And the winner is... Film-makers love awards.
They love handing awards out.
They even love making films about awards.
But above all, they love winning awards,
and the most coveted are those given
by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,
the Oscars.
The highest award within our power to bestow.
2019 sees the 91st Academy Awards,
and speculation is as fevered as ever
as to which of this year's contenders
will scoop the big prizes.
# It's too late to turn back now... #
BRAKES SCREECH, HORN HONKS
Throw!
GUNSHOT
# I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all. #
Stop worrying and think how nice
that statuette's going to look on your mantelpiece.
Over the course of nine decades,
patterns have emerged in Oscar's tastes.
He prefers some kinds of films to others.
They add up to a set of mini genres in their own right,
with their own rules and hidden structures.
Are you not entertained? Are you not entertained?
And if you can nail those,
well, then, it's time to start practising your acceptance speech.
Thank you for believing in me.
So, ladies and gentlemen, roll out the red carpet
and take your seats because, tonight,
I'll be revealing the secrets of winning an Oscar.
And the Oscar goes to...
Yes!
This programme contains very strong language
Good evening, Mr Kane.
# There is a man! There is a man!
# A certain man! A certain man!
# And for the poor, you may be sure that he'll do all he can... #
Now, bear with me for a moment, while I get a few things off my chest.
All awards are essentially foolish, but none more so than the Oscars.
For proof, consider this.
In 1942, Citizen Kane didn't win the Oscar for Best Picture,
but in 1990, Driving Miss Daisy did.
Just think about that for a moment,
and try to imagine a world in which Driving Miss Daisy
was the very best film you were going to see that year...
What are you doing? I'm trying to drive you to the store.
..or even the best Morgan Freeman film of the year.
In fact, when it first opened in the US in December 1989,
Driving Miss Daisy wasn't even
the best Morgan Freeman film of the week.
Amen! CROWD: Amen!
That was Ed Zwick's Glory,
a drama about the American Civil War's
first all-black volunteer company,
but Oscar thought otherwise.
# My Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord... #
Ask any film fan how seriously you should take the Academy Awards,
and chances are they'll remind you that Charlie Chaplin,
Orson Welles...
They've been making statues for 2,000 years
and I've only been buying for five.
..David Lynch...
Arrangements are being made and I will meet you
at the private Portland airport.
OK, Gordon.
..and most famously, Alfred Hitchcock,
never won a Best Director Oscar. Thank you.
Nor did Howard Hawks, Stanley Kubrick,
or so far, Jane Campion.
In 2014, Steve McQueen became the first black film-maker
ever to bag a Best Picture Oscar, with 12 Years A Slave,
although he was beaten to Best Director,
as was Barry Jenkins,
so if Spike Lee wins this year, that'll be a first.
Women have traditionally been shut out of the festivities, too.
It wasn't until 2010 that Kathryn Bigelow
finally broke the glass ceiling in the Best Director category
with The Hurt Locker.
This year, the Best Director list is once again all-male.
Worth noting, too, that no animated feature
has ever won Best Picture.
And if Roma gets the top prize this year,
it'll be the first film made entirely in a foreign language
ever to do so.
The Academy Awards are hardly cutting-edge.
And yet, in the past few years,
I've found myself cheering Oscar Best Picture winners,
like Moonlight,
and most recently, The Shape Of Water,
suggesting that either I'm getting soft
or the Oscars are getting better.
And like it or not, the Oscars do mean something,
not least because they've created a canon of films
about which we can have a good old-fashioned argument.
And underpinning that canon is a whole set of secrets of cinema,
because certain kinds of films, certain themes,
particular types of character, win again and again.
So, let's take a look at Oscar's favourites,
beginning with the oldest of all.
At the 1979 Academy Awards,
the two most talked-about nominations
were for Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter
and Hal Ashby's Coming Home.
I'm not a child, man.
Both took on the most painful and divisive event
in recent American history - the Vietnam War.
Now, while there'd been a whole raft of violent movies,
like Deliverance and Straw Dogs,
that could be read as thinly veiled allegories,
honouring films like Coming Home and The Deer Hunter,
which faced the traumas of Vietnam head-on,
looked like a daring move on the part of the Academy.
But in fact, they were variations on a favourite Oscar formula -
the "war is hell" film.
It was a film about World War I,
William Wellman's Wings,
that triumphed at the debut ceremony
in 1929.
And while it may be 50 years older,
Wings has a lot in common with The Deer Hunter.
Both films begin by establishing their main characters
in their pre-war civilian lives.
Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and John Savage
work at a steel plant.
For all the drinking and swearing, in their own way,
they're as untested and innocent as Charles Rogers
and Richard Arlen's love rivals in Wings.
What unites these characters is that they have no idea
what's about to hit them.
The carnage and suffering of their military service
is depicted in unflinching detail.
These films have much in common with rites-of-passage movies,
tapping deep into the idea of loss of innocence.
That isn't the kind of theme that preoccupies
the makers of popular war films,
like The Guns Of Navarone or Where Eagles Dare,
but Awards winners have to deliver more
than men-on-a-mission thrills.
They have to say something about the human condition -
usually, that war IS hell and even its heroes are martyrs.
Note how many Oscar winners climax with the death of a protagonist
or a significant major character.
Look at All Quiet On The Western Front,
which won the third-ever Best Picture award in 1930.
