Oscar forecast

LOVE IS STRANGE finally limped into town last week, the last of last year's big ones screened at the BFI's London Film Festival last October, and without any Oscar nominations to give it extra cachet. It is not even playing at my local multiplex, so if its still around next week I may have to catch it when uptown next, otherwise its wait for the dvd! The critics though regarded it as the perfect Valentine Day movie instead of that over-hyped FIFTY SHADES OF GREY ...

Timing it seems is everything in the Oscars race. Take 1950 - Bette Davis for ALL ABOUT EVE and Gloria Swanson in SUNSET BOULEVARD may either or both have won if they had appeared in different years, but clashed together thus paving the way for newcomer Judy Holliday to win. Apparently at the ceremony Swanson leaned over and said to Holliday: "For heavens sake, couldn't you have waited till next year?" - it being Gloria's final bid for Oscar glory. (Another point of view of course is that in 1950 both Bette and Gloria were seen as old timers and not as revered as they are now: Bette was all washed up having left Warners while Swanson was just a "silent star", and it seems Judy Garland was also seen as washed up and difficult as well in 1954 thus the vote went to the current golden girl Grace Kelly. THE COUNTRY GIRL may be largely forgotten now (I certainly don't like it), but the love for A STAR IS BORN just keeps on growing....).

Back to this year: THE IMITATION GAME boys must have thought they had it all sewn up. Posh boy Benedict as gay martyr Alan Turing (though we don't see him actually do anything like you know, gay...) who it seems single-handedly cracked the Enigma Code in a cracking period drama (Keira looks a picture in those 40s fashions) crammed with British talent. But then comes along an even posher boy (Benedict went to Harrow, Eddie is an Eton boy who was at school with Prince William) as the even more impressive Stephen Hawking, not only a genius but with that major disability card which Oscar so loves ..... so thats in the bag then. THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING is a more feel-good picture too, and yes Redmayne is astonshing - the perfect mix of actor and role as he looks just right here. 

I am not enamoured with BOYHOOD, as per my review, but it too seems unstoppable now .... and Julianne Moore is certainly worthy and paid her dues, though her film is not opening here until March. Patricia Arquette is a worthy win too. We shall see ...

Red carpet season

We have had the Golden Globes and soon it will be BAFTA time and then the lead-up to The Oscars. The big movies are all playing (though a few have not opened here in the UK yet). I now see they are creating new posters for THE IMITATION GAME, (highlighting its 9 BAFTA, 8 Academy Award and 3 SAG nominations) as it may have peaked too early, following the success of Eddie Redmayne at the Globes. It now seems one's moral duty to honour the Turing film to make up for how he was mistreated. 
The battle lines seemed to be drawn: which posh boy playing a tortured genius would succeed: Benedict Cumberbatch as gay code-breaker Alan Turing or Redmayne as crippled Stephen Hawking? Cumberbatch seemed to be in the lead, with his nuanced performance and Turing has practically been canonised of late, also its Benedict's first lead movie role after his TV SHERLOCK and all those other roles. Talk about an actor being on a roll 

.... then THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING came along (I have only seen the trailer as yet) with a flashier role for its lead actor. The Academy of course loves actors playing serious disabilities (MY LEFT FOOT et al) or losing or gaining weight, and it seems a more emotionally involving story of Hawking's first marriage, as opposed to the more repressed Turing (whose gayness is not depicted in any serious way). THE IMITATION GAME though has the Harvey Weinstein clout behind it, so we shall see.  It now seems of course that Turing and Hawking may cancel each other out (as Bette's Margo Channing and Gloria's Norma Desmond did in 1950) as Michael Keaton comes up fast on the comeback trail with a movie everyone is talking about too: BIRDMAN .... Among those who fell by the wayside: Timothy Spall in Mike Leigh's MR TURNER, and Jake Gyllenhaal in NIGHTCRAWLER. 

Freddie Fox - is he or isn't he?

