A Quick, Opinionated Guide To This Year’s Academy Awards Line-Up
A
is for Alfred Molina, in An Education, playing Jack, Jenny’s (Carey Mulligan) father, a wonderful, restrained performance that deserved a nomination but didn’t get one. Molina is, by turns, bombastic, shy, confused, shrewd and, finally, devastated to find that his daughter has been seduced and left by a playboy. When Molina tells his daughter towards the end of the film: “…and he wasn’t who he said he was. He wasn’t who you said he was,” he breaks your heart with his helplessness.
B
is for Inglourious Basterds. Quentin Tarantino returns to form with this rollicking tale. Who else could have thought of using a knife to carve the swastika on a Nazi head as way for Jews to take revenge?
C
is for Courtship, in An Education. It is actually the start of a seduction (but we don’t know this yet). The lovely Jenny (Carey Mulligan) stands at the bus stop getting drenched in the rain. David (Peter Saarsgard) drives by. He stops, and tells Mulligan: “I can understand that you won’t accept a lift from a stranger, but I am a music lover and am very worried about your cello.” He puts the cello in the back seat, and drives very slowly while Mulligan walks next to the car talking to him. The English and their instruments!
D
is for Lee Daniels. It is hard to take a brutal, depressing tale of a down-and-out black woman (Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire - evidently Saphire negotiated much harder than Chetan Bhagat did with V. V. Chopra) and still manage to grab and hold the audience. But Daniels pulls it off, keeping it real, yet watchable.
E
is for Elegance. Forget Bullock, Streep or Mirren. As Jenny in An Education, Cary Mulligan is elegantly cool; her acting is economical, almost effortless. And her on-screen chemistry with Alfred Molina, who plays her father, is an absolute joy.
F
is for Francois Pienaar, as played by Matt Damon in Invictus. Just when we thought we had lost the talented Mr. Damon to Jason Bourne, he delivers a cool, nuanced portrayal of the captain of the South African Rugby team in the 1990s. Damon keeps it understated and that works beautifully to highlight Morgan Freeman’s Mandela.
G
is for Gallows Humour, as in The Hurt Locker. When a colonel asks the bomb disposal expert, William James (Jeremy Renner), “How many bombs have you disarmed?” James answers, “873.” The colonel persists: “So what’s best way to go about disarming these things?” James, straight-faced, answers, “The way you don’t die Sir.”
H
is for Helicoradian. Avatar deserves to be seen in 3D just for these hallucinatory flowers with red spiral leaves. According to Wikipedia, these plants are 3–4 metres (9.8–13 ft) tall and, when touched, they curl up and collapse into themselves instantly. They are zooplantae, part-animal, part-plant. Unless you are smoking stuff that you shouldn’t be, it is hard to think up this sort of visual imagery.
I
is for Invictus, a poem by W. E. Henley. It ends:
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
Nelson Mandela internalised the poem to help himself survive the long imprisonment. He then gave this line to the captain of the South African Rugby team.
J
is for Jeff Bridges. You can hate country music for its clichés. But not his country singer character in Crazy Heart. His performance encompasses almost the entire range of emotions available to actors; in that sense, his is perhaps the most complete acting performance of the year.
K
is for Kathryn Bigelow. The Hurt Locker is a sledgehammer, yet a very balanced portrayal of the American presence in Iraq. It takes guts to cast actors like Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes and kill them within ten minutes of their first appearances. A wonderfully human touch: Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) realising, in the middle of a heated battle, that he could die any time: “I want a son. At least he would care if I am dead.”
L
is for Loyalty, but in a perverse way. In Up In The Air, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), believes in having a very light “backpack” — a metaphor for relationships — but he travels to accumulate frequent flyer mileage points, becoming the seventh person in history to accumulate 10-million of them. (“More people have walked on the moon!”) In his seat in a plane, Clooney is visited by the captain, who says: “We thank you for your loyalty.”
M
Is for Mandela (as in Nelson) and Morgan (as in Freeman). In Invictus, Freeman does an amazing job of reproducing Mandela’s walk, speech, and that incredible smile. In one memorable scene, Mandela tells his head of security services, who is black, to include whites in his team: “Rainbow nation starts here. Reconciliation starts here. Forgiveness starts here. Forgiveness is such a powerful weapon.” At that point, Mandela and Morgan merge to give you a ringside view of history.
N
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(This story appears in the 05 March, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)