How to win an Oscar

TV and radio are doing what they do before any ‘big’ event, whether it be England versus Ireland, the Budget or, as today, the Oscars. They predict what’s going to happen, spend hours broadcasting the show, and then spend the next day talking about it.

Of course, all they’ll talk about are the so-called major awards and then only if they’ve gone to British winners. Silly, twittering reporters in long frocks will be hanging about outside post-Oscar parties, hoping some vain, self-obsessed, insecure, silicone-implanted, face-lifted, botoxed, coked-up, arrogant star will deign to mouth a few clichés into the microphone.

Hitchcock was taken to task once for saying actors were cattle. Hitch denied it. ‘I merely said was that they should be treated like cattle.’ All this interest in their private lives, their fashions, and why they think their latest film is so important is like seeing inside an abattoir. It’s best avoided if you want to carry on enjoying sausages.

But that’s all by the way. I started this with the intention of listing ten rules for actors to follow if they want to win an Oscar. I’m sure someone’s done a thorough study of winners – and losers – over the last eighty years, but here are my superficial thoughts.

1. Play a loser

It’s always good to play a drunk, for example. Ray Milland did it in The Lost Weekend. Or a whore, like Jane Fonda in Klute. Clare Trevor did both in Key Largo. Frank Sinatra was nominated for playing a drug addict in The Man with the Golden Arm, but Nick Cage took the prize with Leaving Las Vegas. Let’s not forget the Duke in True Grit.

2. Play a ‘differently-abled’ person

Jon Voight won as a paraplegic in Coming Home and Daniel Day-Lewis wasn’t at his most healthy in My Left Foot, and Cliff Robertson was a right Charly. I don’t think Robert Newton was even nominated as Long John Silver – a travesty – but the Duke didn’t do badly with one eye.

It’s obviously better actually to be disabled, but I don’t think even the most dedicated of Method actors would go that far. But amputee Harold Russell won best supporting actor for the Best Years of Our Lives and deaf Marlee Matlin was best actress in Children of a Lesser God.

Peter Finch outdid them all. He was dead when he won for Network.

3. Be old

This works in two ways. You’re coming to the end of your career/life and Hollywood has neglected you in the past. It remembers with embarrassment how it overlooked the likes of Cary Grant, Kirk Douglas and Bob Mitchum. It was fortunate for the Duke that he had little competition in 1969, although Dustin Hoffman was following Rule 2 in Midnight Cowboy.

Like disability, old age can also help attract sentimental votes. And there’s the wonder not that’s done well, but that it’s done at all. Art Carney, for example, in Harry and Tonto. And George Burns in The Sunshine Boys.

4. Be young

Not as helpful as being old, but at least it means you’ve got time on your side. Jodie Foster missed out for Taxi Driver, but came back for The Accused, where she used variations of rules 1 and 2. Tatum O’Neal got a statuette for Paper Moon, but it wasn’t the beginning of a glittering career. Jack Wild was only nominated for Oliver, and look what happened to him. Best avoided.

It’s supposed to be an actor’s nightmare to work with children, but it didn’t too the Duke any harm in True Grit, nor Greg in To Kill Mockingbird, nor Jack Nicholson in As Good as it Gets. And that last film even had a dog as well. Nobody can upstage Jack. That reminds me –

5. Be popular with your peers

In other words be Jack Nicholson.

6. Be black (obsolete rule)

Once Sidney Poitier (Lilies of the Field) and Halle Berry (Monster’s Ball) had got their Oscars, not to mention Denzel (Glory), the pressure to award something to a person of colour was no longer an issue. After all, I think it’s fair to say that the Academy was merely making a point in 1963 with Poitier, when his performance bore no comparison to Richard Harris’ (in This Sporting Life) or Newman’s in Hud in the same year.

I wonder what the Duke made of it. Which oppressed group is next, I wonder. ‘Native Americans?’ Come to think of it, people with Indian blood have won. Ben Johnson in The Last Picture Show, James Garner in Murphy’s Romance, and Cher in Moonstruck.

7. Be in the right place at the right time

If you’re lucky you can get swept up in the enthusiasm for a film. Paltrow, for example, in Shakespeare in Love (what an aberration!). And there was Russell Crowe’s win in Gladiator, Donna Reed’s supporting award for From Here to Eternity. I’ve a feeling that’s why Hattie McDaniel won in 1939. GWTW was so popular that even a black woman could get an honour. Mind you, she was playing a Mammy (no threat there).

