The Oscar’s Not Always Special Relationship With Britain, Concluded
The 1980s: How The Oscars Learned To Keep Calm And Love The Brits
One of the myths of Hollywood that is basically considered gospel was that the aura of the auteur in 1970s ended almost immediately after Star Wars. The story goes, the studios saw how much money you could make by marketing films exclusively to teenage boys and before you could say: “Let the force be with you,” Hollywood wasn’t making directors create masterpieces any more.
Apart from the basic fallacy of that statement (Hollywood is a business and the only reason any film is made is to make money) there are some minor facts that get in the way. The first is that even had the studios wanted to immediately do that, there was no way to tell it would work because in 1977 there was no rating between PG and R. The PG-13 rating didn’t come into existence until July of 1984 and the first movie to get that rating was John Milius’s Red Dawn. Even then it took a very long time before and after that rating was developed before studios decided to exclusively market to teenage boys and there was a lot of trial and error before they hit that sweet spot. (Any child who saw Labyrinth or so many of the Don Bluth cartoons during that decade knows what I am talking about.) As someone who has lived through much of that period I don’t think Hollywood seriously considered that as an economic possibility until Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989 and even past that point, there was a lot of marketing movies towards teenagers of any gender with no idea of making it more than box office. (If anyone doubts me I would simply ask if anyone thought of making action figures for The Breakfast Club.)
The second issue I have is how many of the major box office hits during the 1980s were still of the kind of adult films that were being made in the 1970s. Steven Spielberg started to dip his toe into ‘the deep end of the pool’ with The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun and many of the best directors of the 1970s were making movies that were critical and box office hits. The reasons we might not acknowledge that is that the majority of them (Norman Jewison, Mike Nichols, Sidney Lumet) don’t fall under the label of auteur the way that Kubrick or Scorsese and Hal Ashby do. Nevertheless movies such as Moonstruck, Working Girl and The Verdict were both Academy Award nominated movies and box office successes. And during this same period a new wave of directors were coming into filmmaking, bringing a combination of grownup studio movies and box office success. These included such brilliant talents as Barry Levinson and Peter Weir (who had worked mostly in Australia before Witness brought him to the attention of American audiences. One of the biggest names in directing box office during the eighties was Oliver Stone who managed to win Best Director twice in four years for going even deeper into the horrors of the Vietnam War in Platoon and Born On the Fourth of July then even Michael Cimino had been willing to do in The Deer Hunter. After a slow opening weekend Platoon would gross over $130 million (in 1986 dollars) and while Born didn’t gross that much, it still made more than five times back its $14 million budget.
A large part of the reason Hollywood turned away from directors being able to control every aspect must be laid at the feet of the directors themselves. Despite what the David Mamet’s and their ilk might argue about their work in Hollywood, their ability to produce the movies they want is directly proportional to how much someone is willing to go and see it. And during the 1980s in particular a lot of the directors from the 1970s were burning up whatever goodwill they had in making films that were critically acclaimed but kept losing money. Francis Ford Coppola may have been the biggest abuser of Hollywood’s trust during that period; I suspect the blame he has put on the studios for the failures of such films as The Cotton Club and Peggy Sue Got Married or Tucker is because he can’t blame the people he wants to: the audience. And he’s just the most extreme example: Robert Altman spent most of the 1970s and 1980s making brilliant dramas that either barely made money or lost money. Studios spent a ridiculous amount of money on Kubrick’s vision for Barry Lyndon and got almost nothing in return. A lot of directors got a lot of rope for a long time during the 1980s to try and prove that the studio’s faith in them was not misguided. And by the time I was a teenager (the mid-nineties) they’d pretty much used it all up.
And it should be noting the British were given as much an opportunity to do so during this same period, and there’s an argument they may have done much to hurt the Oscars brand as well during the 1980s and perhaps beyond. By far the most notorious example of this is Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi a movie that has been going on the list of worst Oscar choice in history pretty much as long since I’ve been alive and probably always will.
Richard Attenborough may be one of the worst examples of what happens when an actor decides he wants to direct in history. Even before Gandhi was greenlit he was getting the reputation of making pretentious films that were extremely long. His most well known film to that point A Bridge Too Far was so controversial one of the cast members Dirk Bogarde took a huge amount of heat from friends of the General he portrayed. Many believed had General Browning lived to see it he would have sued Attenborough and screenwriter William Goldman for libel and Browning’s son thought his father was made the fall guy because the writers could not have gone after Field Marshal Montgomery. The movie cost a fortune by 1977 standards — $27 million and it was only because it made money in America that Attenborough was given cover.
