YOUNG ADULT Review

(Director: Jason Reitman)

Bowling for Soup sang that ‘highschool never ends’ and Diabalo Cody and Jason Reitman’s new collaboration Young Adult, leaves you wondering if they may have had a point. Young Adult tells the story of the return of Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) to her backwater Minnesota hometown in a tragic and desperate effort to win back her married high school boyfriend, new father Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson).   In a succession of ever lower-cut tops, ever higher heels and ever darker moods, Theron playing a writer of fiction for young adults whose mental health seems as precarious as the future of her popular series for teenagers, forms an unlikely partnership with disabled small-towner and former classmate Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt).

With high school stereotypes aplenty from Mavis the prom queen and Buddy the jock to Matt the high school looser, Cody and Reitman play with genre superbly in the making of this film, parodying and playing on the norms of the chick flick genre with tragically heartbreaking results.   With a largely neglected lapdog, impossibly long legs wobbling in shoes built for Manhattan not Minnesota, frozen expression, blonde locks thinned by trichotcllomania and battered Mini convertible, Mavis Gary is exactly what you secretly always hoped would become of the cast of Mean Girls. You’ve encountered frozen food sections with more warmth than her.  Theron steps up to the challenge admirably, with other very notable performances coming from Patton Oswalt as Matt and his on screen sister Beth played by Collette Wolfe in a manner that suggests she has seen enough Gossip Girl episodes to know exactly how the role of the jealous sycophant ought to be played.

Diablo Cody has a flare for creating flawed and life-like female characters and in this film her provocative writing is born out in the truthful portrayal of a young woman uncomfortably out of sync with both reality and normality.  Ostensibly a romantic comedy, it does not take you long to realise with a sense of growing unease that there is nothing romantic or funny about this story of psychological and physical flaws.  Instead the end of the film finds you ashamed to be found laughing at Gary’s mental illness.   Young Adults amounts to an uncomfortable emotional rollercoaster of proportions that leave you shocked at not being subject to height restrictions on entry and handed a photograph of your anguished face as you exit.

The prominence of teenage genre series’ such as Twilight and Harry Potter  that have dominated the movie screens in recent years have led to more than one screen character whose job is to write such fiction.  Like Emma Morley of One Day, Mavis Gary is stuck obsessing over her own teenage past and sweetheart in a trend that makes you worry for the mental health of Twilight’s Stephenie Meyer.  Young Adult finds an appropriately teenage genre for a film about people so stuck in an adolescent mindset that they are still listening to cassette tapes of their pubescent music tastes rather than having babies and forming self mocking rock bands called Nipple Confusion with other mothers they have met at toddler group like Gary’s non-rival Mrs Buddy Slade. 

While there are occasionally airs of casting around for the most unusual mental condition or shocking back story to make the plot painful, the film avoids being sidetracked by the metaphors it employs to reinforce what is happening to its characters.   Reitman’s direction is characterised by an air of knowing cynicism which enables him to pull off the most ridiculous sex scenes, painful show downs and excruciating family reunions with candour and a prickly sense of realism that achieves the feat of adapting the neutrality with which Lynne Ramsey depicts despair in films such as Morven Caller for a popular audience drawn in by pink tracksuits and Apple Macs. 

While Young Adult may see Cody and Reitman’s filmmaking partnership mature from it’s high school Juno days, it retains even in adulthood, a compelling retrospective adolescence.  A slight affair with a hefty emotional message, the best thing about Young Adult is that the audience are genuinely unsure how it might end and uncertain as to whether they care about what might happen to Gary.  One thing is for sure though, after 93 subversive minutes in Mavis’ company, we are glad to be shot of her. 

4/5 stars.

March in Films

See at all costs: 

The most exciting film coming to cinemas in the near future is undoubtedly Michael, the directional debut by Markus Schleinzer  a screenwriter so new to the film scene that his Wikipedia page is still in German.  If the well crafted and eerie nature of the trailer for Michael is anything to go by, that’s all going to change soon.  Michael is a film about a man who does his shopping, drives home to suburbia and makes dinner for the boy he keeps locked in his basement.  Devoid of the over-emotional unrealistic air of a Hollywood film (or even a film with a plot), Michael while undeniably art house in nature, is by far the best imaginable way of handling of paedophilia in film.  While there are overtones of being told something we know already thanks to the Kampusch and Fritzl media saturation, the fact that at no point does Michael (Michael Fuith) come under suspicion is far more chilling than any of the gruesome actions that are left unseen, the answers to any of the questions that are left hanging, or the ease with which Schleinzer presents abnormality in an everyday light.  Particularly interesting will be the extent to which this, Schleinzer’s first film, deviates from the work of Michael Haneke whose casting agent he was for many years, and the performance of David Rauchenberger as the ten year old Wolfgang that divided reviewers at Cannes where this film premiered to mixed reviews last year.  Static and reserved, it is through it’s complete lack of sensationalism that this film promises to be sensational.   