BULLET RICOCHETS Lew Ayres' young hero
is almost casually potted by a sniper
as he reaches for a butterfly.
It's tragic and symbolic.
In The Deer Hunter, Cimino makes great play
of the titular veteran lining up but then sparing his prey
because of his traumatic experiences in battle -
another symbolic moment.
GUNSHOT ECHOES
OK?
So, for all its supposedly edgy and challenging subject matter,
The Deer Hunter draws on reliable Oscar-winning precedents,
as does Coming Home.
Luke?
Can I come in?
On the surface, this looks like a very different kind of film.
How are you doing?
# Living is easy with eyes closed... #
It centres on the romance between Jane Fonda's military wife
and Jon Voight's paraplegic veteran, and it's set in California,
but it also echoes an earlier Oscar-garlanded film
that was a huge hit with audiences, as well.
Well, the old hometown hasn't changed very much, has it? No.
William Wyler's The Best Years Of Our Lives
is the story of three servicemen returning home after World War II.
Although it's set entirely on civvy street,
like Coming Home, it's a powerful study
of the cost of war.
Cheers! Fredric March's infantryman-cum-banker Al
struggles with alcohol.
Aren't you drinking?
Gadorsky! Get out of that plane!
And the post-traumatic stress of Air Force captain Fred,
played by Dana Andrews,
is vividly evoked using music and sound effects.
DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS Gadorsky! Wake up! Gadorsky!
It's burning up! Get out! Get out!
I've learned how to take this harness off.
Ex-sailor Homer is the most obvious casualty of the three,
having lost his hands and then had them replaced by prosthetic hooks.
Nonprofessional actor Harold Russell was an actual double-amputee
as a result of his own military service.
The film garnered an extraordinary eight Oscars,
including one honorary award.
Bullshit!
Coming Home scored just three,
with Jon Voight and Jane Fonda scooping Best Actor and Actress,
alongside a Best Screenplay win.
Now, in my opinion, the fact that
Coming Home didn't win Best Picture in '79
and The Deer Hunter did,
is also one of the great injustices of Oscar history.
Say something else, fuck!
I am not the enemy.
But perhaps the victory of The Deer Hunter,
a film which was dogged with allegations of
hysterical racism and exploitative xenophobia,
tells us something else about the Academy Awards -
that flag-waving is always a favourite.
In 1987, nearly a decade after The Deer Hunter's triumph,
Platoon won four Oscars,
including Best Picture and Best Director for Oliver Stone,
who, unlike Cimino, had seen active combat in Vietnam,
earning a Bronze Star and Purple Heart.
Platoon ticks a typical "war is hell" box
by focusing on Charlie Sheen's
newly arrived infantry volunteer Chris Taylor,
a figure of innocence and a clear stand-in for Stone himself.
Chris is quickly caught up in a highly symbolic conflict
between Tom Berenger's brutal Staff Sergeant Barnes
and Willem Dafoe's kindly and humane Sergeant Elias.
You're humping too much stuff, troop.
You don't need half this shit.
I'll haul it for you, but next time, you check with me first, all right?
OK.
In fact, the film is so explicitly symbolic
that when Elias is betrayed,
he meets his death in a cruciform pose,
as if Dafoe was auditioning for his subsequent lead role
in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation Of Christ.
Unlike many previous winners,
Platoon featured no scenes set back at home
and focused almost exclusively
on the tripwire life-or-death struggles
of its male characters.
And although they're very different movies,
Stone's film laid the ground for a much more recent Oscar winner.
The Hurt Locker swaps the jungles of Southeast Asia
for dusty, bleached-out Baghdad.
Unlike Platoon, it's not a movie about loss of innocence.
The explosive ordnance disposal team it follows
are experienced, highly trained soldiers,
and much of the film's fascination lies in the detail
of how they disarm a range of deadly devices.
Oh, boy.
But see how, like Stone's movie,
The Hurt Locker vividly evokes the day-to-day job of a soldier,
the daily grind of dangerous assignments.
And despite Bigelow's documentary-like approach,
the film is still peppered with moments
of familiar cinematic symbolism.
Is this fiery inferno reminding us that war is hell?
We've already seen that the first and third Best Picture Oscars
went to war films, but the second winner, in 1930,
established a very different Academy favourite.
Not only was The Broadway Melody
the first musical to win Best Picture,
it was also the first talkie to do so.
Queenie, I don't want you to answer me like that again.
Then keep your nose out of my business.
Well, your business is my business.
The Broadway Melody proved the perfect vehicle
to showcase the possibilities of full-sound pictures -
a talking, singing, dancing, dramatic sensation.
# Look at them in their places Look at the fancy laces
# Look at them as they smile all sorrow away... #
Since then, the musical has remained a firm favourite with the Academy.
Over the years, the Best Picture award
has gone to such splashy, super-produced hits
as Gigi, West Side Story,
The Sound Of Music, Oliver!, and Chicago.
APPLAUSE
Now, it's worth reminding ourselves
that the actual subjects of these films were,
respectively, sexual grooming, juvenile gang violence,
Nazi oppression, child slavery, and a murder trial.
But let's be honest, we tend to forget all that heavy stuff
and concentrate instead on the delights of musical winners -
the songs and dances, and often the cutting-edge
and even experimental cinematic techniques.