One gets the feeling that Gandhi was given so much praise and record more for the effort involved in the filmmaking. For the funeral sequence alone 300,000 extras appeared and 20,000 feet of film where shot by eleven crews in what was pared down to little more than two minutes on the screen. The film is clearly inspired by the work of David Lean (we’ll get to him in this by the way) but it is lugubrious and bloated by comparison even though it is shorter than some of Lean’s movies. That’s in large part because Bridge on The River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia are epic movies in the kind of stories their telling: both films tell multiple stories aside from the man in the center of it. In what would become a frustrating pattern of Attenborough’s career, he decided that he could make lives that frequently were less about action then about men (and it was always men) the kind of sweeping sagas.
And there’s no contest when it comes to comparing Gandhi to ET when it comes to which is by far the better film. Hell, there’s an argument that Gandhi was, at the most generous estimate, the seventh most worthy film of a Best Picture nod in 1982, behind not just ET and Tootsie, but also The Verdict, Sophie’s Choice, Das Boot and maybe even Victor/Victoria. All of these movies flow, having compelling stories with brilliant technical aspects and engaging characters. Gandhi is a three hour effort by Attenborough to turn a man (who in Britain was never thought of that highly) into a saint.
The only thing that works about the film is the incredible performance by Ben Kingsley at the center of it. Considering that among everything else this was Kingsley’s film debut (he’d work in British television and the theater but had never appeared on the silver screen before that) it is the demonstration of a chameleon at work. Kingsley did what he has done in every major role I’ve seen him onscreen since: he is Gandhi and he embodies it. It took far too long for Hollywood to realize Kingsley’s brilliance again (he spent much of the aftermath of his Oscar win basically acting in British films and theater) before Barry Levinson cast him as Meyer Lansky in Bugsy. (As Billy Crystal joked about it at the Oscars that year: ‘Gandhi and Lansky. Two men with vision and neither ate pork.) After that Hollywood finally figured out how to use Kingsley’s formidable appearance properly and he’s been one of the greatest character actors of all time ever since.
I think Hollywood could have lived with it if they had given the Oscar for Best Actor to Kingsley and given Best Picture and Director to any of the other four nominees in either category. Instead by giving it to both Gandhi and Attenborough it began a trend that may have done more damage to the Oscars that has been difficult to recover from: giving Best Picture to movies that appear to be Oscar worthy picture because they are big in scope and appearance but in reality are just bloated movies overshadowing real art. There are so many examples of this that would follow Out of Africa beating movies like Witness or Kiss of The Spider Woman in 1985; The Last Emperor, Bernardo Bertolucci’s bloated historical film triumphing over Moonstruck and Broadcast News in 1987; The English Patient utterly crushing Fargo in 1996…well, you get the idea. And that’s without counting all of the bloated films that seem to be epic but actually aren’t that have been nominated in all the decades since — Gangs of New York; The Thin Red Line; The Revenant (my opinions, I admit) So many of the wins that the Oscars are the kind of film I can imagine Hollywood collectively waking up the next day and going: “We did what last night?” And part of me does think we have to blame Gandhi for that.
Now to be fair there were some British directors still making different kinds of masterpieces during this same period and for those who might have thought Attenborough was aspiring to be David Lean, in 1984 they would finally get the real thing again.
After the disastrous reception for Ryan’s Daughter and a horrible luncheon with Pauline Kael and other critics where he was publicly shamed Lean had essentially retreated from filmmaking during the 1970s. Then in the 1980s he began work on another epic movie; this time based on E.M. Forster classic novel A Passage to India.
Age had done little to change Lean’s attitude as a filmmaker; he was now more rigid and petulant then ever before. During the film making his relationship with Alec Guiness who had been part of Lynch’s movies for nearly forty years deteriorated and finally fractured when Guiness learned many of his scenes had been edited out. The two men never met or spoke to the other again. He also did much to isolate one of his leading ladies, Peggy Ashcroft, who played Mrs. Moore, shunning her from his table during meals. Ashcroft took it better than Guiness, thinking it was just Lean being Lean.
Compared to his previous epics Passage to India was short: 2 hours and forty five minutes. Still considering the length of Forester’s novel, the movie would be accused of having many of its scenes being stretched too long. Nevertheless, most critics hailed it as a brilliant return to form, capturing the essence of Forster’s novel. Set in the 1920s, it tells the story of Adela Quested (Judy Davis in an early role) and her possible future mother in law as they travel to India to visit Adela’s unofficial fiancée. A story of colonialism and racism, it involves the meeting between the two women and a local Indian physician (Victor Banerjee). The three go on a trip to the Marabar Caves where something horrible and undefined happens.
