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Liam Greetings, fellow slumdogs. I'd like to begin by noting that the first Academy Awards, back in 1929, was a private dinner held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Tickets were $5, fewer than 250 people were in attendance and it lasted 15 minutes. Now that was a ceremony appropriate to an imminent — what are we calling it — a de-cession? Do you feel it's time to party like it's 1929?
Elizabeth Most of the nominees failed to show up — there's one way to keep it short.
Liam This year, we're supposed to have a different kind of Oscar. The team of Bill Condon, who directed and wrote the 2006 multiple Oscar nominee, Dreamgirls, and Laurence Mark, who produced that film, have been given the task of completely revamping the show. There will be no opening monologue and fewer canned segments — as well, the Oscar presenters, for some reason, will be kept secret.
Mark has called it a "time to tap your troubles away" awards show, which is why the host is Hugh Jackman. Apart from wearing agricultural sideburns as Wolverine in the X-Men movies, and being People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive, Jackman has a lot of musical-theatre experience. He'll be doing a production number conceived of by fellow Aussie, Baz Luhrmann, of Moulin Rouge! and Australia fame. So, my first question is, does this leave you panting with anticipation or give you a major case of the heebie-jeebies?
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With four days until the 81st annual Academy Awards, workers are busy rolling out 20,000 square feet of red carpet for the ceremony. (Feb. 18)
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Elizabeth You know, I bow to no one in my love of Hugh Jackman. I'd knit a coat of those Wolverine sideburns and wear it even on warm days if I could.
Johanna Yikes! I bow to you. He's yours.
Elizabeth The problem with the Oscars is not the host, it's the inherent dullness and self-importance of the thing. It's like an entire industry built on drama, on this one evening, forgets how to tell a story and drowns in good taste instead.
We know Hollywood isn't about camaraderie, it's a dirty, seething cauldron of emotion (thanks for that, Christian Bale!). But on this magical evening, we're supposed to pretend Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei can stand the sight of each other, and Harvey Weinstein's campaign for The Reader didn't involve him harassing Sydney Pollack, one of the film's producers, on his deathbed, or the widow of Anthony Minghella, the other producer, to get it released in time for competition.
At least they could throw us a bone and bring back the Debbie Allen dancers.
Johanna Or the sneaky soundman on Terminator 4 who not only didn't turn off Bale's microphone during his four-minute f-bomb rant — as movie-set protocol strictly dictates — but also sent the tape to YouTube.
Still, the Oscar host matters. A Steve Martin or Johnny Carson — the guys who know everyone — can make the snide inside references that shake the Kodak Theatre out of its stupor. Or, someone way outside, like the East Coast frat boys David Letterman and Jon Stewart, can also goose the proceedings. I'm not sure Jackman has the teeth.
Johanna I'm actually glad that uber-producer Harvey Weinstein is back, pummelling the academy for votes again. I loved Harvey slugging it out with Scott Rudin, the producer of Revolutionary Road and no stranger to bullying himself, who didn't want his Kate Winslet movie competing with Harvey's. Guess what? Rudin was right: Revolutionary Road was all but washed out. And until recently, Slumdog Millionaire seemed to be a lock for best picture. At least with Harvey stamping his hooves again, people are re-thinking that. Yes, Slumdog has its charms, but best picture?
Liam The Reader over Slumdog? Let's see now — tasteful, dull, drama about German wartime guilt and the shame of illiteracy as opposed to falling into a latrine, a theme song by M.I.A. and a game-show victory? Slumdog is the obvious Little Miss Sunshine-style crowd-pleaser.
Elizabeth That's exactly why Slumdog gets my vote: Danny Boyle managed to maintain such an original tone throughout the whole film that the darkness perfectly balanced the light. Even child-blinding and torture-by-electrode didn't stop people from saying, "feel-good movie of the year!" Benjamin Button also had one tone, but that tone was "ponderous." Although I didn't mind the first seven hours.
Johanna Benjamin Button, yech. It proves all the CGI in the world can't create chemistry between actors, or make a dull story come to life. I also think in 10 — hell, two years time — it's going to look hokey, like those car-ride scenes in black-and-white films where the scenery rolling by was obviously filmed separately.
Liam I liked Slumdog, but found Milk more nutritious. Benjamin Button's going to belly-flop as people begin to recognize it's really The Curious Case of Benjamin Gump.
Johanna I, too, would vote for Milk. Unlike Slumdog, which to me is a fake feel-good movie — "Here, sit back and watch two full hours of us torturing these children, but don't worry, we'll wrap it up with a snazzy dance number!" — Milk is the genuine article. You get to feel good because it demonstrates how people, working together, can improve each other's lives. It also shows the death of one man won't stop the momentum, because others will pitch in. And, it's great cinema, with rich performances all around, and an absolutely heartbreaking lead turn from Sean Penn. But every time I mention Milk, it's like I'm standing on a hillside hollering, "Go see this movie!" yet my words are lost in the howling wind. Maybe that wind is named Harvey Weinstein.
Liam Nobody in the film industry I spoke to at Sundance could figure out how The Reader was even in the running. The only thing I can see is that it has the Heath Ledger posthumous factor: Two of its producers, Minghella and Pollack, both well-loved figures, died last year.
It's a big year for the Brits, isn't it, with Slumdog's success and Kate Winslet a best-actress threat, and wins at the Golden Globe for both The Reader and Revolutionary Road?