Like the 20-minute ballet
featuring homages to Impressionist painters,
which Gene Kelly cooked up in Vincente Minnelli's
An American In Paris...
..or the superb on-location choreography
of Jerome Robbins in Robert Wise's West Side Story.
And of course, that dizzying mountain shot
from the opening of The Sound Of Music.
# The hills are alive with the sound of music... #
It doesn't matter that many of these winners
were originally created for the stage.
Translated to the big screen,
they become a showcase for what cinema can do.
How can the Academy resist?
Because the Oscars are an industry award,
it's no surprise that films set within the entertainment business
appeal to voters.
Now, of course, musicals are the very definition of show business,
which in turn provides the perfect material
for a song and dance film.
The Artist, which triumphed in 2011,
followed in the footsteps of Singin' In The Rain
by taking us back to the birth of sound,
using the techniques of silent cinema
to create a drama in which the key language is music.
Among the film's five Oscar wins, including Best Picture,
was one for Ludovic Bource's score.
Sometimes, the dancing in cinema isn't done by the actors,
but by the camera.
SOARING MUSIC
MUSIC STOPS ABRUPTLY You OK, man?
Take Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Birdman,
the Best Picture winner in 2015.
Do you know where to go?
Yeah, I know where to go.
Here, Michael Keaton plays Riggan Thomson,
a washed-up actor struggling to reinvent his career
years after his prime playing a superhero in the 1990s.
Sound familiar?
Although there are no song and dance numbers in Birdman,
the camera is choreographed with a dexterity
that would put a spring in Gene Kelly's step.
The film uses digital technology
to create what looks like a seamless and often spectacular single shot,
twirling around the set from scene to scene
with the grace of a ballerina.
Ladies and gentlemen, I owe my entire success
to beef, iron and wine. HE BLOWS A RASPBERRY
At the heart of so many of these showbiz pictures
is the fickle nature of fame and the sense that,
almost like a law of physics,
for new stars to rise, others have to fall.
In 1932, a film about movies - What Price Hollywood? -
scored a nomination for Adela Rogers St Johns
and Jane Murfin in the category of Best Writing, Original Story.
It didn't win, but that story was fairly quickly recycled
in a more elaborate form,
and went on to be remade three times over the next eight decades.
And now we arrive at the climax of the annual dinner
of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
It's been a magnet for nominations in every one of its incarnations.
We have already applauded with our hearts as well as our hands,
Miss Vicki Lester.
Ladies and gentlemen,
when something like this happens to you
and you try to tell how you feel about it,
you find that, out of all the words in the world...
Just two stick in your mind - thank you.
And all I can do is to say them to you from my heart and...
AUDIENCE MEMBER APPLAUDS LOUDLY
Hey, let go of my goddamn arm!
Hey, let go of my arm!
Christ! I'm sorry, baby, I can't find my place.
They don't seem to have a place for me down here.
Interestingly, the first incarnation of A Star Is Born was not a musical.
It was set in the world of acting and didn't feature songs.
Those arrived in the second version, directed by George Cukor
and starring Judy Garland and James Mason,
which took this behind-the-scenes tale
and added the musical element -
a theme that was picked up in the 1976 Barbra Streisand version,
in which the heroine changed from being an actor to a singer.
Evergreen duly won the Oscar for Best Song.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
The latest incarnation, directed by Bradley Cooper,
who stars alongside pop icon Lady Gaga,
also stays in this musical world, and once again,
it's attracted a clutch of Oscar nominations.
# Tell me something good
# Are you happy in this modern world?
# Or do you need more? #
What's significant is that a story that began life
as an expose of the truth about Hollywood
turned almost organically from a drama into a musical,
as if any film about Hollywood would eventually break into song.
# Gonna give America the English Derby cup
# He's gonna give America the English Derby cup
# I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy
# Yankee Doodle, do or die... #
It's no coincidence that the Best Actor and Best Actress awards
have often gone to stars playing other stars,
whether real or fictional.
Such roles provide the opportunity to do a song and dance onstage
and demonstrate heartache and tragedy offstage.
Using his own hoofing and warbling skills,
James Cagney won in 1943
as real-life song and dance man George M Cohan
in Yankee Doodle Dandy,
while Barbra Streisand shared the only ever joint Best Actress award
as vaudeville legend Fanny Brice in Funny Girl.
# Don't tell me not to live Just sit and putter
# Life's candy and the sun's a ball of butter
# Don't bring around a cloud to rain on my parade... #
What did you get me a guitar for?
Cos I like the way you sing.
# Well, I was born a coal miner's daughter... #
Sissy Spacek and Reese Witherspoon
both triumphed playing country stars,
respectively Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter
and June Carter in Walk The Line.
# I dropped a nickel in a jukebox just to hear it play... #
And 2019 has seen Rami Malek nominated
for his portrayal of Freddie Mercury,
with Bohemian Rhapsody in contention for five Oscars,
including Best Picture.
# Mama
# Just killed a man... #
But you don't always have to play a big name to win big.
Sometimes, small can be beautiful.
Let's call this genre "ordinary people"
in homage to Robert Redford's debut film as a director,
which won a handful of Oscars in 1981,
including Best Picture and Best Director.
It's a weighty examination of how a family reacts
to the death of one son and the attempted suicide of another,
the film that American critic Roger Ebert astutely praised
for sidestepping the sophisticated suburban soap opera
it could easily have become.