A Passage to India was one of the most well regarded films by critics in 1984 with the movie sweeping the four major awards (Picture, Director, Actor for Bannerjee, Actress for Ashcroft) and the National Board of Review) and winning everything but Best Actor at the New York Film Critics. Ashcroft would win multiple awards for Best Lead Actress and Supporting Actress, earning the latter from the Golden Globes. The film would receive eleven Oscar nominations, including three for Lean, for writing, directing and editing.
Another British film maker of note also made himself known to the Oscars that year. Roland Joffe had worked almost exclusively in television before Columbia Pictures agreed to have him helm an adaptation of New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg’s experiences covering the civil war in Cambodia,, for which Schanberg won the Pulitzer prize. The Killing Fields tells the story of Schanberg’s relationship with a local Cambodian journalist Dith Pran and how after the American evacuation, the two men were separated and Schanberg’s effort to find him.
Sam Waterston was cast as Schanberg and in a work of symmetry Joffe would cast Haing S. Ngor, a Cambodian native as Dith Pran. Ngor had been a physician and medical officer in the Cambodian Army who was captured by the Khmer Rouge and imprisoned and tortured. To escape execution, he denied being a doctor or having an education. He escape to the United States in 1980. Though he had no formal acting experience Joffe cast him in this critical role. The film was one of the most awarded movies of 1984 and received seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Director, Actor for Waterson and Supporting Actor for Ngor.
By and large the Oscars basically got everything right in 1984, giving eight Academy Awards to one of the all-time great films, Amadeus. Lean didn’t win a single Oscar in what would be his final Academy Awards but Peggy Ashcroft did prevail for Best Supporting Actress for her work as Mrs. Moore. The Killing Fields took three Oscars, Best Supporting Actor for Ngor, Adapted Screenplay and editing. There were quite a few other British Actors nominated in 1984, though few attended the ceremony. One of them Sir Ralph Richardson, nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Greystoke, had a decent excuse — he had passed away two months before the film made it to theaters. Albert Finney, who received his fourth nomination for Best Actor playing one of the great performances of an alcoholic in Under the Volcano reacted the same way his previous three nominations — no comment. And Vanessa Redgrave nominated for Best Actress for The Bostonians showed the better part of valor and didn’t show up. (We’ll be dealing with the filmmakers in a bit.)
The British had actually been in force in the acting categories the previous year, indeed when Robert Duvall was nominated for Best Actor for his work in Tender Mercies he said, “I guess it’s me against the Limeys.” (He won.) One of the surprise nominees for many awards that year was Peter Yates’s The Dresser, a film about the complicated relationship between an actor known only as Sir (Finney) and his personal assistant Norman (Tom Courtenay). Courtenay and Finney were both nominated for Best Actor and the film earned nominations for Best Picture, Director and Screenplay.
Michael Caine was nominated for his work in the working class comedy Educating Rita as was Julie Walters for the title role. The film would sweep the Golden Globes winning Best Foreign Film , Actor and Actress in a Comedy. Asked what an Oscar would mean Caine said: “I might get more scripts with less coffee stains on them.” He acknowledged that when the time came for the Oscars to be presented Dolly Parton’s presence was a sign that he wasn’t going to win. Perhaps that was part of the reason that, after three consecutive nominations and no wins he decided not to show up for what would be his biggest night.
There’s a good argument that the special relationship with Britain was cemented in Hollywood in 1986 as many of the most critical actors and creative forces that would be prominent among the Academy Award nominees and winners came in that year. Much of it had to do with Michael Caine.
Caine would joke upon accepting a Golden Globe a decade later that there was a time “when I made a lot of crap…and a lot of money.” That was certainly true during the 1980s but there was a lot of excellent work in there as well. It was definitely true of two of his biggest roles in 1986 both of which were supporting.
One couldn’t have been more American if he tried: his role as Elliot in Woody Allen’s masterpiece Hannah And Her Sisters. One of the best movies in Allen’s long career and certainly the highpoint of his collaborations with his then-partner Mia Farrow who plays the title role her husband is played by Caine in one of his performances. As the financial advisor who has the first lines in the film which he uses to justify the affair with Hannah’s sister Lee (played by Barbara Hershey) the role was a feather in Caine’s cap from the start. Caine received many nominations for Critics’ Awards, usually in conjunction with another critically acclaimed masterpiece.