Miss this, whatever you do:

Then there’s ID:A a Danish thriller from director Christian E. Christiansen that you would be forgiven for thinking is receiving a UK release only because Danish dramas are in vogue on the small screen this winter in the UK.  Consistently poorly reviewed, this is yet another film about a woman who wakes up with no memory, enough cash to stimulate the Greek economy and a handgun, and begins to realise her past may not be as savoury as the hair and makeup department have led you to believe.  The trailer indicates that this may be as unfulfilling an experience as watching someone solve a Sudoku puzzle. 

Worth taking a chance on:

You can take Thomas Hardy out of bleak Wessex but you can’t take the bleakness of Thomas Hardy.  It’s understandably hard to be enthusiastic about Thomas Hardy at the best of times, but it’s definitely a lot easier when it is presented to you in a sugar-coated form in the manner of Trishna, Michael Winterbottom’s take on Tess of the D’Urbervilles.  From the director of Jude and The Claim (based respectively on Jude the Obscure and The Mayor of Casterbridge), Winterbottom returns to the work of his favourite author in a third attempt to trick an audience into sitting through Hardy. Rest assured that though set in India, this is not an attempt to cash in on the successes of Slumdog Millionaire.  In fact, the trailer suggests something of a documentary ambience that leaves you feeling that Michael Palin might at any moment appear in shot.  This film looks to be a success because it takes as much from the ambience, culture and societal expectations of modern day Rajasthan and Mumbai as Hardy took from Victorian village life.  When English born Jay (Riz Ahmed), son of a hotel tycoon meets peasant girl Trishna (Freida Pinto) he offers her a job and a new life which she eventually turns her back on out of guilt over the physical relationship that develops between them.
The contemporary take on issues of class and gender raised by this film are more potent for the modern audience than they would ever be against a Victorian backdrop.  In the trailer the titular character remains silent while she is cast in various roles by the man to whom she sells herself in the hope of betterment.  This film promises to deal with the reality of being poor and being a woman and being a sexual being in a way that would have even Nadine Dorries or Newt Gringrich reaching for the nearest copy of The Female Eunuch. 

Film you are obliged to see because everyone else will have:

If there’s one thing that England does well, it’s old people and if there’s one thing that India does well it’s aesthetics.  Unfortunately the combination of the two in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (directed by John Madden who has made a career out of popular yet vapid films such as Shakespeare in Love), is motivated more by money than by artistry.  This film looks to be predictable, two dimensional and inanely crowd-pleasing, peppered with the sort of jokes that you have forgotten by the time you have left the cinema with a distinct air of seaside comedy about it.  Despite boasting a cast that reads like a who’s who of British actors, this film misses the chance to be edgy, cynical, challenging or compelling.  Instead it gives the largest possible audience the largest possible number of stereotypes they could wish for, with the largest possible number of Indian sunsets it is possible to cram into 123 mins.  Worse still, there is a distinct air that the cast were board making it.  If you enjoy pleasant movies then this is probably for you, if not the best thing that can be said about this film is that it might revitalise the BUPA care home industry. 

Predicted to disappoint:

And finally a shout out for the film with the most promising title that seems like it will fail to deliver.  Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (directed by Lasse Hallstrom) starring Ewen McGregor could have been an interesting film about a culture and location as topical as it is beautiful.  Instead the trailer seems to suggest that the Yemen could be replaced by just about anywhere ‘not western’ in what appears to be a post colonial political kerfuffle of a film; salmon and the Middle East are sidelined in a postcolonial plot constructed to enable Ewen McGregor and Emily Blunt to conduct a bland romance (or should that be ‘hook up’?).  Fred Jones (Ewen McGregor) is a typically earnest yet wholly unconvincing ‘expert’ and Kristin Scott-Thomas plays yet another character defined by her inability to move her facial muscles.  The whole thing seems about as compelling as a narrative as Monty Python’s dead fish sketch and about as alien to the sharp satire of Paul Torday’s book on which it is based as 10,000 North Atlantic salmon are to the waterways of Western Yemen.  The themes are interesting:  the role of political spin in Europe’s relationship with the Middle East and the interplay between the minted sheiks rolling in Arab oil money and Western society but they seem incidental to anything that actually happens in the film.  On the whole, this fails to bite.