It's cold out here.
You should put that on, or do you want a sweater?
Do I need one?
Key to its success are some great performances,
not least Mary Tyler Moore,
one of the biggest TV stars of the '60s and '70s,
known previously for playing lovable, ditzy city girls,
but here cast against type as an uptight, middle-class mother
frozen by grief.
You know, erm, that animal next door,
that Pepper or Pippin - whatever his name is... Pippin. Pippin.
Pippin. ..is not a very friendly dog.
I don't care what Mr McGreery says.
What he really wanted was the retriever down the street.
Every time that dog comes into this back yard and I try to get him out...
HE BARKS LIKE A DOG
In some respects, Ordinary People fits neatly
into that group of films in which the Academy,
whose membership is disproportionately weighted toward actors,
rewards an actor for their debut stint behind the camera
because, as we all know, what all actors really want to do is direct.
Think of Kevin Costner's triumph directing Dances With Wolves...
But they'll never take our freedom!
..or Mel Gibson winning big with Braveheart.
I came here to take my son home.
And I realise he already is home.
Ordinary People followed another dysfunctional family saga,
Kramer Vs Kramer, which had scooped Best Picture the previous year.
Social dramas have often been rewarded
in the acting categories,
with Oscars going to performers like Halle Berry in Monster's Ball
or Mo'Nique in Precious,
both of which deal with tough issues in a gritty, realistic manner.
But to win Best Picture often takes something a little lighter.
If you ask me real nice, I might put that bag up there for you.
In 1935, Frank Capra's It Happened One Night
became the first movie to sweep the board at the Oscars,
winning Best Picture, Best Director,
Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay.
The film's success was a surprise.
Claudette Colbert was so convinced she wasn't going to win
that she was heading off on a cross-country rail trip
on the night of the ceremony.
Studio boss Harry Cohn had to send someone
to drag her off the train when it turned out she'd won.
Cleverly, It Happened One Night
deftly combined sharp social commentary
with crowd-pleasing screwball comedy,
in much the same way that Capra's It's A Wonderful Life
mixed film noir with sentimental drama.
HE SNORES LOUDLY
Gable plays a working-class reporter,
and Colbert, a spoiled socialite.
When they're thrown together on a bus journey,
their two worlds collide and sparks fly.
Why, you ungrateful brat.
All aboard! All aboard!
It may have become a rom-com classic,
but It Happened One Night was made at the height of the Depression
and the anxieties of the time are clearly on show
in the hardship of the people in trailer parks and bus depots.
You know, there's something about your manner.
It's like you...you're trying to toy with me.
That's right, Aurora.
I'm playing with you. No, this is the element.
This is exactly... Do you want to play, Aurora?
50 years later, we find a similar interplay between comedy and drama
in the 1984 Best Picture winner Terms Of Endearment.
Here, the uptight heroine, played by Shirley MacLaine,
and the cheeky, straight-talking ex-astronaut,
played by Jack Nicholson,
spar in a manner which echoes Gable and Colbert.
The characters are older, but the banter is, at times,
strikingly similar.
Like its predecessor,
Terms Of Endearment won a clutch of big awards,
including Best Picture, and Director for James L Brooks,
Actress for Shirley MacLaine, and Supporting Actor for Nicholson.
# Fly me to the moon! #
Compare these bedroom scenes from the two films.
It Happened One Night was a pre-Hays Code comedy,
meaning this was racy for the time.
Perhaps you're interested in how a man undresses.
Well, I was just sitting here realising...
Realising that I have never shown you my Renoir.
What are you talking about?
First, the right. Then, the left.
After that, it's every man for himself.
# Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?
# The big bad wolf, the big bad wolf
# She's afraid of the big bad wolf
# Tra-la-la-la-la. #
Hi. Don't you realise I am a grandmother?
Would you mind, please, putting out the light?
No, not at all.
I like the lights on. Then go home and turn them on.
In 1960, the midway point between these two pictures,
MacLaine appeared in Billy Wilder's brilliant comedy The Apartment -
a classic Oscar-winning tale of ordinary people.
In one way, it's an embittered look
at the cruel, brutal exploitation of the corporate world,
but it's also an irresistible romantic comedy
that trumps an attempted suicide with a sweet, tough, tart,
but essentially optimistic resolution.
Cut.
I love you, Miss Kubelik.
Three.
Queen. Did you hear what I said, Miss Kubelik?
I absolutely adore you.
Shut up and deal.
Our own king of the socially conscious drama,
is, of course, Ken Loach,
whose films have earned major awards' recognition in Europe,
but have never been seen as Oscar contenders.
Loach's countryman Mike Leigh has been Oscar-nominated seven times
but never won, even though his films are shot through with humour.
Enrahah!
Other British directors, however, have found that sweet spot
between social realism and movie magic.
John Schlesinger made Midnight Cowboy,
the first Best Picture winner to earn a US X rating.
The final scenes depict a man dying of emphysema
on a bus ride with a male prostitute,
but the performances of Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight,
and the combination of music and image,
make this a transcendent moment of cinema.
And that sense of sweetness is heightened
by John Barry's memorable harmonica theme,
which I once had the privilege of playing
with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra
and which never fails to melt an audience's heart.