Handing a support actor award can be useful where a worthy film is otherwise unacknowledged. Lust for Life, perhaps, and Twelve o’clock High.

8. Do something showy

Chew the scenery, be larger than life, ham it up, play against type, show you can ACT.

Examples: Walter Huston, in Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs, Hoffman in Rain Man, Pacino in Scent of a Woman, the Duke in True Grit, Bogart in The African Queen, Lancaster in Elmer Gantry, Marvin in Cat Ballou, Charlize Theron in Monster, Kingsley in Gandhi, Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, Borgnine in Marty, Roberts in Erin Brockovich and Broderick Crawford in All the King’s Men.

Anthony Quinn should have tried it the other way round. He might have won even more.

10. Give Hollywood a touch of class.

Not too often, but once in a while, Hollywood likes to allow itself a little prestige. Be there at the time. The film might soon be forgotten or disparaged, but you’ll have your Oscar, like Olivier for Hamlet, F Murray Abraham for Amadeus, Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire, Max Schell in Judgement at Nuremburg, Schofield in A Man for All Seasons, etc . . .etc. Oh, recently there was that bloke who won for Capote.

11. Take a tip from George C Scott (who followed rule 8): Who needs an Oscar, anyway?

The films you're supposed to like

In his article on Howard Hawks in his Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema, David Thomson imagines himself on a sinking ship with the opportunity to save from oblivion the ten best films of all time. He muses on how most critics would react - one Welles, one Hitchcock, one Mizoguchi, one Renoir, etc. He claims that he would choose ten Hawks films, but he does have a few funny ideas. He's not keen on Ford and Capra for a start.

It's a game we all play, choosing the ten best, and can be a lot of fun. Taken seriously, the choice will avoid most of the selection criteria I am returning to here from time to time, and has many other factors to consider - script, acting, direction, camerawork, insight, overall artistry, etc.

But there several films which recur frequently on these 'official' lists and these are the films which we might feel we 'ought' to like. I've been having a look at how 'official', intellectual opinion has changed in Sight and Sound's ten-yearly best films poll of critics (and now film-makers). This is found at http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten

As a matter of interest, David Thomson contributed to this poll and, being serious, limited himself to one Hawks, His Girl Friday.

I'll concentrate on critics for the moment, although I've got my reservations about them. For example, critics (at least according to my prejudice) are too concerned with the script and the themes of a film rather than the the craft and the visual. The also have a tendency to be arty and pretentious. And rather too inclined to look for innovation or, conversely, trends and patterns. However.

The link leads to several articles on the polls, but these are my immediate thoughts:

The most consistent appearances in the top ten are Potemkin and La Regle du Jeu, featured every 10 years since 1952.

The most successful is Kane.

There are still two silent films there: Potemkin and Sunrise (Murnau). Greed and Intolerance have slipped.

The most recent is Godfather I and II (cheating her because they've added the votes for the two films together). Otherwise, the most recent would probably be 2001. I suppose it is understandable that we need time to allow the 'greatest' films to emerge from the stew of passing enthusiasm, not to mention rediscovery (this applies to Vertigo, Sunrise and Kane itself).

Surprises: Singin' in the Rain and the Searchers. I suppose I consider myself so resolutely middle-brow that I don't expect to find these serious-minded men and women choosing, a musical and a Western, two of my favourites.

Incidentally there are three Westerns in the top sixty or so, the other two being The Man who Shot Liberty Valance and Rio Bravo. Where the hell is The Wild Bunch? Moreover I can't find any other films by Ford or Hawks in the full list, which is strange. What about The Grapes of Wrath or To Have and Have Not?

Those that have fallen out of favour over the years include Chaplin, who was represented by both City Lights and The Gold Rush in 1952. Also, thank God, there are fewer arty films of the Antonioni, Bergman, Godard variety, but they are still bubbling under.

Japanese cinema is well-represented. Ozu's Tokyo Story is in the top ten and the old favourite Kurosawa is still high with Seven Samurai and Rashomon. Mizoguchi's Ugetsu is still highly regarded.