Speaking of Jake, it is almost a decade on from BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. Actors are still playing gay but now seem to be courting publicity by hinting or teasing that they may be or turn gay in real life ... step forward Freddie Fox, (actor son of actor Edward) - one of those actors (like Tom Hollander or Jude Law at one stage) who seems to play gay a lot - we saw him on stage a year or so ago as Bosie to Rupert Everett's Oscar Wilde in David Hare's THE JUDAS KISS (Theatre label) and a right petulant Bosie he was too, and he was in the recent PRIDE and now in a new tv series getting a lot of publicity, CUCUMBER, part of a new trilogy by QUEER AS FOLK creator Russell T Davies. QAF caused a sensation back in the '90s with its frank depiction of young gays in the Manchester 'gay village', whereas CUCUMBER focuses on older gay men. Freddie is one of the main younger characters here, another petulant young beauty who is rampantly bisexual. Freddie though, in not one but in several interviews (as in gay ATTITUDE magazine), keeps going on about how he has dated girls in the past but may conceivably fall in love with a man. Who the hell cares? Is this news? Acting is acting - 

This is the start of a latest interview, in today's INDEPENDENT with Patrick Strudwick :

Playing disabled – which sounds arrestingly offensive – has long been noted as a swift route to Oscar glory.

But now there is a new toy for actors: not just playing gay (Brokeback Mountain is 10 years old) but flirting with homosexuality off-camera. It is a new flow chart of orchestrated ambiguity, social-media wildfire, ratings and fame. Virtual, viral gayness.

This week, Freddie Fox, who flickers, resplendent, as the sexually omnivorous lust beacon in Channel 4’s new gay drama Cucumber, gave an interview straight from the Hedge Your Bets textbook.

“I wouldn’t wish to go, ‘I am this or I am that,’ because at some time in my life, yes I’ve had girlfriends, but I might fall in love with a man,” he said. “The majority of my life to date has been as a straight man. But who knows what will happen next?

Hollywood of course wants to keep its actors in the closet and their toxic attitudes resurfaced this week in the body of Billy Crystal, so embraced by Tinseltown that he has hosted the Oscars nine times. Crystal spoke of gay television characters “pushing it a little too far”, and of their sex scenes: “I hope people don’t abuse it and shove it in our faces.” 

Which leads us back to Freddie Fox. ..... He would have invited much less cynicism about his motivation if he had said: “Yes, I fantasise sexually about men.” Or if he had actually owned the label bisexual. That he didn’t leaves three possibilities: he is merely playing another part, that of a keep-’em-guessing heart-throb; he is a coward; or he does not understand that until bigotry ends, using terms such as gay and bisexual to come out, to stake our identity, to become a visible social force, is the single most potent weapon we have. And one significantly tougher, braver and in-your-face than a blasted cucumber.

Meanwhile out gay actors like Andrew Scott, Ben Whishaw  or Russell Tovey (or Americans Matt Bomer or Zachery Quinto) just get on with acting without having to give interviews to discuss their sexuality and how it may change; Olympic diver Tom Daley comes out perfectly on YouTube and can now get on with his training (as fans fantasise on his relationship with Dustin Lance Black) and actors matter-of-factly disrobe in the current revival of MY NIGHT WITH REG, which as per my previous posts on it is about that group of gay friends in the 1980s who experience the ravages of time, Aids, loss and betrayal, which is both laugh out loud and heartbreaking. 

Benedict cracks the Oscar code ?

THE IMITATION GAME, 2014. Benedict Cumberbatch makes his Oscar bid as the persecuted gay mathematician Alan Turing, whose obsessive efforts in cracking the Enigma code, and hastening the end of World War Two, were met with chilling ingratitude by the British government. Morten Tyldum's widescreen film has a handsome sheen, a great cast and Keira Knightley on spry form (and looking nicely in period in those Forties fashions, even if maybe too young and too pretty) as Joan Clarke, a crossword whiz who becomes Turing's colleague - the only woman it seems cracking codes, but it might have delved further into his private conflict, and what it meant to him, particularly after the war. He and Joan do get engaged for a while, but it not built up as a romance. 