MUSIC: Midnight Cowboy Theme by John Barry
40 years later,
Danny Boyle's Best Picture winner, Slumdog Millionaire,
loosely adapted from Vikas Swarup's novel Q & A,
took the poverty-stricken plight of street kids in Mumbai
and turned it into an uplifting human drama
coloured by the lively inflections of Bollywood movies.
MUSIC: O... Saya by A R Rahman and MIA
MUSIC: The Middle Of The World by Nicholas Britell
Give me your hand.
OK, let your head rest in my hand. Relax.
I've got you. I promise. I'm not going to let you go.
Hey, man, I got you. There you go.
And most recently, Barry Jenkins' sublime Moonlight
proved that an indie film with potentially niche appeal
could win Best Picture
when universalised by unexpectedly dazzling visuals
and a superb use of music.
No wonder it beat La La Land to the top prize.
And speaking of outside contenders,
there's one small but important group of Oscar winners
that reveals key clues about the narrative tropes
and character types that the Academy hold most dear.
In March 1975, a little-known Italian-American actor
called Sylvester Stallone watched a boxing match
between Muhammad Ali and Chuck Wepner.
Ali was heavyweight champion of the world.
Wepner, a minor fighter with little hope of finishing the bout -
the classic underdog. In the event, Wepner was only seconds short
of going the full distance when he lost on a technical knockout.
Stallone, himself a Hollywood outsider and underdog,
whose roles had included the soft-core romp
The Party At Kitty And Stud's, aka Italian Stallion,
and the cult film The Lords Of Flatbush,
immediately started work on a script about a boxer,
which he then sold on the condition that he starred in it.
Against the odds, the studio agreed, provided the budget was kept low.
The result was Rocky.
In Stallone's story, the hero loses the fight,
but crucially, is still standing at the end.
A huge box-office hit in 1976, Rocky picked up both Best Picture
and Best Director the following year.
Here, it's chaos. Rocky, you went the distance.
You went the 15 rounds. How do you feel? All right.
What were you thinking about when that buzzer sounds and...
Adrian! What did you think about when the...? Adrian!
You've got to get mad.
You've got to say, "I'm a human being, Goddammit!
"My life has value!"
In doing so, it knocked out a couple of big hitters -
Network, a razor-sharp media satire...
"I'm as mad as hell
"and I'm not going to take this any more!"
Forget it. We don't want you to do anything that would embarrass you
or that you don't feel right about.
Forget it.
..and the acclaimed Watergate drama All The President's Men.
Like so many sports movies, Rocky features a training montage -
the transformative, stirring sequence
that's a staple of the genre.
It ends with one of cinema's most iconic shots
as our hero dances at the top of the steps
to Philadelphia's Museum of Art.
Ever since, they've been called the Rocky Steps.
28 years later, we find a very similar training sequence
in Million Dollar Baby,
Clint Eastwood's tale of underdog female pugilist Maggie Fitzgerald,
and Frankie Dunn, the grizzled trainer
who helps give her a shot at glory.
It's the only other boxing film to win Best Picture and Director,
but unlike Rocky before her, Maggie isn't left standing.
A profoundly downbeat ending brought criticism from some groups,
prompting Eastwood to say that the film was about
the American Dream, albeit expressed in the arc of a Greek tragedy.
You remind me of my daddy.
Well, he must've been a very intelligent, handsome man.
Million Dollar Baby netted Hilary Swank a Best Actress Oscar,
putting her in a tradition of Academy Award-winning-movie boxers,
which includes Wallace Beery, for The Champ, way back in 1932,
Marlon Brando, for On The Waterfront,
Christian Bale, for The Fighter,
and, perhaps most famously, Robert De Niro, for Raging Bull.
SHOUTS OF ENCOURAGEMENT
COMMENTATOR: He wobbles into the ropes, and goes down!
One last bout, one last shot at redemption.
The point is not about winning, but going the distance.
Now, it should be noted that the plucky underdog theme
isn't restricted to boxing pictures.
The wonderfully funny and moving script by Steve Tesich,
for the cycling movie, Breaking Away,
was rewarded in the 1980 ceremony.
The Cutters, a motley crew of working-class small-town boys,
face the wealthy and privileged university team in a cycle race,
and succeed in triumphing against the odds.
WILD CHEERING
INDISTINCT COMMENTATOR
And of course, the most celebrated British sporting entry
is 1981's Chariots Of Fire.
The story of not one, but two underdogs,
who overcome prejudice and class snobbery to win Olympic gold.
Chariots Of Fire has a blend of music and image imitated ever since.
Vangelis' theme tune laid down the perfect track,
and Chariots ran away with four big awards.
Simple Jack, the story of a mentally-impaired farm hand
who can talk to animals...
Ben Stiller's Hollywood satire, Tropic Thunder,
reinforces the most-oft-repeated canard about the Oscars.
In a weird way, I had to sort of just free myself up
to believe that it was OK to be stupid or dumb.
To be a moron. Yeah.
To be moronical. Exactly. To be a moron.
An imbecile. Yeah. Like the dumbest motherfucker that ever lived.
It's the claim that the easiest way to win an acting award
is to play someone facing, and often overcoming,
a physical or mental challenge.
Be it illness, injury, addiction or disability.
Now, look at the last 30 years alone, and by my reckoning,
well over a quarter of Best Actress awards
and a third of Best Actor awards have gone to people
playing characters who would broadly fit into this category.
But the idea that these are somehow easy wins is nonsense.
