The Screening Spires
Come Sunday, the Oscars are hitting town. Expect much excited bleating as the elite of the world’s entertainment journalists hit Los Angeles and realise this is their one chance every year to combine their favourite pastimes: scurrilous gossip, corporate marketing disguised as news, and pressing the flesh. We will hear endless sermonising on this being the ‘gayest’ Oscars ever, with Capote, Brokeback Mountain and Transamerica all in serious contention.
Expect much interest also in this being the most politically engaged year since the days of Watergate and Vietnam, due to George Clooney’s mutation into the most amiable libertarian since John Stewart Mill (by the way, you really, really need to see Good Night, and Good Luck). However, the real story has gone largely unnoticed amongst all our beloved media nodes: the dominance of independent film over this year’s Oscar nominations.
The Academy Awards have traditionally always been the big studios’ annual mutual appreciation society, an enormous brand awareness scheme on behalf of the sinister conglomerates who payroll them.
Why in God’s name would they reward those pesky little films that slip under the multiplexes’ lowest-common- denominator policy? Yes, there is the depressing fact that 95 per cent of these supposed ‘indie’ productions are at least distributed, and most of the time funded, directly or indirectly by the same machine that churns out guff like Cheaper by the Dozen 2, a film somewhat different in intent and execution to Syriana.
So what does this mean for the film world? I am not in the business of prophecy; how certain must it have seemed that every film of the future would be like Easy Rider in 1969? Or that the David Puttnam’s “The British are coming!” in 1983 was more than just demented hyperbole after the bizarre success of the execrable Chariots of Fire? But once, just this once, let us dream together.
Imagine a world where, instead of weekly emerging from the cinema severely depressed after another helping of the artistic equivalent of Dairylea, we skip out of the joint with a goofy grin on our face. Instead of bloated behemoths costing hundreds of millions of pounds, let alone dollars, we see small, compact, neat films; you know the kind, the ones with a hint of integrity as to their own material and holding the audience in something more than the contempt we are usually held in.
Are this year’s awards the first step on this path of glory, or will we simply get fooled again?
2nd Mar 2006