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 \u2013 14 in total, equalling the record shared by Titanic and All About Eve \u2013 and why it will score big on the night. It\u2019s 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 \u2013 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\u2019s movie isn\u2019t a Best Picture by any stretch of the imagination. But then Best Pictures so rarely are. The King\u2019s 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\u2019t that close, will be Kenneth Lonergan\u2019s 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\u2019s a deserving performance and Affleck must already be thinking about where in the house he\u2019s going to put his statuette. At last count, he\u2019d already scooped 16 awards for this film alone. I reckon someone\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 except that I don\u2019t have a vote.
That said, I did have a vote in the London Film Critics\u2019 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\u2019s thriller Elle.
Then again, we also handed our Best Film prize to La Land. Oh well. You win some, you lose some. Unless you\u2019re La Land , that is, in which case it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 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\u2019s oldest registered football club \u2013 Sheffield FC, formed in 1857 \u2013 and the first English team to win three successive League titles, Huddersfield Town, in the mid-1920s. Hull City are now Yorkshire\u2019s 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. \u201cMy dad worked at Orgreave,\u201d he said, \u201cthe scene of Mrs Thatcher\u2019s greatest hour, bless her. You paid for putting an axe through what is a very strong culture of community and joint responsibility.\u201d
The best-known scene in Loach\u2019s 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\u2019s 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. \u201cYou can still see the dint in the crossbar,\u201d he said. When I spoke to him recently, Bradley enthused about his lifelong support for Barnsley FC. \u201cBut I\u2019ve not been to the ground over the last season and a half,\u201d he said. \u201cI can\u2019t afford it.\u201d
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 \u00a330 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. The top leagues \u2013 like the EU \u2013 are perceived to be out of touch and skewed in favour of the moneyed elites.
Bradley, an ardent Remainer, despaired after the Brexit vote. \u201cThey did not know what they were doing. But I can understand why. There\u2019s still a lot of neglect, a lot of deprivation in parts of Barnsley. They feel left behind because they have been left behind.\u201d
It is true that there has been a feel-good factor in Yorkshire following the Rio Olympics; if the county were a country, it would have finished 17th in the international medals table. Yet while millions have been invested in \u201cpodium-level athletes\u201d, in the team games that are most relevant to the lives of most Yorkshire folk \u2013 football, cricket and rugby league \u2013 there is a clear division between sport\u2019s elites and its grass roots. While lucrative TV deals have enriched ruling bodies and top clubs, there has been a large decrease in the number of adults playing any sport in the four years since London staged the Games.
According to figures from Sport England, there are now 67,000 fewer people in Yorkshire involved in sport than there were in 2012. In Doncaster, to take a typical post-industrial White Rose town, there has been a 13 per cent drop in participation \u2013 compared with a 0.4 per cent decline nationally.
Attendances at rugby league, the region\u2019s \u201cnational sport\u201d, are falling. But cricket, in theory, is thriving, with Yorkshire winning the County Championship in 2014 and 2015. Yet Joe Root, the batsman and poster boy for this renaissance, plays far more games for his country than for his county and was rested from Yorkshire\u2019s 2016 title decider against Middlesex.
\u201cRoot\u2019s almost not a Yorkshire player nowadays,\u201d said Stuart Rayner, whose book The War of the White Roses chronicles the club\u2019s fortunes between 1968 and 1986. As a fan back then, I frequently watched Geoffrey Boycott and other local stars at Headingley. My favourite was the England bowler Chris Old, a gritty, defiant, unsung anti-hero in the Billy Casper mould.
When Old made his debut, 13 of the 17-strong Yorkshire squad were registered as working-class professionals. Half a century later, three of the five Yorkshiremen selec\u00adted for the last Ashes series \u2013 Root, Jonny Bairstow and Gary Ballance \u2013 were privately educated. \u201cThe game of cricket now is played in public schools,\u201d Old told me. \u201cTop players are getting huge amounts of money, but the grass-roots game doesn\u2019t seem to have benefited in any way.\u201d
\u201cIn ten years\u2019 time you won\u2019t get a Joe Root,\u201d Rayner said. \u201cIf you haven\u2019t seen these top Yorkshire cricketers playing in your backyard and you haven\u2019t got Sky, it will be difficult to get the whole cricket bug. So where is the next generation of Roots going to come from?\u201d Or the next generation of Jessica Ennis-Hills? Three years ago, the Sheffield stadium where she trained and first discovered athletics was closed after cuts to local services.
Anthony Clavane’s A Yorkshire Tragedy: The Rise and Fall of a Sporting Powerhouse is published by Riverrun<\/p>\n

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