THE ENVELOPE - AND THE CHICKEN - PLEASE...

Mark Mordue shows how to be hilariously opinionated and still get it all wrong in his preview story for the 2002 Oscars, revived here for 'posterity.'

Film Review Archive

You know the schtick: the facelifts, stiff-as-a-pinewood-box suits and the ghastly dresses that are all tits ‘n’ arse sensational (and that’s just the journalists); those scripted ‘unscripted jokes’ and other autocue tragedies; the high stink of glamour in all its fantastical glory; the odd dash of genuine emotion that cuts through all the bullshit; and fame, fame, fame so thick and cheesy on the red carpet you want to crane that neck of yours right through the television screen just to see who’s there for yourself.

Oooo yeah, baby, it’s the 74th Annual Academy Awards.

With Ms Whoopi Goldberg hosting (how come she’s so much smarter than any film she ever acts in?) and lifetime prizes on the boil for Sydney Poitier and Robert Redford, two of Hollywood’s most deserving men of honour.

Are you really going to miss that kind of high-powered action?  

Let’s face it, like a billion plus others, YOU are going be there.

Best find a friend with the biggest TV set in town and prepare to turn it up loud, with your choice of pizza and pretzels (take it easy George), coke and beers at the ready. It’s going to be heaven in takeaway and home delivery land on this night of nights. So wear loose trousers and place your bets on what will certainly be a wildcard evening for the gamblers amongst you.

I just pray they don’t start the Academy Awards the same way they did the Golden Globes - with a song especially written for the occasion. Celebrities were barely glimpsed during the opening broadcast of ‘the Gee Gees’ as they arrived to a girl singer rhyming ‘Hanks’ with ‘tanks’ and ‘George Clooney’ with ‘Mickey Rooney’ - at least that’s how it sounded to me and believe me it sounded pretty bad.

I much prefer those traditionally meaningless hellos, the mindless waving to the camera, the pit-stop interview gratuities, the searing insights on every sequined siren and bow-tied bad boy, someone acting crazy or ‘independent’ for the cameras (Bjork as an emu maybe? those wacky guys behind South Park wearing dresses again?), the brief asides for world peace with a thank you to God as if He reads People regularly (sometimes you’ve got to wonder), not to mention a lot of hot air about the other ‘wonderful’ nominees they want to walk all over come the opening of that envelope.

As an Australian I will be participating from Sydney (hi), and I am sure you can guess where my sympathies lie – with Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman, Moulin Rouge and a Downunder invasion of the USA entertainment industry that even us Aussies are finding hard to believe.

It must raise questions in America as to how your nation can protect its culture, the very flavor of what it is as a country, from the onslaught of so many laconic, rugged charmers and earthy-yet-sexy idiosyncrats now dominating your film and television world.

Yes it’s all true: Australia is filled with tough, honorable, handsome men and eccentric, horny, stylish women. Perhaps it’s time America to give in and just say, ‘G’day you bastards.’

Our successful presence at the Golden Globes in January suggests very promising things are on the way for us folk in the Southern Hemisphere. In Sydney we’re still high from the Olympics, so for this year’s Academy Awards we’re hoping it’s “gold, gold, gold” again for Australia (which means you too New Zealand) (it really is our ‘Middle Kingdom’) as our nation invades the Oscars and rools the world.

Russell Crowe looks a dead cert for Best Actor in Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind - the true story of John Forbes Nash Jnr, schizophenic, code-breaker and Nobel-prize winning mathematician. Try as I might, though, I can never get the sight of Ron Howard out of my head without thinking it’s Ritchie Cunningham dressed up to look old. It’s weird that he’s become the USA’s reserve-grade Spielberg, and part of an armada of modern American directors trying to recapture the dream magic of Frank Capra at his height. Happy Days? Maybe it’s the right place to come from now America wants to return to the 1950s again since September 11. But for all Howard’s undeniable and growing abilities as a director, I think the earnestness of his work tends to swallow the talent on display.

That said, you Americans love a great ‘spaz act’ when it comes to serious acting and with Geoffrey Rush’s Shine as the template another nutcracker from Russ should prove us Aussies can do genius lunatic at the drop of a Yankee hat (or Jack Nicholson beanie)!