Elizabeth And yet no one is harder on poor Kate than her country mates, who tore her apart for her semi-hysterical Golden Globes speech. But while the Brits are doing well this season, the country's film council has warned production investment is dropping and independent films are in trouble. The cry next year might be, "The British are leaving!"
Johanna The Brit Stephen Daldry, who directed The Reader, has made three films — the other two were Billy Elliot and The Hours — and scored three directing Oscar nominations. That's quite a feat. Is it now a sure thing that Hollywood will yank him west to make, I dunno, Cheaper by the Dozen 3?
I want to talk about this notion of awards momentum — do you agree it seems more ludicrous every year? I look at Rachel Getting Married, for example, which everyone was crazy about when it appeared in September. The script is sensational — every character so cleverly articulated. There are two very strong supporting roles: Rosemarie DeWitt as Rachel and Debra Winger as her mother. And Anne Hathaway was stunning. But then three months roll by, and poof! No one cares any more. The script and supporting actresses are ignored (for Amy Adams in Doubt? I'm sorry, I like Adams, but she could do "naive nun" in her sleep). And everyone scoffs at the idea of Hathaway winning. How does this happen?
Liam I agree that the short-term-memory Oscar problem deserves some sort of intervention. I think the academy membership tends to be elderly, and the studios' worry is that they forget things like their dentures, or the movie they watched two months ago.
Johanna I think it's more puerile than that; I think folks in Hollywood are insanely preoccupied with what's hot and what's next. It's okay to like a film for a while, but God help you if you don't like the next hot thing that comes along even more.
Liam When it comes to accelerating negative trends, I'd also like to mention that I'm bothered how the awards are treated as an adjunct to the fashion business. At this year's Golden Globes, Susan Sarandon actually pulled out her glasses and a piece of paper, and read her and her son's clothing and jewellery credits. The actresses, instead of showing personal style, have become something like NASCAR drivers with a "This space for rent" sign on their bodies. How is, "Who are you wearing?" an intelligible question outside of the context of an orgy?
Elizabeth There was a report in the British press that Kristin Scott Thomas didn't get a nomination for I've Loved You So Long — a robbery worthy of Ronnie Biggs, by the way — because she refuses to play the game. She was asked on a red carpet who she was wearing, and she replied, "My skin." In Hollywood, that heresy is punishable by the stake — or exile.
Liam I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you really want viewers, do the Academy Awards in the nude. Audiences would be riveted, at least until the guy from Price-Waterhouse came out.
Elizabeth This year we'll be looking to Mickey Rourke to be fashion's hurricane. That hair! But will he win? My vote would actually go to Frank Langella, for his stupendous, heavy-lidded, heavy-limbed turn as Richard Nixon. I never imagined that my heart could break for Nixon — and that the man who made him human was the dude who played Dracula. Although when you think about it, that was a pretty good rehearsal.
Johanna The person I feel for is Robert Downey Jr. He could teach even Rourke a thing or two about the deep end, I'll betcha. The fact that he got a supporting-actor nomination for a comedic role — and in Tropic Thunder, a slapstick, one-joke Ben Stiller movie to boot — is incredible; the fact that he deserved it, even more so. His performance(s) skewer, simultaneously, movie clichés, actor clichés, black clichés and Russell Crowe. Lucky for Hollywood that they won't have to actually give him the statuette for it, since Heath Ledger's performance in The Dark Knight was also so extraordinary. I'm sure the Oscar producers have been scratching their heads for weeks, trying to figure out where in the lineup to present the best-supporting-actor award — will it stop the show, or will it provide a liftoff? Will there be a dry eye in the house, or will it be anticlimactic?
Liam Downey's is not, oddly enough, the first blackface nomination in Oscar history. Larry Parks also got nominated for The Jolson Story in 1946 but the Oscar went to Fredric March for The Best Years of Our Lives. At least we do have a full make-up performance from Heath Ledger, so the audience can have their mascara run in tribute to him.
Johanna As to The Dark Knight's being "shut out" of the major awards such as best picture and director — sorry folks, but eight nominations (Ledger's plus seven technical awards) is pretty freaking good for a comic-book movie, and all that it deserves. If Hollywood is going to continue down its bipolar road, where they throw all their production and marketing money at vast tent-pole movies and hang smaller pictures out to dry, then they have no right to boo-hoo during awards season that the thrillers don't get nominations, or that audiences aren't going to the films that do.
Liam Best-picture Oscars used to go to big box-office successes but smaller films winning big prizes are now common. In the last five years, the most-nominated film has only won once. To use an analogy from books, the Oscars used to be more like the bestseller list; now they're more the Man Booker Prize — and outside of big cities, people just don't get to see these celebrated movies.
But because the studios want to use the Oscars to promote their whole product line, this year the show's producers have promised "to celebrate all the movies of 2008." That includes blockbusters, sleepers and everything else. There's a grisly possibility that we may be watching tributes to Sex and the City: The Movie or The Love Guru.
Johanna Maybe that explains why they haven't released the presenters' list — no one wants to admit how stridently they're shilling other product.
Elizabeth I can see it now — Hugh Jackman, Mike Myers and Dev Patel dancing to a saucy bhangra beat, followed by a naked pas de deux inspired by The Reader. Paging Debbie Allen — it's showtime!