Thursday, January 25, 2007
Hail to 'The Queen'
Now I understand what all the buzz is about over Helen Mirren's performance in the movie The Queen. Amazing, spell-binding. Go ahead and give her the Oscar now.
I haven't seen all of the other nominated performances, but I find it hard to imagine how they could be any better (or even as good). Mirren nails it as Queen Elizabeth II in the days after the death of Princess Diana.
The really good thing about it is that it is so good even the Anglophobic voters of the Academy can't deny it, as they have so often in the past. The only times they have rewarded British actors is when they have known they'd be laughed at mercilessly for bypassing a hands-down winner -- like Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai.
Of course, there was a least some tittering when they snubbed Peter O'Toole's performance in Lawrence of Arabia. Hello? The Best Picture winner was a one-man, one-character show, and the actor playing that man/character wasn't the Best Actor? How does that happen?
And Richard Burton never won an Oscar? Ludicrous. There are endless other examples of the slighting of the British film thespians -- including Mirren herself when she was nominated, and should have won, for Gosford Park, and the amazing Imelda Staunton in Vera Drake -- but not this time. She'll win, along with three African-American actors, shutting out white-American actors for the first time in a long time, maybe forever.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, as they used to say on "Seinfeld." Maybe it will alert the Hollywood community to the fact that Ashton Kutcher and Vince Vaughn are not the cornerstones of the next generation of esteemed American actors. And, try as he may, Adam Sandler isn't, either.
(For the record, don't throw Sir Anthony Hopkins in my face on this subject. He never won for his fine "British" roles, only the one where he portrayed an American psycho/cannibal.)
I haven't seen all of the other nominated performances, but I find it hard to imagine how they could be any better (or even as good). Mirren nails it as Queen Elizabeth II in the days after the death of Princess Diana.
The really good thing about it is that it is so good even the Anglophobic voters of the Academy can't deny it, as they have so often in the past. The only times they have rewarded British actors is when they have known they'd be laughed at mercilessly for bypassing a hands-down winner -- like Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai.
Of course, there was a least some tittering when they snubbed Peter O'Toole's performance in Lawrence of Arabia. Hello? The Best Picture winner was a one-man, one-character show, and the actor playing that man/character wasn't the Best Actor? How does that happen?
And Richard Burton never won an Oscar? Ludicrous. There are endless other examples of the slighting of the British film thespians -- including Mirren herself when she was nominated, and should have won, for Gosford Park, and the amazing Imelda Staunton in Vera Drake -- but not this time. She'll win, along with three African-American actors, shutting out white-American actors for the first time in a long time, maybe forever.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, as they used to say on "Seinfeld." Maybe it will alert the Hollywood community to the fact that Ashton Kutcher and Vince Vaughn are not the cornerstones of the next generation of esteemed American actors. And, try as he may, Adam Sandler isn't, either.
(For the record, don't throw Sir Anthony Hopkins in my face on this subject. He never won for his fine "British" roles, only the one where he portrayed an American psycho/cannibal.)
