Awards fatigue, which descends around this time each year, has been alleviated slightly by last week’s London Film Critics’ Circle Awards. As a voting member, I was naturally thrilled to see the award for Film of the Year go to what I considered to be the right film — A Prophet — and even in the other categories there wasn’t much to quibble with.
Let the Right One In and Fish Tank got some deserved love, and as for Avatar . . . well, let’s just say that James Cameron probably spent Thursday evening eating a hell of a lot of comfort food and sobbing himself to sleep on a bed of $100 bills. We sure showed him.
But with the Baftas behind us and the Oscars looming, the cultural nausea returns. So, let me recommend an effective antidote in the form of those websites that revisit the scenes of past Academy Award ceremonies in the interest of righting wrongs.
The internet has successfully undermined the idea that history is written by the winners, proposing instead that it can be annotated, challenged and rewritten in favour of the losers. And nowhere is this more apparent than at stinkylulu, where Oscar rematches (or “smackdowns”) in the Best Supporting Actress category are a regular and stimulating feature.
Cheer as Angelina Jolie‘s 1999 statuette for Girl, Interrupted is snatched from her livid fingers! Then gasp as it is handed instead, after much heated and knowledgeable debate, not to the deserving Chloë Sevigny (Boys Don’t Cry), but to Toni Collette (The Sixth Sense).
Applaud as Josephine Hull loses the Oscar she won in 1950 for Harvey! Then guffaw wildly as it goes to Hope Emerson, whose portrayal of a sadistic prison guard in the trashy Caged makes Nurse Ratched look like Little Miss Marker.
One smackdowner, Ken, puts it brilliantly: “Built like Foghorn Leghorn, she’s six-foot-two of slow swagger, prowling around looking for the next can of worms to pry open, torturing her victims with that slow-motion chuckle from Hell. Line up, you tramps — and salute one of the great screen heavies.”
You get the gist: it’s a feast for anyone whose TV is stained from all the projectiles thrown at the screen each Oscar night. In the same vein is a new and, so we’re promised, regular item at mainlymovies, where past Oscar categories are replayed with added wisdom, sanity and imagination.
So, instead of Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe (both in Platoon) battling it out with the eventual winner, Michael Caine in Hannah and Her Sisters, to be crowned Best Supporting Actor 1986, we get a far more inspired batch of nominees, including Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, Ray Liotta in Something Wild and Tom Noonan in Manhunter.
What a war of the psychos that would’ve been! My vote has to go to Liotta — not just for his seductive, oddly sad menace, but for the way he wears his responsibility for changing the entire character of that fine film in its second half with such lightness.
Next to such delicious “what ifs”, this year’s “Cameron v Bigelow” Oscar contest looks about as exciting as Kramer v Kramer.
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