And the Oscar Goes, Too
PODHORETZ, JOHN
And the Oscar Goes, Too Horror and tedium at the Academy Awards. BY JOHN PODHORETZ This year’s excruciatingly boring Oscars stumbled to a conclusion with the victory of a movie that (a)...
...Aside from giving Tom Tancredo heart palpitations, and raising traditional fears about the loose mores of Europeans and actors, what does this portend...
...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...This is a grotesque violation of the spirit of immigration law...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ This year’s excruciatingly boring Oscars stumbled to a conclusion with the victory of a movie that (a) nobody has seen and (b) nobody who has seen it is all that crazy about...
...For an example, check out Swinton’s Michael Clayton colleague, Tom Wilkinson, who hits every R like a railsplitter hurtling an axe into a log...
...I mean, are these really jobs Americans couldn’t or wouldn’t do...
...Marion Cotillard took the bestactress trophy for playing a real-life drunken, drug-addicted singer—given all that, how could she possibly have lost?—of whom not a single soul in America under the age of 50 has heard...
...Maybe the Oscar he won will serve as his comfort object during his midlife crisis...
...has already entered the annals of camp...
...Day-Lewis, a genuinely great actor, is 50 years old and has long hair and a pair of earrings...
...None of the acting winners is an American...
...The best you can say about it was that it wasn’t quite as horrifying as the moment when Angelina Jolie made out with her brother on national television after saying she was “so in love” with him from the Oscar podium...
...Tilda Swinton, who looks like she was skinned to appear in one of those “Bodies” exhibits, won as best supporting actress for the year’s most excessive performance as a nervous-wreck lawyer who trembles like a leaf even when she orders hit men to take out rival barristers in Michael Clayton...
...These may all have contributed to the ratings woes...
...The same thing happened 43 years ago when NAFTA wasn’t even a twinkle in the eye of evil globalizers who want to drive every resident of Ohio into poverty...
...The show’s ratings have been declining for a decade, and usually the decline is attributed to the proliferation of other awards shows, the excessive politicalstyle campaigning for the prizes, and the general withdrawal of affect from once-starry-eyed consumers of show business...
...Swinton, it is said, lives in a m?nage ? trois...
...There was a movie this year everybody liked a lot...
...By doing a John Huston impression, he escaped the accent trap...
...Once we might have cared...
...The 80th annual Academy Awards ceremony was no country for ordinary men, or women, who go to the movies because they want to have a good time...
...Once it would have won...
...Daniel Day-Lewis won as best actor for an overwhelming performance in another movie that left many viewers scratching their heads, and whose signature line in There Will Be Blood— “I . . . drink . . . your . . . MILKSHAKE...
...It is true that there is no better actor in the world than Daniel Day-Lewis, so he deserves a waiver from the INS, even though he’s so not American that his father Cecil was actually the Poet Laureate of England...
...Day-Lewis simply copied the voice patterns of John Huston, specifi cally the John Huston who played the evil Noah Cross in Chinatown...
...Bardem was so excited by his triumph that he made out with his mother on national television...
...That’s fi ne, since nobody in America has ever heard of Marion Cotillard, either...
...What is different this year is that three of the four nonAmericans—Britons Day-Lewis and Swinton, and Spaniard Bardem—are playing Americans in movies set in the United States...
...It was nominated, too...
...Very little...
...For his role in the Oscar-triumphant No Country for Old Men, the Spanish actor Javier Bardem won as best supporting actor, even though mostly what he did was limp around, use the word “friendo” menacingly, and carry a magical oxygen tank that could blow holes in anything...
...The only interesting moment in his speech was when the camera cut to his wife, Rebecca Miller, who looked like she was wearing the wallpaper at a New Orleans bordello...
...Even more impressive than that bit of trivia is the method by which Day-Lewis the Younger fi gured out a way around the standard problem of English actors attempting American accents, which is that they stress the “r” too heavily...
...I can think of a dozen American actors who could have limped around in an oxygen tank with a Herman’s Hermit hairdo calling people “friendo...
...It was called Juno...
...For all Oscar voters knew, they were actually voting for the real Edith Piaf...
...But what if the cause is far simpler...
...And as for Tilda Swinton’s part, why not just hire Calista Flockhart if you want an insanely nervous anorexic with invisible skin...
...Genius...
...Better that than a younger girlfriend or a Ferrari convertible that he will crack up when his long hair blows into his eyes...
...com for all the hijinks...
...What if the Oscars, in a display of perverse artistic integrity, are simply determined to garland movies in which (and performers in whom) no one but a critic or a fi lm-industry professional has the slightest interest...
...Perhaps she and her roommates should take the Bardems out to dinner...
...Check out idrinkyourmilkshake...
Vol. 13 • March 2008 • No. 25
