Ahead of this year’s Academy awards ceremony on 22 February, Susan Sarandon has sounded a note of cynicism amid the feverish predictions and tuxedo bookings.
In an interview with the Guardian discussing her win for Dead Man Walking in 1996, she says: “There are so many ways that people vote that are just not that serious; like, they think, ‘It’s so great that she made herself look ugly and stuck on a fake nose’, or ‘I feel good about voting for Nelson Mandela’ and ‘I like Gandhi’ – I am not convinced that everyone sat through three hours of Gandhi.”
Her comments playfully skewer the likes of Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman, who donned fake noses for performances in The Iron Lady and The Hours, as well as Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi biopic starring Ben Kingsley, which won eight Oscars in 1983.
She also laments how driven by lobbying the awards can be, saying: “All actors realise that a race for recognition, in a business that is so connected to commerce, is a very subjective thing. There are so many performances that don’t get recognition – especially these days when you have to have so much money to run a campaign.”
It’s a sentiment shared by Alfonso Cuarón, director of Gravity, who is also interviewed for the feature in which Oscar winners reminisce about their wins. “The campaigning for awards is like a parallel industry, and it gets more intense every year,” he notes. He celebrates the attention that is brought to a film by a win, but says that “the Oscar is not going to make your film a better film”.
Steve McQueen, who won last year with 12 Years a Slave, similarly says that “an Oscar is not a measuring stick for what is good or bad”. But he, too, acknowledges the power of the awards: “Winning had a huge impact on the money 12 Years A Slave made [£85m at the global box office], and opened a lot of doors for black cinema. Already there have been films with more black protagonists. I know our film helped.”
The full feature, also featuring interviews and photos with past Oscar winners Juliette Binoche, animator Nick Park, Sir Ben Kingsley and many others, is in Saturday 7 February’s edition of the Guardian’s Weekend magazine.
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