Cover the Academy Awards long enough, and a certain sheepish self-consciousness sets in. Look back at the ghosts of Oscars ceremonies past, and it’s like discovering old photos of yourself in once-trendy clothes. Yikes! Did we really devote all that brow-furrowing critical attention to Argo (best picture, 2012), an engaging but supremely middleweight true-life dramedy about the 1979 Iran hostage crisis? Did we really spend so much time reflecting upon Catherine Zeta-Jones (best supporting actress, 2002) and her competent performance in the musical Chicago? We did. As the late Christopher Hitchens remarked: it’s impossible to have a nourishing conversation about last year’s Oscars results.
But as it happens I am excited about this year’s Oscars – really and truly – because they are likely to honour a film which I think is a modern classic: Boyhood, directed by Richard Linklater. This is the time-lapse study of a child’s growth to adulthood, filmed for a fortnight or so annually for 12 years: an artwork of inspired simplicity and organic consistency, infused with pure generosity and love, and easily capable of riding out the backlash-lifecycle that always attends much-fancied films like this. (Nay-sayers and meh-sayers call it something knocked off from TV’s 7-Up, and wonder if it would have been praised as much if it was just an actor in incrementally increased ageing makeup. This, in the words of Caitlin Moran, is not just missing the point but dozing off on the train and finding the Point was three stations back.) Boyhood is a frontrunner to win best film, with a best supporting actress prize for Patricia Arquette, who plays the mother of the boy (Ellar Coltrane): Arquette deserves it for her heartbreaking moment of empty-nest agony and fear of death at the film’s end.
As it happens, I think Linklater may not get best director: this is likely to go to Alejandro González Iñárritu for Birdman, his outrageously enjoyable fantasia of menopausal showbiz anxiety. Michael Keaton is a washed-up movie star trying to reinvent himself as a serious actor on Broadway, but plagued with hallucinatory visions of “Birdman” – the preposterous superhero he once played. It is a terrific film: smart, funny, more or less in control of its own hyperactive invention. The Academy loves the idea of a comeback and may be beguiled by Keaton’s personal resemblance to his role. Keaton is really good in it — a best actor Oscar for him is not out of the question — but I think this is the director’s achievement.
The best actor statuette has Eddie Redmayne’s name on it, for his performance as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. This I broadly agree with. It is an excellent, intuitive performance in a movie that is still more complex and elusive than it gets credit for: the study of an evolving, open marriage, or perhaps rather open mariage blanc, and an emotional quartet: Hawking, his wife Jane (very well played by Felicity Jones), her friend Jonathan Hellyer Jones (Charlie Cox) and Hawking’s nurse (Maxine Peake). Of course, a prize for Redmayne is open to the traditional criticism that the Academy fetishises and romanticises disability, but his portrayal has subtlety, candour and intelligence. Part of me, however, would love to see the Oscar go to Steve Carell and his fascinating depiction of the troubled billionaire John du Pont and his bizarre attempt to mentor the US Olympic wrestling team in Foxcatcher. Of course, it is embarrassing for the Academy that David Oyelowo is not on the nominees’ list for his fine portrayal of Martin Luther King in Selma. I don’t know what more he could have done to impress.
The best actress prize must surely go to Julianne Moore, who plays an academic suffering from early-onset dementia in Still Alice. In some ways, Moore is in acting terms the equivalent of Sean Penn: a big gun who goes off with a loud bang. This is a very big performance from Moore, a real above-the-title turn, commanding and grandstanding but heartfelt and with exquisitely painful touches as her character’s condition deteriorates in public, though I personally would be equally as pleased, or more pleased, to see the award go to Marion Cotillard for her portrayal of the sacked assembly-line worker in the Dardenne brothers’ Two Days, One Night.
There is a similar lack of tension on the question of who is to win best supporting actor: universal consensus is that this will be JK Simmons. He is the terrifyingly abusive music teacher screaming like a drill sergeant or sports coach at the young jazz-drummer in the exhilarating, if fractionally overpraised, Whiplash. Academy voters have responded passionately to Simmons’s character: I suspect the creatives among them have been bullied by that kind of teacher in their early lives and then, in their later professional lives, by precisely that kind of overbearing producer.
Elsewhere, it would be great to see an Oscar for best adapted screenplay go to Paul Thomas Anderson’s almost experimentally delirious version of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice — what a wonderful film — and the best foreign language Oscar to Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan or Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida. They are two of the very best films of the year. As for the snubs, I have already complained about Oyelowo; it is without irony that I also protest against The Lego Movie’s omission from the animation list, and it is an awful shame that Jonathan Glazer’s extraordinary and almost unclassifiable Under the Skin couldn’t have found some traction among Academy voters. But it will be exciting to settle down to Sunday night’s Oscar ceremony — a sumo contest between Birdman and Boyhood.