Far from it.
In fact, they're often very demanding roles
and they encompass a wide range of characters and performances.
The role that seems to have embedded the theme of disability
in the Academy's consciousness
is Dustin Hoffman's autistic Raymond Babbitt in 1988's Rain Man.
A-A-A-A-A-Argh! A-A-A-A-A-Argh!
Hey-hey-hey! A-A-A-A-A-A-Argh!
A-A-A-A-A-Argh! A-A-A-A-A-Argh! Ray! Ray! Ray!
While Rain Man was praised in some quarters
for raising public awareness of autism,
it's a spectrum, of which Raymond's form is highly unusual.
He's an autistic savant.
And although he's withdrawn, some of his mental skills,
including memory and counting,
function at an almost-superhuman level.
You watching that? Yeah.
You seeing that? You catching that?
Yeah. Falling on the ground. Yeah?
OK, now, what...what do I have left?
Two jacks, one eight, one king, one six,
two aces, one ten, one nine and one five.
One five? Yeah.
You are beautiful, man! Yeah.
Rain Man won a handful of awards,
including Best Actor and Best Picture in 1989.
A feat repeated in 1995 by Forrest Gump.
Congratulations. How do you feel?
I got to pee.
I believe he said he has to go pee.
Tom Hanks' Forrest faces very different challenges to Raymond.
He has a somewhat unspecified learning impairment, reflected in a low IQ.
But Forrest also has exceptional athletic skills,
which see him become a top American footballer...
He must be the stupidest son of a bitch alive,
but he sure is fast!
..a world-class ping-pong player,
and a transcontinental runner.
This is a recurrent theme for the kind of roles that win Oscars.
The portrayal of a character who has a disability,
but who is also blessed with a special gift.
In 1990, the year after Dustin Hoffman won Best Actor for Rain Man,
Daniel Day-Lewis triumphed
with his own extraordinary transformative performance.
My Left Foot is the story of Christy Brown.
Born with cerebral palsy, he grows up in poverty in 1930s Ireland.
THEY CHEER
WOMAN GIGGLES
Christy's life is the very definition of struggle,
and, in Day-Lewis's remarkably physical performance,
you can see Christy's rage and frustration
all but bursting out of his body.
A turning point in his life comes when he demonstrates
that he can write and draw with his left foot.
Christy goes on to become a talented painter and an author.
A story all the more inspiring because it's based on real events.
As, of course, was 2014's The Theory Of Everything,
featuring Eddie Redmayne's Oscar-winning portrayal
of the late Professor Stephen Hawking.
The Oscar-friendly elements are all in place.
Real-life story, mental brilliance, physical disability,
but playing Hawking presents its own unique challenges.
While Daniel Day-Lewis portrays a man disabled from birth,
Redmayne has to capture how Hawking's motor neurone disease develops
after it's first diagnosed when he's studying at Cambridge.
What about the brain?
The brain isn't affected.
Your thoughts won't change, it's...just that...
Well, eventually, no-one will know what they are.
I'm ever so sorry.
There's a parallel strain of Oscar-winning films about real-life characters
whose mental brilliance is accompanied by mental illness.
Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind
centres on Russell Crowe's mathematician John Nash,
a man who developed paranoid schizophrenia.
Unusually, while the film itself won awards for Best Picture,
and Best Director in 2002,
Crowe left the ceremony empty-handed.
Perhaps as a result of negative campaigning,
which claimed that the real-life Nash was an anti-Semite,
and a vote for Crowe was somehow a vote for Nash.
Well, on the bright side, you've invented window art.
This is a group playing touch football.
This is a cluster of pigeons fighting over breadcrumbs.
And this here is a woman who is chasing a man who stole her purse.
John, you watched a mugging. That's weird.
In competitive behaviour, someone always loses.
However, the following year, Nicole Kidman won Best Actress by a nose
for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours.
Suffering from bipolar disorder, but still writing a masterpiece.
This is my right.
It is the right of every human being.
I choose not the suffocating anaesthetic of the suburbs,
but the violent jolt of the capital. That is my choice.
Meanwhile, Geoffrey Rush and Jamie Foxx combined piano virtuosity
with schizoaffective disorder, as David Helfgott, in Shine...
PIANO RECITAL
..and blindness, as Ray Charles, in Ray.
# Well, now, ol' Mary Ann
# You know, you sure look fine
# Well, now, oh
# You know you sure look fine. #
While these kind of roles have long attracted Oscar attention,
more recently, it's been argued, with some force,
that characters with disabilities should be played
by actors who have similar disabilities.
So, for example, if a character uses a wheelchair,
who better to play them than an actor who uses a wheelchair?
After all, in a world in which talented actors with disabilities
are necessarily restricted in their role choices,
why should roles for which they're uniquely qualified
be taken away from them?
If Coming Home were remade today,
would Jon Voight be the first choice
for the sexy wheelchair-using Vietnam veteran
who gets the girl?
WHISPERS: Don't wake him up.
Hey, Doc?
In 1987, Marlee Matlin, who is deaf, made Oscar history
by winning Best Actress for her role as a deaf character
in Children Of A Lesser God.
A remarkable victory, which seemed to offer real hope for change.
But this year, the Academy notably failed to nominate
rising star Millicent Simmonds, who is deaf,
for her standout role in A Quiet Place,
despite several nominations elsewhere.
