A two-horse race

A period drama and a contemporary biopic will square off against each other
at the 83rd Academy Awards tonight, writes Saibal Chatterjee

ON Hollywood’s biggest night this year, an independent film from the UK is all set to gatecrash the party. The King’s Speech, a superbly acted royal drama, set in the years leading up to World War II, has as many as 12 nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director (Tom Hooper) and Best Actor (Colin Firth).

The film will end the night with several of the golden statuettes up for grabs. There is only one other film in the race — David Fincher’s The Social Network, which traces the creation and phenomenal success of Facebook — that can give The King’s Speech a run for its money.

Several other titles will be mentioned, and even perhaps awarded, on the evening of February 27, when the 83rd annual Academy Awards are handed out, but the British film will remain the firm favourite to hog the limelight.

The Oscar ceremony this year will be hosted by actors James Franco and Anne Hathaway. Interestingly, Franco is one of the nominees for an Oscar in the Best Actor category. He is unlikely to bag the statuette though.

He is up against two standout performances — Colin Firth’s nuanced interpretation of a diffident English monarch, who surmounts his speech impairment in The King’s Speech and Jesse Eisenberg’s star turn as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, which has seven more nominations.

The two other actors in contention are Spanish star Javier Bardem (for his role in Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Biutiful) and Jeff Bridges (for fleshing out John Wayne’s Rooster Cogburn persona in the Ethan and Joel Coen update of the classic 1969 western, True Grit). Neither will win — Bardem won’t because his performance is in a foreign language film, and Bridges is unlikely to win because he was the winner last year for Crazy Heart. Back to back acting Oscars are a rarity.

In the Best Picture category, 10 films are up for the night’s top prize but the tussle, realistically, will be confined between just the two titles mentioned above. Though The Social Network won the Golden Globe a few weeks back in the Best Motion Picture-Drama category, the predictions of the experts appear to favour The King’s Speech in the Oscar contest.

Thanks to last year’s expansion of the Best Picture nominations field to 10 films, eight other features are in the fray. These are 127 Hours, Black Swan, The Fighter, Inception, The Kids Are All Right, Toy Story 3, True Grit and Winter’s Bone. But despite the crowd out there, it remains a two-horse race, with may be True Grit in with an outside chance of pulling off an upset.

The outcome of the Best Oscar race, too, is a foregone conclusion. Deserving as all the other four nominees are, it will be difficult for them to outscore Natalie Portman’s performance as a ballerina in Darren Aronofsky’s showy melodrama Black Swan.

The nominees in this category include Annette Bening in The Kids Are All Right, Nicole Kidman in Rabbit Hole, Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone and Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine. If sentiment scores over instant appeal and the Academy chooses to recognise an actress’ body of work, only then will Bening stand a chance of putting it past Portman.

The contest among the supporting actors and actresses could be far more open. Geoffrey Rush,
who plays the Aussie speech therapist, who guides a stuttering royal out of his disability in The King’s Speech, might, given a little bit of luck, upstage the favourite, The Fighter’s Christian Bale. The latter’s performance has just the sort of flamboyance that could force the Academy’s hands when it comes to casting its vote.

One of the Best Supporting Actress nominees — True Grit’s Hailee Steinfeld — is virtually in every single frame of the film that she has been named for. She is nothing, if not the lead actress. But so crowded was the Best Actress field this year that the 14-year-old Steinfeld had to be held back for the supporting actress category. But will she win? She has as much of a chance as, if not more than, the other nominees — Amy Adams (The Fighter), Helena Bonham Carter (The King’s Speech), Melissa Leo (The Fighter) and Jacki Weaver (Animal Kingdom).

The biggest surprise that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has thrown up this year is in the directing category: it has snubbed Christopher Nolan, maker of the immensely successful and critically acclaimed Inception. Here, too, the difficult-to-call battle will be between David Fincher and Tom Hooper. The former has garnered more points from the critics in the run-up to the Oscars, but it might be tough for the Academy’s voting members to ignore the director of The King’s Speech, a film tipped to take the Best Picture prize.

A Directing Oscar for Hooper might not be a deserved nod, but not everything the Academy does on the night Hollywood comes out to party is beyond question. The world has lived with that reality for decades. Another year added to that history won’t make a difference.

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