Time for some nominations (a few from each of these categories and my choice in bold):

Citizen Kane. It's like the Bible and Shakespeare on your desert island. It's the sine qua non of cinema.

Silent cinema: The General, Potemkin, Sunrise. I'd like to add Gance's Napoleon.

Asian: I'll have to stick with Kurosawa, because I haven't seen anything else. Seven Samurai. Perhaps Ray should be here too (not Nick, the other one).

European: obviously La Regle du Jeu. I notice, by the way, that Renoir's other masterpiece, La Grande Illusion is now down at 35. I'd better mention Fellini's 8 1/2, although I haven't seen it, not do I intend to. What kind of director puts his own name in the title of his film? There are a few French films I want to see, which appear on these polls, such as Le Jour se Leve and La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc. Le Salaire de la Peur

Art-house (same as above really): take your pick from any already mentioned, plus Bunuel. As a matter of fact I can't find Bunuel on the latest list. Perhaps people have finally twigged that all that time he was taking the piss. I'll pass on this.

Hollywood (classic): The Searchers, Some Like It Hot, Vertigo, 2001, Singin' in the Rain, My Darling Clementine, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, It's a Wonderful Life.

British: Lawrence of Arabia, The Third Man, and there ought to be a Powell and Pressburger film here. A Matter of Life and Death, possibly, or Black Narcissus.

Recent films: There aren't any in the poll. What, from the last 10 years will make it into the Hall of Fame? A Scorsese or Spielberg? Their best work is already more than 10 years old. Is Clint Eastwood's Letter from Iwo Jima going to put the seal on his incredible career?

My personal top ten of all-time greats:

Citizen Kane, plus

Potemkin

The Wild Bunch

The Searchers

Twelve o'clock High

The Scarlet Empress

Way Out West (Laurel & Hardy)

The General

Schindlers List

The Bride of Frankenstein

It's a Wonderful Life

'It's very educational'

John Walsh's book has reminded me of another reason why some people add a a film to their list of favourites. It's heard primarily from those who are not particular fans of the movies.

'It will help you learn about. . .whatever.'

These are the films that parents and teachers approve and they fall into two categories, the literary substitute, and the history lesson.

I've written elsewhere about the films made for people who don't like movies but can't be bothered to read the book. Or, who have read the book and think the film will be safe to watch.

This is why there will always be a market for the Shakespeare film. People can view the plays, nicely reduced and edited into digestible chunks and with the action sequences emphasised. I have to admit that they do provide a handy overview before tackling the text itself.

It's always amused me that teachers would encourage us to go to Zefferelli's Romeo and Juliet and then be outraged that all we could talk about was the brief glimpse of Olivia Hussey's naked breasts. How anyone can object to Leonard Whiting's buttocks and at the same time listen po-faced to Shakespeare's great line, 'The bawdy hand of time is on the prick of noon', sagely noting that it is a perfect example of the standard iambic pentameter, escapes me.

In this category, you will find other filmed plays- The Importance of Being Earnest, The Browning Version, Othello, Richard III. Classic novels - Dickens, Austen, Melville. Some work as films, some are recordings of the play, some respectful renditions from one medium to another. Some work as pretty good movies, Moby Dick, for example. People tell me that Dr Zhivago is a bad film, but I think it's great. Perhaps I'd just like to write poetry inspired by Julie Christie. Come to think of it, bugger the poetry.

Then there's the history lesson. Lawrence of Arabia, for example, or Patton, or Alexander the Great. Except they are quite untrustworthy as history, for all their consultants and advisors. If you take Cromwell on trust you'll believe that Lords and Commons sat in the same house.

Right, a decision. Going by the usual 'best' lists, something like Gladiator might be chosen here, or maybe Titanic or Lawrence. Henry V would probably feature.

As for me, when it comes to history turned into film, I would avoid Cromwell, which scores poorly on both counts and choose Schindler's List or A Bridge Too Far. I'm rather fond of the latest version of The Alamo too.

And for literature, let's have Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight and Moby Dick.

The 'Potemkin' moment

I've just started reading Are You Talking to Me by John Walsh. I've hardly read more than the introduction and already I know it's the book I should have written, the book I would have written, if I could. It's a serious book about the movies, written by a fan. I thoroughly recommend it.

