent directors for unworthy films (past recipients of the Sorry-We-Didn't-Give-You-This-Earlier award include Bernardo Bertolucci and last year's winner, Martin Scorsese).
If the bad news is that No Country made the Oscars no fun, then what's the good news? Paradoxically, even those not enamoured of the winning film will have to concede that its victory is a positive sign for US cinema as it prepares to emerge from the Republican stranglehold of the past eight years. Regardless of its shortcomings, the Coens' picture at least has none of that prestigious, conservative aura that has in the past been a prerequisite of Oscar success. In fact, the DNA of this year's Best Picture nominees, with the exception of Atonement, suggests a gradual Rip Van Winkle-style reawakening among Academy members, and in Hollywood at large.
Usually, anything unusual can be nominated only in a few peripheral areas, like the aforementioned Best Original Screenplay, or the Best Supporting categories (where idiosyncratic character actors can make their mark). This year, things have been less rigidly demarcated. The Iranian graphic-novel adaptation Persepolis and the delicious Ratatouille (the eventual winner) were both nominated for Best Animated Feature, while the expressionistic French-language drama The Diving Bell and the Butterfly made a significant showing elsewhere. It isn't just that the calibre of film-making is improving; it is also the case that the Academy is acknowledging this creative shift, just as it did in 1968 (when the counter-cultural hits Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate made the cut) and 1975 (when The Towering Inferno resembled a damp squib next to Chinatown and The Godfather: Part II).
But let's not get carried away here. With the exception of There Will Be Blood, this year's Best Picture list still has nothing on 1976, when every nominee - Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, Nashville and the winner, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - represented a revolution in cinematic form. Maybe this year's move away from rewarding Hollywood behemoths signals a spirit of optimism that could eventually produce another 1976, if the political climate proves favourable. In the past few months, two respected US directors have told me separately that the conservative mood in Hollywood has either thwarted or impeded attempts to finance their films. It is a sign of how oppressive an influence the Bush administration has been on the arts that neither director was keen to speak on the record about the difficulties they had encountered. Both noted that the word "liberal" had become taboo in Hollywood studios, a comment borne out by the opprobrium Michael Moore received when he spoke against the Iraq War at the 2003 Oscars ceremony.
Such stifling of creativity looks particularly cruel for anyone who hoped, like those two US directors, that the late 1990s - when stylistically experimental work such as Being John Malko vich, Boys Don't Cry, Rushmore and Traffic was clasped to the Academy's bosom - would mark the beginning of an American New Wave. But, with a Democratic president looking like a possibility, Hollywood, as embodied by the Academy, has begun to breathe more easily again.
Not that the Oscars are perfect by any means, even in this more enlightened year. If there is an internal scandal attached to the 2008 ceremony, it pertains to the clueless shortlist for Best Foreign-Language Film, which was arrived at through a selection process that tips the balance toward the innocuous. Anyone wishing to vote in the category must sign in at a screening of every film on the longlist; dissenters have pointed out that this favours voters with ample time on their hands, which inevitably means retirees who are unlikely to plump for anything as distressing as, say, the Romanian abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (which itself beat No Country for Old Men at Cannes last year).
But one thing at a time. America is contemplating its first black or female president. Justice for foreign-language cinema may have to wait.
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