Whether this second Oscar in a row will stop Russ from dining casually at Oportos takeaway chicken in Kings Cross remains to be seen, but the man looks cool with a nine o’clock shadow on his surly face and a greasy bag in his hand - and you can’t beat that for star power in a democracy! Russ was caught out like this looking real casual recently at ‘the Cross’ – a red light district near where he lives in Sydney. A tabloid photographer snapped him purchasing ‘Portugese-style chicken’ while Tom and Penelope were in town that very same night dining up-market at the exclusive Ariel restaurant after the mostly well-attended opening for Vanilla Sky. Seems Russ had better things to do at home, like chew on a drumstick and watch a video (I couldn’t see through the plastic bag but it looked like Shrek).

To us in Sydney, this tabloid moment is pure Russ. Fat, greasy, slothfully dressed in his flannelette shirt, kinda cranky and completely one of us – at least until he gets his act together for another movie. Though we have been concerned about his increasing propensity for commonsense wisdoms (“just remember folks it’s only a movie”) that may see him recite all of The Man From Snowy River as his acceptance speech this time around. I guess, as you Yankees might say, that’s just Russ ‘keeping it real’ (and boring sometimes) but he might want to resist another homily from the bloke-pit.

Nonetheless we love the bugger! Every time he abuses a press conference his popularity goes through the roof here. Even his run-in with a producer of the BAFTA awards in England seemed like good old wild colonial boy passion – “Yeah I gave him a poke” – after his speech had been cut in half for the sake of the broadcast. Then it came out he had actually pinned Malcolm Gerrie up against a wall while swearing violently. To Russ’s credit he phoned Gerrie at home direct on his mobile, no interlocutors or spin masters to ease him back into the situation, apologized, and then spent another fifteen minutes chatting to Gerrie’s son about the making of Gladiator. All bad feelings dealt with on both sides and apology accepted.

It’s this directness and the nobler elements that underline it that makes Russ so popular at home. Aussies have especially enjoyed Russ’s valiant defence of Nicole Kidman during her breakup with Tom Cruise. Our Russ was happy to flirt with rumors about his and Nicole’s ‘relationship’, which seems to be a pretty good friendship and nothing more - but why let that get in the way of stirring up some jealousy from her ex-hubbie when you’re on a few chat shows and the lurid hosts suggest otherwise? Yeah we liked Russ a lot for that: for a form of macho that’s decent and slyly humorous and which shows you can count on Russ when the chips are down. Hey man, pass the drumstick!

If her personal year was one of hard luck and heartbreak, Nicole Kidman’s professional career has been nothing short of stellar (I should write songs for the Golden Globes) – in 2002 Nicole Kidman has emerged as an enduring and bona fide superstar with The Others and Moulin Rouge, for which she is nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. Her own appearances on international talk shows have meanwhile demonstrated she is intelligent, kooky, wounded, stylish, and a somewhat surreptitious wit herself – in short the kind of woman people have fallen in love with everywhere she goes. Who was that guy again she used to be married to - Tom Vanilla, oh yeah.

It’s reckoned that Nicole will have an uphill battle for the Best Actress Award against sentimental favorite Sissy Spacek, who plays the mother of a tragically killed young man in Todd Field’s In The Bedroom (forget the Bergman comparisons, this is suburban poetry and surely one of the most astounding Hollywood directorial debuts since Terence Malick’s Badlands). Spacek is superb as an angry woman bottled with dark grieving, but it’s Tom Wilkinson who really owns In The Bedroom as the mystified father on a slow, bothered trajectory through trauma and on into the darkness of his actions. I don’t want to admit it, but I think Wilkinson can beat Russ this year, I really do. I also think he deserves to.

Spacek effectively occupies a background role to Wilkinson that more truthfully should put her in a Best Supporting Actress category if there was any logic to the awards process. Nonetheless she has won Best Actress at the Golden Globes already, and puts in an undeniably moody, stinging performance - she sure as hell knows how to smoke a cigarette on screen, that’s for sure. Every puff burns a little more furiously, a little more like agony rising. What next, Lady Macbeth?

