The Oscars: Top of the awards

There may be other film awards, but they’re only the starters before the main course. By Stephen McGinty

AUDIENCES enraptured by The Artist, that love letter to Old Hollywood, will already be familiar with the type of Brylcreemed men and blushing women who met on the morning of 16 May, 1929, at the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles to raise a champagne glass to the year’s finest actors, writers and directors and so launch the Academy Awards. The 15 winners of the first ceremony had been notified three months before, with Emil Jannings scooping the best actor for his role in The Way of All Flesh. Afterwards the audience of 270 alighted to the Mayfair Hotel for the post awards party. The entrance fee was $5.

Times, as they say, have changed, but what has remained constant over the past 82 years is the power of the Academy Awards, or, as Bette Davis, is said to have dubbed the 13-inch art deco knight standing resplendent on a reel of film (after her first husband, the bandleader Harmon Oscar Nelson): the Oscars.

Yesterday the 6,000 members of the American Academy of Motion Picture Art and Science again announced the myriad of contenders for the golden statue, perhaps the most treasured and famous accolade in the arts. The biggest winner would appear to be film itself with the medium, old Hollywood or its bygone stars, the focus of the most highly nominated movies. The Artist, the silent, black-and-white film which celebrates the early days of Hollywood, won ten nominations, including best film, director, actor for French star Jean Dujardin and supporting actress for Berenice Bejo. The director of The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius, said: “Filming The Artist in Los Angeles was a dream come true, and to receive this recognition today is far beyond what I ever imagined.”

Hugo, the 3D movie directed by Martin Scorsese which is an ode to the invention of cinema, earned 11 nominations, with the majority in the technical categories, while My Week With Marilyn, about the making of The Prince and The Showgirl, earned a best actress nomination for Michelle Williams who played Marilyn Monroe and a best supporting actor nomination for Kenneth Branagh, who played Sir Laurence Olivier. Yesterday Branagh said: “It was a rare honour to play Sir Laurence Olivier. To be recognised by the Academy for doing so is overwhelming. I’m absolutely thrilled.”

While the American actress Meryl Streep earned her 17th nomination for playing the British Prime Minister in The Iron Lady, the British also did reasonably well with Gary Oldman nominated for Best Actor for George Smiley the spymaster in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The screenwriter, Peter Straughan, was nominated for best adapted screenplay for the British spy film, along with his wife, Bridget O’Connor, who died of cancer at the age of 49. He said: “I wish more than anything in the world that my wife – who did the lion’s share of the adaptation – could be here to enjoy this moment.”

Among the first to recognise the lucrative potential of the Academy Awards was the director Frank Capra, who said in 1936: “The Oscar is the most valuable, but least expensive, item of worldwide public relations ever invented by any industry.” While that may have been true 70 years ago, today studios spend millions in marketing in an attempt to secure a nomination and the same again to secure the statue. Yesterday Agata Kaczanowska, an entertainment analyst for IbisWorld, an industry researcher based in LA, said: “The studios increase their marketing efforts and people really do respond to the buzz.”

While the average boost a movie receives following Oscar nomination is between 15 to 19 per cent, last year’s winner, The King’s Speech, enjoyed a rise in box-office takings of 41 per cent on the first weekend after the film was nominated. From 2006 to 2010, best-picture winners on average had $57.2 million in box-office sales heading into the nominations and a further $42.9 million afterwards.

John Archer, the former head of Scottish Screen, said: “The Baftas have got bigger, the Golden Globes are funkier, but the Oscars still shine brightest: they happen in the heart of Hollywood, the unrivalled centre of the film industry in the West. Everything else just leads up to them.” But Mark Millar, the comic writer behind the hit movie Kick-Ass, countered: “I know why the industry wants an Oscar. It’s because it’s a nice second chance for a good movie that maybe got overlooked. It’s also a chance for studios to re-release something and get paid all over again. But I’m baffled by the hysteria around it like we’re talking about a general election or something. It’s an ornament, essentially.”