And it leads me to another criterion for the inclusion of a film on a list, which I have called 'The Potemkin moment'.

By this I mean the moment when you see a film, any film, and comprehend for the first time the visceral power of the movie art form and its limitless possibilities. Suddenly you know that it can be more than an entertainment, something to be ashamed of liking. Maybe the film is not in itself outstanding, maybe it has many faults overall, but it has elements that you know can be harnessed to greatness.

'Potemkin' must have had this effect on many in the 20s and probably still does to new viewers. I would have chosen Abel Gance's Napoleon from that period, a silent film with epic sweep and technically daring. Birth of a Nation was a revelation to the world in its day, as was Citizen Kane 25 years later.

In conversation the following have been put forward as personal choices: 2001; The Shining; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Psycho; Seven Samurai. I suppose it's inevitable that people will choose big, brassy films. You have to be pretty sophisticated to choose a Japanese study in ageing as the film that made the first big impact upon you.

Walsh speaks of seeing, at the age of eight, Lawrence of Arabia, Mutiny on the Bounty, Casablanca and The Longest Day. Martin Scorsese, in his TV documentary series, remembers the garish colours of Duel in the Sun and The Ten Commandments.

As a boy myself I was impressed by Kane, The Third Man, The Magnificent Seven and The Guns of Navarone, respectively for performance and narrative structure, crazily-angled photography, character delineation and sheer exciting story-telling.

But, as anyone who knows me will have guessed, the film that turned my flirtatious toying with the cinema into true, deep, passionate love was The Wild Bunch.

It opens with movement. Even the music seems to start halfway through a bar. The frame freezes on Bill Holden's grim face as he says, 'If the move, kill 'em' and the credit appears, 'Directed by Sam Peckinpah', to the sound of a long, low chord.

The chord underscores the amateurish marching band playing 'Shall we gather' tightening the tension before an orgy of violence breaks out, the like of which I had never seen before, and which I did not realise would be outdone two hours later.

I was struck by the death fall of one man, in slow motion and intercut with other bursts of action, as two children watch fascinated.

I liked the radical concept of villains as heroes, of the original sin in children, the existential aceptance of a meaningless world. It is brutally honest and honestly brutal.

Every line is quotable and has entered my everyday speech. The music is perfect. The acting the best the cast ever turned in. Peckinpah himself was never as good again.

The Searchers is the one Western which appears on 'respectable' lists. It is indeed a great film, and with Once upon a Time in the West, one of the three which 99% of Western fans would take to their desert island. The third is The Wild Bunch. Perhaps it is still too strong and too illiberal for our bleeding-heart critics.

Recency

'Recency' is the curse of movie lists.

Just look at Channel 4's list of the 100 'greatest' films which was compiled about 5 years ago from the votes of viewers and somehow incorporated those of 'experts'. (I wasn't invited).

I don't propose to dissect the whole list, but a cursory glance shows the power of recency. At number 3 is The Shawshank Redemption. Now, I like it. Shawshank is moving and entertaining, but somewhat derivative. I could do a whole blog on prison films - and I probably will some day - and which no doubt would list the half dozen required elements:

1. An innocent man in gaol (or at least punished disproportionately)
2. A corrupt/weak liberal governor and brutal guards
3. A really evil prisoner - there aren't that many of them - whom the hero subdues
4. The crushing of a man without the hero's resilience
5. A moment of soaring humanity, which shows that even the lowest amongst are 'God's children'
6. Escape, or preferably death in the attempt.

So I ask. Is it a better film than no 5, Some Like it Hot?

And Gladiator, at no 6. Better than It's a Wonderful Life at no 7? The Matrix at 15, with Casablanca at 16? And Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon at 18, with Citizen Kane, for God's sake, at 19!

As I've already said, I do not wish to denigrate these fine films. But will they feature in a similar list 10 years from now? I doubt it, but I've no doubt that Kane, Casablanca and the like will still be there.

I always take a long time to decide I like a film above others, and so I would choose Schindler's List as my 'recent' choice, but it is getting on a bit now.

So what's it to be? The Constant Gardener, Brokeback Mountain (please!), Crash?

Oh to hell with it. Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-rabbit.

Primacy

A while ago I talked about lists, something to which film fans are particularly prone. The reasons for a film being included on anyone's list are obviously many and varied. My own list of 'greatest' would be different from 'favourite', for example.