Despite Spacek’s glimpses of pained, vengeful energy, Nicole Kidman gives me the feeling she just might sneak through to victory on Moulin Rouge’s hyper-charged theatrics. Her only other obstacle is Dame Judi Dench in Iris, a patchy, pseudo-poetic film vastly deepened by the acting of herself and Kate Winslet as the great British novelist Iris Murdoch descending into Alzheimers disease. Moulin Rouge is a better film, and a broader showcase for Kidman, which is why I think she can and should win the Best Actress award. As she strides towards the dais looking glamorous and real, you can guarantee the cameras will cut to that cad Tom Vanilla as he applies his smile tectonically (boo hiss from across Australia) and Penelope Crescendo holds his arm, clapping generously. I hate to be a cynic, but I don’t think they go to method acting school to learn how to behave like that.

For the Best Picture award In the Bedroom is the understated danger (and dark horse in betting circles) to Baz Luhrman’s ambitiously overblown Moulin Rouge, while A Beautiful Mind looks like the conventional favorite that might stabilize everyone who freaked out because they saw Mulholland Drive. Could Robert Altman, though, that grumpy master of the cinema experience as a sarcastic orchestral piece, sneak off with both the Best Film and Best Director awards for Gosford Park? It’s possible, even if Ridley Scott has come in late and hard with all guns blazing amid the finely tuned chaos of Black Hawk Down.

What a competition that is. I can’t wait to see the result. Though I’m part of an international audience that always gets appalled at the way some great old genius (Altman this year?) (no one’s gonna fuck with Scott, let alone Russ!) is swept offstage with an orchestral broom before his or her speech is done, especially after we have laboured through so many ‘comic’ set pieces and moronic patter that has been splitting our sides not at all. Time and again organizers of these major events forget we actually watch to see something excessive, human, and over indulgent occur – it’s what they call ‘water cooler’ television, and it’s actually why we tune in apart from simply getting the results. That’s why the 2001 Golden Globes were so fantastic: between Al Pacino’s hair scratching ramblings and Liz Taylor’s fruity presence, it was one of the most entertaining awards ceremonies anybody had seen in years. Too bad they tightened up the show this year and put unpredictability to rest for 2002. Let’s pray Whoopi kicks some ass!

As an Australian I must also say ‘Nic’s good mate’ Naomi Watts was unlucky not to get a Best Actress nomination – even if she was on an outside loop in David Lynch’s eroto-headspinner Mulholland Drive. When they flash to him during the Best Director nominations, you should dig Lynch’s currenthairdo: Presley pompadour meets the spooky old lady next door. Classy and strange, this guy looks like he cooks people and buries them in his backyard then makes dinner for his grandma. Can America accept such weirdness and admit its greatness I wonder?

As for that last partisan gripe for Naomi Watts, I’m not really too worried – she will no doubt get another shot. We’ve also got a whole swathe of other Australians in the wings. Rachel Griffiths, Simon Baker, Frances O’Connor, Judy Davis, Eric Bana, Hugh Jackman, Miranda Otto and Heath Ledger for a start, not to mention directors like Peter Weir, Scott Hicks, Jane Campion, Gillian Armstrong and P.J. Hogan, as well as a new figure like Robert Luketic (who did Legally Blonde). This year’s Sundance sensations, the directors Rachel Perkins - whose One Night The Moon proves Australia is single handedly bringing back the offbeat musical - and Paul Goldman, whose Australian Rules is igniting a load of questions back home about race relations and cultural identity - may well be there to party with ‘our gang’ at the end of the night as well. Mel Gibson, who has made a bad habit of revealing his patronizing attitude to his Australian past, will also be likely grease up to his history this year ‘mate’ (we might have to grin and bear it back home).

But the amazing thing about all this isn’t just how well Australia has done at the Academy Awards. It’s the depth of the talent, in front of and behind the cameras, and the links between Hollywood successes and our own cinema identity in projects as fine as Chopper and Lantana, films that mark a renaissance in the narrative and visual strength of what Australian cinema can do. So I can’t wait to watch the winners and the losers up there on Oscar night because they’re all on a lifetime roll and I’m happy and even proud to be along for the ride with my fellow countrymen.

That said I will be laying my bets carefully and without undue prejudice. By the way Russ, if you do win, you owe me a chickenburger, Portugese style. I like junk food too you know.