When it comes to the Oscars, change happens very slowly.
I meet you today...
In 2010, Colin Firth combined disability with royalty
as the stammering George VI in The King's Speech.
..in circumstances which are...
Great men and women of history is another solid acting-awards bet,
and it's a category where the Brits, in particular,
have delivered some majestic performances.
Good morning. I'm so sorry to disturb you.
I'm just expecting a phone call to be put through here.
BARKING Out!
PHONE RINGS Oh, there it is.
Thank you.
Helen Mirren's Oscar in 2007 placed her in a line
of Academy Award-winning British kings and queens
that includes Charles Laughton's Henry VIII
and Judi Dench's Elizabeth I.
And in 2019, Olivia Colman is hotly tipped for a memorable performance
as one of Britain's least-memorable monarchs,
Queen Anne, in The Favourite.
Make them stop.
What? Stop!
Enough! Stop!
Be gone! I command it!
Leave!
But what about some of our other national treasures?
In 2018, the Best Actor award went to a British star
playing a British Prime Minister.
Gary Oldman as Churchill.
How many more dictators must be wooed,
appeased, good God, given immense privileges,
before we learn?!
You cannot reason with a tiger
when your head is in its mouth!
It's the kind of serious, showy role for a serious, showy thespian
who knows how to deliver a serious, showy speech.
I am the President of the United States of America,
clothed in immense power!
The Brits also have a nice sideline playing American leaders.
Daniel Day-Lewis won an unprecedented third Best Actor award
in 2013, for his Abraham Lincoln.
Anthony Hopkins' Nixon was nominated back in 1996.
I promised the American people peace with honour in Southeast Asia.
Now, that may take time.
And in 2019, Christian Bale is a nominee
for his portrayal of Vice President Dick Cheney,
a man just a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.
Now, maybe I can handle some of the more mundane jobs,
overseeing bureaucracy,
managing military,
energy, foreign policy.
That sounds good.
One of the challenges of making a historical film
is to create suspense and drama,
despite the fact that the audience knows how the story will end.
Churchill may be Prime Minister,
but he also has to be a sympathetic underdog.
Darkest Hour emphasises his political weakness
as Hitler advances in Europe.
I need not impress upon you that...
..a trouble faced by the Western Hemisphere...
..without your support in some fashion...
I know, I know.
You are on my mind day and night.
It's interesting to compare Darkest Hour
to the story of another Prime Minister, The Iron Lady,
directed by Phyllida Lloyd,
which secured Meryl Streep her third Oscar, in 2012.
You've got it in you to go the whole distance. Absolutely.
What...Prime Minister?
Oh, no.
Oh, no. No, no.
In Britain, there will be no female Prime Minister.
Here, not in my lifetime, no.
While the film isn't afraid to present Margaret Thatcher as a flawed figure,
it still requires us to invest in her as a character.
So she's depicted as bravely taking on the male public school establishment
in the course of her rise to power.
Underdog figures are often at the heart of the grand historical epics
that sometimes sweep the board at the Academy Awards.
Gandhi and Braveheart's William Wallace
may have ever-so-slightly different views about the use of violence,
but they're both fighting to secure justice for their people.
You can see underdogs in fictional epics, too.
Maximus, in Gladiator, is a former Roman general
reduced to fighting in the arena.
Father to a murdered son...
..husband to a murdered wife.
And I will have my vengeance,
in this life or the next.
But Oscar also has a fondness for the little guy
fighting a small battle that embodies a more eternal conflict
between freedom and repression.
In 1976, the big winner was One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest,
in which Jack Nicholson's psychiatric patient, Randle McMurphy,
comes to represent an everyman struggling against the system,
personified by Louise Fletcher's Nurse Ratched.
Chief, he's got his hand up! Look!
No, Mr McMurphy.
When the meeting was adjourned, the vote was nine to nine.
Ah, come on, you're not going to say that now!
You're not going to say that now!
You're going to pull that henhouse shit now when the vote...
The Chief just voted, it was ten to nine.
Now, I want that television set turned on right now!
These struggles can be against forms of oppression and evil so vast
that it's impossible for a single film to capture them.
Some other Oscar Best Picture winners, like Schindler's List,
have been criticised, wrongly, in my opinion,
for focusing on stories of survival
rather than on the millions more who died or were murdered.
WHISPERS: I could have got more out.
I could have got more.
I don't know, if I'd just...
You luxuriate in... I survive!
I will not fall into despair!
I will offer up my talents to Master Ford!
I will keep myself hardy, till freedom is opportune!
When it comes to the great historical injustices,
it's perhaps hard to imagine that anyone in the audience
really needs to be told how terrible they are.
As Amy Poehler joked from the Golden Globes stage in 2014,
"I loved 12 Years A Slave,
"and I can honestly say that after seeing that film
"I will never look at slavery the same way again".
In fact, director Steve McQueen does a brilliant job of finding a new way
to tell an old story, to avoid stating the obvious.
He resists the temptation to burden his film,
and Chiwetel Ejiofor's Solomon Northrup,
with repeated outbursts about injustice and hope.
Sometimes, the realities of our hero's struggle are told through music.
Like this.
A striking counterpoint is established between Paul Dano's
weaselly, taunting rendition of a song heard in the plantations...