The first criterion I plan to look at I call 'primacy'. In other words, the first film that made an impression on us. I do not mean the sort of film that I will consider later under the headings 'nostalgia' or 'Potemkin moment', but what are often childhood favourites.

My own introduction to the cinema was in the mid-fifties. These were the days of support features, Pathe News, Look at Life and Pearl and Dean advertisements. My mother would take me and my sister to the pictures, taking advantage of continuous performances. It was quite normal to take our seats halfway through the main feature, and then spend half an hour wondering what the hell was going on. And two three hours later she would announce, 'This is where we came in' and off we'd go, despite my protests. My mother didn't believe in watching films twice.

It's strange the things you remember from those early days. There was, for example the bust of Edgar Wallace at the beginning of Man of Mystery, which revolved through 360 degrees while The Shadows played the theme tune. The tune ended just as the bust finished turning and faced us again. Every time I watched it I would wonder if, this time, the process would not would not be synchronised properly.

Then there was the lugubrious Edgar Lustgarten recounting famous murders of the past. Pathe News was relentlessly cheerful, Look at Life relentlessly boring; there was a preponderance of monochrome, which I didn't appreciate in those days, and a growing realisation that British films were hopelessly cosy, while Hollywood knew how to deliver real excitement.

Hence my disappointment when, taken to see Reach for the Sky, I found myself viewing a black and white British war film, with a rather unattractive hero and lots of British domesticity, rather than the colourful American Western the title had led me to expect. I was only a child.

One such Western is a strong candidate for a place on my list, because it impressed me at the time and is even now regarded as an excellent film. I refer to The Man from Laramie.

It was the last James Stewart/Anthony Mann collaboration and I am little surprised that it's censorship category allowed me to see it because for the time it was startlingly violent. When I saw it again, many years later, I was surprised at details I remembered. Stewart's fight with Arthur Kennedy; Stewart being dragged through a camp fire and shot in the hand; Kennedy's sympathetic villain; the salt flats; and bullets ricocheting off rocks. While I was always a fan of Westerns, the only other one I remembered in such detail was Boetticher's Ride Lonesome. These films obviously had something more for a small boy who was only interested in gunfights and fistfights.

In this frame of mind others might choose a James Bond film. Or maybe The Magnificent Seven, The Guns of Navarone, The Great Escape. Alternatively, Brief Encounter or Four Weddings and a Funeral.

I remember going to see The Battle of the River Plate, another disappointment at the time. I told my primary school teacher about my planned trip, and she advised me that the supporting film was much better. When I saw it I couldn't have disagreed more. It was a short French film about a small boy. Now, the presence of children and women always detracted from a film for me in those days, and my prejudice kicked in within a minute of its opening.

I've changed my mind. This film is about loneliness and the cruel bullying of child on child. It is about hope and dreams, about escape from poverty, monotony and narrow-mindedness. It has much in common with Kes and is called The Red Balloon. An excellent little movie and is my choice in this category, if I allow myself hindsight.

Lists

I have a friend who claims to see many parallels between two of his favourite films, namely One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Searchers. I couldn't really follow him and thought I would check it out on the internet. What did I find? Millions of hits, but no information at all, because where the two films were mentioned together it was merely because they were both on somebody's 'my favourite films' list.

I even found someone who'd compiled his 'hundred greatest films' - and put a star against the ones he'd actually seen.

Nick Hornby, in High Fidelity, had great fun with this male tendency to compile lists. It usually is a male affliction, unless you count shopping lists. I've heard that, like hobbies, collecting and general buffery, it's a vestige of our hunter-gatherer days. No doubt that gives a little sense of pride to the nerds and anoraks who are particularly prone to the syndrome.

I like to think that lists are like diaries, or blogs, and photograph albums. They are a way of hanging on to the fleeting little pleasures of life. Or maybe a way of fitting the the vagaries of knowledge and experience into a satisfactory framework.

I have my own film lists, which I might share one day, but I thought I would compile one which uses the different criteria I notice others using, which give a different result from what I would otherwise produce.

I am thinking of criteria like primacy, recency, snobbery, prejudice, nostalgia, politics, etc. I'll talk about primacy first, where else. Later.

Who the hell is 'they'?