Bad Impressions
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Bad Impressions Imitation is the sincerest form of campaigning for an Oscar. by John Podhoretz At the Academy Awards ceremony on February 25, Helen Mirren is all but certain to be named Best...
...Hoffman was preceded by Jamie Foxx, who took an Oscar in 2005 as Ray Charles...
...Since we know what Ray Charles looked and sounded like, there's no difficulty in declaring Jamie Foxx's version of Ray Charles an uncanny likeness...
...Comedians and impressionists used to be two different showbiz animals entirely, but now there's no such thing as a comedian who doesn't do impressions...
...Kidman's fellow Australian Cate Blanchett took Best Supporting Actress honors on the same evening Foxx won his award by sounding and looking just like Katharine Hepburn...
...Impressionists appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show between the animal act and the little Italian puppet in a race car...
...were the sure bets of previous decades...
...Hoffman's successor this year will probably be Forest Whitaker, who plays Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland...
...Try this: Download a clip from YouTube, put it on a loop and then watch it 500 times...
...Theron followed Nicole Kidman, who nabbed an Oscar as Virginia Woolf...
...It's hard to fathom this change, but I'll hazard a guess that it has something to do with the increasing discomfort so many people seem to feel in making judgments...
...They could watch movies and television shows to get the body language down...
...It was a specialized business, but it isn't any longer...
...Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was last year's Best Actor for his performance as Truman Capote, will present the award to her...
...Impersonation was once considered a lower form of acting, a freakish vaudeville stunt...
...Nor is it to show up without a lot of makeup on, or to have a death scene, or to survive somebody else's death scene...
...These John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is The Weekly Standard's movie critic...
...Now that it's easier than ever for performers to do impressions, and now that your accountant regales you at the beginning of your tax session with his imitation of Jack Nicholson in The Departed, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has decided that the highest form of acting is impersonation...
...Foxx was handed his statuette by Charlize Theron, who got hers a year earlier for making herself look as ugly as Florida serial killer Aileen Wuornos...
...The objective standard for an impression is the memory or idea of the person being impersonated...
...They didn't win the most prestigious prize in the world of performance...
...And what is a great impression anyway but a kind of human special effect...
...After the 200th time, even someone who is unable to distinguish between the voices of Barry White and Tiny Tim will be able to do a creditable version of what he's been viewing...
...When they succeeded in getting an impersonation right, it could be dazzling...
...Want to learn how to do an imitation of someone...
...There was a reason for the low esteem in which impersonators were once held relative to actors...
...The surest route to winning a performing Oscar in our time isn't to create a detailed fictional character from scratch, to imbue a writer's creation with three-dimensional life...
...It's strange...
...When we listen to Elizabeth in bed with Prince Philip, alluding to her son's criticism of her as a mother, we aren't only thinking, "Yes, that's just how it would be with my mother," but rather, "Yes, that's probably exactly what Queen Elizabeth would be like in that situation...
...but it was, in the most basic sense of the word, not a performance but a caricature...
...And yet even here her magnificent performance is given added resonance by the fact that we bring our knowledge and image of the woman she's imitating to bear in judging Mirren's work...
...In the first place, they had something very specific to copy...
...What Helen Mirren does in The Queen is something a little different— she gives us an Elizabeth we've never been privy to, the woman as she lives her life out of the public eye...
...Barrie, and Don Cheadle's Paul Rusesabagina (a real-life hotelier in Rwanda...
...They played the mountains, opened for Sinatra in Vegas, and sat in one of the lesser corners on The Hollywood Squares...
...The movies have been overtaken by special effects...
...Foxx prevailed over Leonardo DiCaprio's Howard Hughes, Johnny Depp's J.M...
...Whitaker will receive his prize from Reese With-erspoon, who was honored last year as Best Actress for her depiction of country singer June Carter Cash...
...Simple: The advent of the VCR and other technology that allows people to repeat film and television clips endlessly...
...It's discrimination to be discriminating these days, and people are grateful for any kind of objective standard by which to judge a thing...
...How did that happen...
...Rather, these days, the way to the stage at the Kodak Theater is to become an impressionist—to be the kind of performer who converts an actual person into a fictional character...
...by John Podhoretz At the Academy Awards ceremony on February 25, Helen Mirren is all but certain to be named Best Actress for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II...
...They recorded comedy albums that, for the most part, didn't sell very well...
...And if you have enough patience to make it through 500 viewings, you will be the second coming of Rich Little—at least where that one person you're imitating is concerned...
...They could listen to recordings to get a famous person's voice down...
Vol. 12 • February 2007 • No. 20