# Nigger run, nigger flew. #
# Everybody say Roll, Jordan, roll...#
..and the slaves' defiant graveside rendition of Roll, Jordan, Roll.
# My soul arise in heaven, Lord
# For the year when Jordan roll...#
The latter becoming an epiphanic moment
that pierces to the very heart of Northup's predicament.
# My soul arise in heaven, Lord
# For the year when Jordan roll. #
PHONE: Hey, Robby. Everything OK?
I need you to tell me something, Jim.
Could it be 90 priests?
What? Could it be as high as 90?
A recent Oscar winner about another horrific injustice,
avoids showing the crime altogether.
Spotlight, which won Best Picture in 2016,
concerns the widespread sexual abuse of children
by Catholic clergy in Massachusetts.
Rather than depicting the abuse,
Spotlight concentrates instead
on the painstaking work of investigative reporters
from The Boston Globe to bring the scandal to light.
HE SIGHS
We need to focus on the institution, not the individual priests.
Practice and policy.
Show me the Church manipulated the system
so that these guys wouldn't have to face charges.
Show me they put those same priests back into parishes time and time again.
Show me this was systemic, that it came from the top down.
Spotlight also examines how a wider community
may become complicit in an unspoken crime.
This is how it happens, isn't it, Pete? What's that?
Guy leans on a guy,
and suddenly the whole town just looks the other way.
The irony, of course,
is that Spotlight won Best Picture in 2016, just
a year before the #MeToo movement accused Hollywood itself of turning
a blind eye to persistent sexual abuse within the movie industry.
When the Academy awarded Frances McDormand Best Actress in 2018
for her portrayal of a furious grief-stricken mother
in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,
it seemed to reflect the mood of the moment.
Hey, fuckhead.
What?
Don't say "what", Dixon, when she comes in calling you a fuckhead,
and don't you come in here...
Shut up!
Mildred Hayes, whose teenage daughter was raped
and murdered, blames the police for failing to solve the crime,
and incurs the wrath of her local community.
In her uniform of a boiler suit,
Mildred is quite literally a blue-collar warrior.
I don't think those billboards is very fair. The time it took you
to get out here whining like a bitch, Willoughby,
some other poor girl's probably out there being butchered right now,
but I'm glad you got your priorities straight, I'll say that for you.
She has predecessors in other working-class female
characters seeking justice.
Julia Roberts won Best Actress
for playing campaigner Erin Brockovich...
Second of all, these people don't dream about being rich.
They dream about being able to watch their kids swim in a pool
without worrying that they'll have to have
a hysterectomy at the age of 20.
..as did Jodie foster for portraying rape survivor
Sarah Tobias in The Accused.
If that's the best you can do, then your best sucks.
Now, I don't know what you got for selling me out,
but I sure as shit hope it's worth it.
But writer-director Martin McDonagh raises the possibility that
Mildred's rage predates the tragedy,
and that anger was already tearing her family apart.
So how come, a week before she died, she comes around asking
if she could move in with me at my place cos she couldn't stand the
two of you bitching at each other no more, fighting with each other...
I don't believe you. And I said, "No, stay at home.
"Your mom loves you."
Fuck 'em. CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYS
There is an uncomfortable ambiguity at the heart of
Three Billboards, which is maybe why the Academy found it easier to
celebrate the performances than the film as a whole.
When it comes to the Best Picture award, Oscar still prefers
the moral clarity of films like 12 Years A Slave and Spotlight.
Master must go inside the tunnel.
In 2004, Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King
gained access to an elite club - the third and most recent film
to win 11 Academy Awards.
No picture has ever topped this number,
which was first achieved by William Wyler's Ben-Hur in 1960,
and then by James Cameron's Titanic in 1998.
So, does this elevate them
to an exclusive tier of artistic excellence?
Well, it's worth noting that they are all a certain kind of film.
Spectacular epics.
I nearly said historical epics, but of course, Lord Of The Rings isn't
historical, unless you are somehow watching this in Middle Earth.
All three won awards for Best Picture and Best Director,
but only Ben-Hur took home any acting awards.
And it's interesting to note that all three are classic
underdog stories, with slaves, penniless artists
and hobbits at their respective hearts.
And if there is one big lesson when you look back at the history
of the Academy Awards, it's that Oscar loves an underdog.
Just look at this year's nominees.
A Star Is Born and Bohemian Rhapsody are classic
all-singing, all-dancing tales of outsiders making it big in showbiz.
Roma is an ordinary people tale, featuring an extraordinary
performance from screen first-timer
Yalitza Aparicio, as a struggling housemaid in 1970s Mexico.
BlackKklansman and Green Book explore racial
prejudice in America in the '60s and '70s.
You know what I'm trying to say.
Chief, some of us can speak King's English, others speak jive.
Ron Stallworth, here, happens to be fluent in both.
Ryan Coogler's Black Panther also has strong social justice themes.
It may be a superhero fantasy,
but everything from the design to the narrative to the soundtrack
has an empowering anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-sexist edge.
There is even an underdog element to drive the drama forward.
Whether or not you think it's the best film of the year,
Black Panther is certainly one of the most ground-breaking.
A bona fide blockbuster made by an African-American director,
with a largely black cast.
I also think, most importantly, that it's just a bloody good film.
Exciting, adventurous and unexpected.
No wonder it's been a hit with audiences and critics alike.
As for Oscar, we'll have to wait and see.