The least surprising Academy Award nominations in recent memory were announced today in Los Angeles. The good news is that the OscarsSoWhite controversy is behind us, at least for this year. What we have in its place is OscarsSoPredictable. In its incestuous, self-regarding way, Hollywood loves Hollywood stories, which is why La Land has netted so many nominations – 14 in total, equalling the record shared by Titanic and All About Eve – and why it will score big on the night. It’s a diverting but shallow movie, reassuringly uncontroversial, which has coasted to glory on a wave of goodwill that will culminate at the Oscars ceremony.
There were a handful of surprises. A Best Actress nomination for Ruth Negga, for her quiet, understated performance as a black woman imprisoned for marrying a white man in 1950s Virginia in Loving , is very welcome. It is good also to see Mica Levi nominated for her adventurous score for Jackie and Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou in the running for their screenplay for The Lobster.
More controversially, Mel Gibson is a contender for Best Director for his violent war movie Hacksaw Ridge , which indicates that the industry has decided to forgive the drunken antisemitic outbursts, which seemed at one point to have ended his career for good.
But La Land is up for all the biggies – Best Picture, Best Director (Damian Chazelle), Best Actor (Ryan Gosling), Best Actress (Emma Stone), Best Original Screenplay (Chazelle). It could feasibly win them all except for Best Actor. I had hoped that the Best Actress award would go to Natalie Portman, who is brilliant as Jacqueline Kennedy in Jackie , but a clued-up colleague assured me recently that the La love is likely to dominate in that category too. Imagine that! All those trophies going to a candyfloss fantasy which tickles the eye but leaves the brain untroubled. La Land? Looks like more like Cloud-cuckoo-land to me.
Chazelle’s movie isn’t a Best Picture by any stretch of the imagination. But then Best Pictures so rarely are. The King’s Speech instead of The Social Network? My Fair Lady rather than Dr Strangelove? Argo over Amour? Argo over anything, come to that? That film, which won in 2013, was another beneficiary of the tendency for Academy voters to favour movies about their own kind, their own world. Movie-movies. (See also: Birdman , the 2015 winner.) That tendency will give La Land an extra push.
Its closest competitor, which still isn’t that close, will be Kenneth Lonergan’s intense drama Manchester By the Sea. Casey Affleck has the Best Actor prize sewn up for his brooding, minimalist turn as a grieving handyman saddled with his teenage nephew. It’s a deserving performance and Affleck must already be thinking about where in the house he’s going to put his statuette. At last count, he’d already scooped 16 awards for this film alone. I reckon someone’s going to be putting up a new shelf. A whole den or anteroom may be in order.
Another dead cert is Viola Davis for Best Supporting Actress in Fences , directed by her co-star Denzel Washington, which opens in the UK on 10 February.
Mahershala Ali should take the Best Supporting Actor award for playing the drug dealer who becomes a surprisingly tender mentor to a young Miami boy in Moonlight (out here on 17 February). Ali’s chief rival will be Jeff Bridges, who gives one of those grizzled-but-affectionate veteran performances as a good-hearted sheriff in Hell and High Water. Moonlight is to my mind one of the few genuinely great titles vying for Best Picture and would have been my choice by miles – except that I don’t have a vote.
That said, I did have a vote in the London Film Critics’ Circle Awards , which were announced last weekend. We made some choices of which I heartily approve, such as naming I, Daniel Blake Best British/Irish Film and giving the Best Actress award to Isabelle Huppert for Things to Come. She is up for an Oscar in that category for a very different film, Paul Verhoeven’s thriller Elle.
Then again, we also handed our Best Film prize to La Land. Oh well. You win some, you lose some. Unless you’re La Land , that is, in which case it’s win-win all the way.
The 89th Academy Awards ceremony will be held on 26 February.
On a drive between Sheffield and Barnsley, I spotted a striking painting of the Kes poster. Billy Casper’s two-fingered salute covered the wall of a once-popular pub that is now boarded up.
It is almost 50 years since the late Barry Hines wrote A Kestrel for a Knave , the novel that inspired Ken Loach’s 1969 film, and it seems that the defiant, us-against-the-world, stick-it-to-the-man Yorkshireness he commemorated still resonates here. Almost two-thirds of the people of south Yorkshire voted to leave the EU, flicking two fingers up at what they saw as a London-based establishment, detached from life beyond the capital.
But whatever happened to Billy the unlikely lad, and the myriad other northern characters who were once the stars of stage and screen? Like the pitheads that dominated Casper’s tightly knit neighbourhood, they have disappeared from the landscape. The rot set in during the 1980s, when industries were destroyed and communities collapsed, a point eloquently made in Melvyn Bragg’s excellent radio series The Matter of the North.
Yorkshire historically acted as a counterweight to the dominance of southern elites, in sport as in politics and culture. Yet today, we rarely get to hear the voices of Barnsley, Sheffield, Doncaster and Rotherham. And the Yorkshire sporting powerhouse is no more – at least, not as we once knew it.
This should be a matter of national concern. The White Rose county is, after all, the home of the world’s oldest registered football club – Sheffield FC, formed in 1857 – and the first English team to win three successive League titles, Huddersfield Town, in the mid-1920s. Hull City are now Yorkshire’s lone representative in the Premier League.
Howard Wilkinson, the manager of Leeds United when they were crowned champions in 1992, the season before the Premier League was founded, lamented the passing of a less money-obsessed era. “My dad worked at Orgreave,” he said, “the scene of Mrs Thatcher’s greatest hour, bless her. You paid for putting an axe through what is a very strong culture of community and joint responsibility.”
The best-known scene in Loach’s film shows a football match in which Mr Sugden, the PE teacher, played by Brian Glover, comically assumes the role of Bobby Charlton. It was played out on the muddy school fields of Barnsley’s run-down Athersley estate. On a visit to his alma mater a few years ago, David Bradley, who played the scrawny 15-year-old Billy, showed me the goalposts that he had swung from as a reluctant goalkeeper. “You can still see the dint in the crossbar,” he said. When I spoke to him recently, Bradley enthused about his lifelong support for Barnsley FC. “But I’ve not been to the ground over the last season and a half,” he said. “I can’t afford it.”
Bradley is not alone. Many long-standing fans have been priced out. Barnsley is only a Championship side, but for their home encounter with Newcastle last October, their fans had to pay £30 for a ticket.
The English game is rooted in the northern, working-class communities that have borne the brunt of austerity over the past six years.