Neil Jordan was relatively unknown when he made what would be his breakthrough film in 1986. Mona Lisa tells the story of an ex con named George released from prison. His time in prison has reduced his stature into the underworld of London. The only job he can find is being a driver for a high priced call-girl, with whom he slowly bonds and then falls in love with her. What he doesn’t know is the dangerous game she’s playing and that by helping her he will end up in trouble with the local kingpin.
Caine’s work as Mortwell was the draw but the breakout sensations of the movie were the performances of Bob Hoskins as George and Cathy Tyson as Simone. Hoskins’s appeal was a shock to himself as he knew he had no sex appeal — “Me own mum wouldn’t think of me as pretty.” But he had built a reputation in England as one of the best character actors in the country, particularly on television officially becoming a sensation for his work as Arthur in Dennis Potter’s masterpiece Pennies From Heaven.. Not long after that he became beloved for his work in a similar dark masterpiece The Long Good Friday. He had worked steadily and to acclaim in some American films of note — Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil but Mona Lisa introduced him to American audiences in a big way.
He would win Best Actor at Cannes which would be a preview of how the awards season would go for him. From New York to LA, from the National Society of Film Critics to the Golden Globes he would win nearly every Best Actor award in sight. Tyson did well herself, tying with Dianne Wiest for Best Supporting Actress in LA and receiving a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Mona Lisa looked sure to be a major contender for every award in the book and it might well have been — had it not been for another British import that would have a far wider appeal and a more far-ranging impact for America.
Ismail Merchant, James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala had formed a production company in the 1960s. Ivory and Jhabvala were the creative forces, Merchant was mainly involving producing. Their films were period pieces and their more successful works had been literary adaptations, certainly in America where their adaptations of Henry James’s The Europeans and The Bostonians had received Oscar nominations. The latter had been earned Redgrave her first Oscar nod in seven years.
In 1985 they became work on an E.M. Forster novel, which had already brought multiple Oscar nominations and acclaim to David Lean the previous year. But A Room With A View was far more intimate — in both scope and budget — than Passage to India had been. And it was even more ambitious in casting performers making their film debuts. Helena Bonham Carter made her movie debut as the lead role of Lucy Honeychurch. Rupert Graves made his theatrical debut as her brother Freddy. And a young Irish actor named Daniel Day-Lewis was cast in the critical role of Johnny, even though it was only his second major role of any significance.
The majority of the other leads were acting royalty in Britain but with the exception of Maggie Smith they were basically unknown in America — and honestly if it hadn’t been for Smith’s two Oscars I doubt Hollywood would have known who she was. Judi Dench would play the role of Eleanor (and still wouldn’t become a household name for another decade) Denholm Elliott, basically known for his work in Raiders of the Lost Ark, played Mr. Emerson and such talents as Julian Sands and Simon Callow filled out the other leads. The film was a sensation in Britain but that was meaningless in America. Then it opened in March of 1986 — and became the biggest independent hit of the year, making nearly seven times it budget back in America.
The movie won Best Picture prizes from the National Board of Review. The major sensation in the eyes of critics was Day-Lewis, who won Best Supporting Actor prizes from the New York Film Critics and the National Board of Review. Strangely enough he would be one of the few people associated with the movie NOT to get an Oscar nomination. (He’s done okay since then.)
On the day of the nominations both Hannah & Her Sisters and A Room With A View were among the most nominated films, each receiving eight nominations including the first nominations for Merchant for producing, Ivory as a director and Jhabvala for Adapted Screenplay. Denholm Elliott was nominated for Best Supporting Actor and Maggie Smith received her fifth nomination for Best Supporting Actress. The news was not as great for Mona Lisa which received just a single Oscar nomination — Hoskins for Best Actor.
Part of the reason it may have been excluded from the nominations was Roland Joffe’s follow-up to The Killing Fields. The Mission told the true story of eighteenth century Spanish Jesuits trying to protect a remote South American tribe from falling under the rule of pro-slavery Portugal. Robert De Niro played the lead role of Mendoza, a slave hunter who was converted and a relative unknown named Jeremy Irons as a Spanish Jesuit who went into the wilderness.
