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. 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. 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 political-style campaigning for the prizes, and the general withdrawal of affect from once-starry-eyed consumers of show business.
These may all have contributed to the ratings woes. But what if the cause is far simpler? 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 film-industry professional has the slightest interest?
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. Bardem was so excited by his triumph that he made out with his mother on national television. 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.
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!”–has already entered the annals of camp. (Check out idrinkyourmilkshake.com for all the hijinks.)
Day-Lewis, a genuinely great actor, is 50 years old and has long hair and a pair of earrings. Maybe the Oscar he won will serve as his comfort object during his midlife crisis. Better that than a younger girlfriend or a Ferrari convertible that he will crack up when his long hair blows into his eyes. 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.
Marion Cotillard took the best-actress 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. That’s fine, since nobody in America has ever heard of Marion Cotillard, either. For all Oscar voters knew, they were actually voting for the real Edith Piaf.
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. Swinton, it is said, lives in a ménage à trois. Perhaps she and her roommates should take the Bardems out to dinner.
None of the acting winners is an American. Aside from giving Tom Tancredo heart palpitations, and raising traditional fears about the loose mores of Europeans and actors, what does this portend? Very little. 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. What is different this year is that three of the four non-Americans–Britons Day-Lewis and Swinton, and Spaniard Bardem–are playing Americans in movies set in the United States. This is a grotesque violation of the spirit of immigration law. I mean, are these really jobs Americans couldn’t or wouldn’t do? 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.” And as for Tilda Swinton’s part, why not just hire Calista Flockhart if you want an insanely nervous anorexic with invisible skin?
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. Even more impressive than that bit of trivia is the method by which Day-Lewis the Younger figured out a way around the standard problem of English actors attempting American accents, which is that they stress the “r” too heavily. (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.) Day-Lewis simply copied the voice patterns of John Huston, specifically the John Huston who played the evil Noah Cross in Chinatown. By doing a John Huston impression, he escaped the accent trap. Genius!
There was a movie this year everybody liked a lot. It was called Juno. It was nominated, too. Once it would have won. Once we might have cared.
John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic.