Cumberbatch - is it his first leading role after all those appearances in films like WAR HORSE and 12 YEARS A SLAVE, TINKER TAILOR SOLIDER SPY and of course his SHERLOCK for the BBC - catches Turing perfectly, but we see nothing of his private life, or that robbery that gets the police involved in the first place - as we never see him with a pick-up or involved with any man. We only get those flashbacks to his schooldays and that friendship with fellow pupil Christopher - the name he gives to his code-breaking machine. But how does this machine work? Well, it is a film, not a documentary .... and it certainly knocks 2001's ENIGMA into a cocked hat, with its fictional hero Tom Jericho, and where Turing is not mentioned at all - Jericho being the heterosexual version of him served up by novelist Robert Harris - no friend of the gays in his novels (not even in the Ancient Rome of his "Pompeii"). 

Charles Dance and Mark Strong score as the Bletchley Park overseers, while Matthew Goode and DOWNTON's Allen Leech are effective as part of the code-breaking team. We see Turing's eccentricities and inability to tell a joke or mix in with the others and their growing respect for him. Rory Kinnear is the dogged detective (in the '50s scenes) looking for the real story on Turing whose classification documents have disappeared and he thinks he is tracking down a spy, not a naive homosexual who goes to the police after being robbed, back in that bleak early Fifties time for gays.

As a true story fictionalised for the cinema (it could be this year's THE KING'S SPEECH, another prestige film, which I didn't actually like) it is effective, and we get nice snippets of the war going on away from these Bletchley huts, and the end credits fill us in on Turing's fate (his suicide in 1954 after chemical castration instead of a prison sentence) and how his prototype computers helped end the war, and his eventual Royal Pardon ....  More on Turing at label.

Next Award season is hotting up, not only Cumberbatch as Turing but Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking (THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING - caught the trailer for that today), a career-best from Jake Gyllenhaal and maybe Tom Hardy (THE DROP), and Timothy Spall as MR TURNER and thats just for starters - there's also Channing's FOXCATCHER. Cumberbatch has already worked on 10 projects since completing his Alan Turing saga. Sir Derek Jacobi too of course had one of his biggest stage successes playing Turing in the play BREAKING THE CODE (they missed a trick not including him somewhere here), its a story that will continue to fascinate us.

Genius: Alan Turing

Alan Turing's genius ushered in the digital age. Britain could have been at its centre, had it not treated him so cruelly, according to a report by Michael Hanlon in today's "Sunday Times". Turing's story is of course too well known to go into detail here but briefly he was the breaker of the Enigma code and credited with shortening the second world war by two years - but life for a gay man in post-war Britain was a furtive affair, homosexuality was still illegal. I remember being a child in the early 50s and reading about that court case involving Peter Wildblood and Lord Montagu and trying to understand why what they had done was so bad. Turing had met a young man whose friend had burgled his house so the naive professor reported him to the police - as a result one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century was arrested and charged with gross indecency. He was given a choice between going to prison or having treatment for his condition - which turned out to be chemical castration. He chose the latter and never truly recovered, committing suicide in 1954 by eating a poisoned apple (he had seen SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARVES several times!). It wasn't until 2009 the the British government, after a petition, made a formal apology for the appalling way he had been treated.

It now seems evident that Turing, Britain's almost forgotten genius, may have been nearly single-handedly responsible for the shape of the modern world, as well as aiding the end of the last war. Had he lived he may have been able to have jump-started a new industrial revolution. Google now says "without Alan Turing we would never have had Google, we would never have had the whole IT revolution; all the principles of computing go back to Alan Turing". So all modern computing: internet, mobile phones, laptops, email, Facebook, YouTube etc are a result of ideas published in his 1936 paper which showed how the manipulation of binary code using a series of simple logical operations could be put to an infinite number of uses, from computing prime numbers to forecasting the weather! No other technology has enriched more people more quickly in less than a generation. Turing thought that one day computers would become common and small enough to be carried around.

Of course the development of computing would have happened without Turing, but it would have happened later and far more slowly. It is fascinating to ponder what might have happened if he had lived - and such a shame his own life was so wasted. Like Oscar Wilde dying in his 40s in 1900 - if he had lived to enjoy old age he would have been a media star on radio and film, so too one can imagine an older Turing a flamboyant, confident pundit on television and perhaps the founder of a British Google or Apple ? but this brilliant, charming, odd, driven workaholic had a different fate. At least he is now being celebrated.