While it was well-regarded at the time The Mission is the Best Picture nominee of 1986 that holds up the least well. Much of the movie is based on the ‘white savior trope’ that would increasingly become called out in the years to come: the two leads have ‘saved the savages’ and are risking their lives to protect them from a greater evil. One also gets the feeling, as with Gandhi, that the Academy was giving the film and Joffe nominations for the effort put in rather than the quality of the film — the movie was shot on location in the Amazon jungle and the majority of those associated became ill of dysentery. It looks incredible on the big screen and it has a great spiritual message — both of which lead the Academy to give films like this recognition and ignore smaller, more quality films like Mona Lisa.
Whatever the reason The Mission received seven Academy Award nominations almost all of them technical. (None of the cast or the screen play were nominated that year.) It would have made more sense to nominate Mona Lisa or other masterpieces from that year for Best Picture: Blue Velvet, Aliens or Salvador.
Michael Caine, who was nominated for Hannah and Her Sisters, chose not to attend arguing his obligations for shooting Jaws: The Revenge were too demanding. (He took a lot of ribbing for that later on.) Maggie Smith, his co-star from California Suite and a heavy favorite for Best Supporting Actress, chose to stay home as well perhaps thinking it highly unlikely she would win Academy Award number 3. Bob Hoskins was there on Oscar night and he spent it royally unhappy.
Paul Newman had received his seventh Oscar nomination for Best Actor for The Color of Money, the unofficial sequel to The Hustler. While a superb movie no one even pretended that it was Newman’s best work but by 1986 the fact that the Oscars had never given one of the greatest actors of all time an Academy Award was too glaring to overlook. Newman had only won a single award in the leadup to the Oscars from the National Board of Review: everything else had gone to Hoskins. Four years earlier Ben Kingsley had won every award in sight for Gandhi while Paul Newman had been ignored for his extraordinary performance in The Verdict. The Academy was not going to let history repeat itself.
During a commercial break on Oscar night William Hurt, nominated for his work in Children of a Lesser God, gathered with two of his fellow nominees for Best Actor — Dexter Gordon for Round Midnight and James Woods for Salvador — and toasted Paul Newman. Hoskins hung back and would be brutally honest afterward. “It wasn’t his best work by any measure.” The fact that Newman had decided to stay home that night — he would later acknowledge it was ‘too little, too late’ — compounded the insult in Hoskins’s mind. Hoskins would go on to be one of the better character actors in Hollywood and Britain but he would never even be nominated for an Academy Award again.
Neither of the other major winners for British films — Michael Caine or Jhabvala who won Best Adapted Screenplay — were their to pick up on their Oscars. Because not only Newman but Woody Allen was, as per usual, absent, it wasn’t noted upon as a bigger sin.
From 1986 on the floodgates for British director and actors were open and have never closed. Merchant/Ivory would be among the constant producer of British masterpieces for the next decade and Neil Jordan would go on to make several major masterpieces, finally getting the recognition he deserved for The Crying Game in 1992 for which he would win for Best Original Screenplay.
Other filmmakers of that era would soon follow. Stephen Frears, the director of My Beautiful Launderette would receive his first nominations for Dangerous Liaisons in 1988 and has been a major force in both British and American films and TV ever since. Jim Sheridan would make his film debut with the extraordinary My Left Foot the story of Christy Brown. Daniel Day-Lewis was officially introduced to America and immediately entered the clique of the greatest actors of all time, winning the first of three Best Actor Academy Awards. (After the standing ovation, he told the theater: “You’ve set up the makings of a great weekend in Ireland.)
And completing the circle of the original British invasion that year saw the first Shakespearean adaption of Kenneth Branagh, Laurence Olivier’s godfather. Fittingly he also adapted Henry V but while he was as much of an artist as Olivier, he was far more of a guerilla filmmaker. It took him just two months to shoot the entire film — Olivier famously spent that much time shooting Agincourt alone — and his film was received to enormous acclaim. He received the Best Director prize from the National Board of Review and won Best new director from the New York Film Critics. That year he would be nominated for Best Actor and Best Director. One of the smaller roles would be played by Emma Thompson, who Branagh would briefly be married too. It wouldn’t take long for the rest of America to fall in love with her either.
Not long after American studios would start to move away from the kind of director’s visions that they had allowed in the past. In a sense the British filmmakers managed to fill that void in the Academy Awards. But having seen all of the struggles they have gone through to get respectability from the Academy over the years — and honestly, how brilliant the majority of their performances and movies are — it is hard to begrudge them their seat at the table these days. The British Empire is no more and Britain itself facing a tumultuous future but it is hard to look at their body of work then and now and argue that as far as the Oscars are concerned, there will always be an England. (Sorry I couldn’t resist.)