The Oscar the Grouch Film Awards 2011

With the Oscars just around the corner, here is an alternative take on the highs and lows, successes and embarrasements of the year 2011 in films:

Oscar for best facial hair on screen:

Jean Dujardin in The Artist as George Valentin, sporting the sort of facial hair which would have made Greta Garbo blush.

Sacha Baron Cohen in Hugo as the Station Inspector, displaying an interesting symmetry between his eyebrows and upper lip.

Adrian Brody in Midnight in Paris as Salvador Dali, which says it all really.

The identibeards of everyone with a connection to the literary scene in Annonymous.

Puss in Puss in Boots explaining the meaning of the phrase ‘the cat’s whiskers’.

And finally, Benedict Cumberbach in Warhorse as Major Jamie Stewart with the sort of moustache you are obliged to grow if you intend to lecture others on the subject of bravery.

Oscar for movie with the most useful title to signal your intentions on a first date:

No Strings Attached   produced by Jeffrey Clifford, Joe Medjuck and Ivan Reitman.

Friends With Benefits  produced by Liz Glotzer, Will Gluck, Martin Shafer, Janet and Jerry Zucker.

Bridesmaids  produced by Judd Apatow, Barry Mendel and Clayton Townsend.

Abduction  produced by Doug Davidson, Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Dan Lautner, Roy Lee and Lee Stollman.

Monogamy  produced by Jeffrey V. Mandel, Randy Manis, Tom Heller and Dana Adam Shapiro.

A Good Old Fashioned Orgy  produced by James D. Stern.

Oscar for performance that the greatest number of people are currently masturbating to, but would be afraid to tell their friends about:

Ezra Miller as the teenage Kevin in We Need to Talk About Kevin especially that shot where he’s profiled in the act of drawing the crossb…

Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady  in an unlikely blue movie role.

Gary Oldman as George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  Move over Bond, I spy a new MI5 heart throb.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Adam Lerner in 50/50 whose attractiveness increases in inverse proportion to his health.  Who says cancer’s all bad?

Pina.  All of it.  Everyone in it.  Never has the Rhineland been more attractive (except maybe to Hitler). 

Puss in Puss in Boots (voiced by Antonio Banderas).  Would it be zoophilia, would it?  Really?

Oscar for most blatant English stereotype:

Colin Firth as Bill Hayden in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy , so English he could only be a Russian agent… 

Major Jamie Stewart in Warhorse  playing a characterisation straight out of Blackadder Goes Forth.

Judi Dench as Mrs Fairfax from Jane Eyre.  It is no longer clear whether Judi Dench is acting or has merely become a stereotypical period drama character.

Richard E. Grant as Michael Hesletine in The Iron Lady.  While it is not immediately clear if the real deal or the impersonator has the worst hair, it is clear that only an Englishman would think they could pull it off.

Eddie Redmayne as  in My Week Wth Marilyn.  Frightfully decent young chap, product of a head-on, high velocity collision between Biggles and Brideshead Revisited. 

Most peculiar unforeseen consequence of losing a spouse:

Penelope Ann Miller as Doris Valentin in The Artist: loose a husband, discover the need to fill time with something other than defacing his photographs.

George Clooney as Matt King in The Descendants: loose a wife, gain a new enthusiasm for March of the Penguins.

Peyman Maardi as Nader in A Separation: loose a wife, gain familiarity with the Persian legal system.

Michael Fassbender as Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre: loose a wife, regain use of the attic.

Owen Wilson as Gil Pender in Midnight in Paris:  loose a wife, gain intimacy with F.  Scott Fitzgerald.   

Sanda Bullock as Linda Schell in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: loose a husband, gain a constipated demeanour. 

Oscar for most androgynous screen role (is it a man, is it a woman or is it a…?):

Tilda Swindon as Eva Khatchadourian in We Need to Talk About Kevin: it’s a Day of the Dead decoration that you left up by mistake.

Owen Wilson as Gil Pender in Midnight in Paris :  it’s a Woody Allen wannabe.

Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo:  it’s a middle class mother’s nightmare. 

Melissa McCarthey as Megan in Bridesmaids:  it’s 450lb of gender-confused Bridesmaid coming straight at you.

Janet McTeer as Hubert Page in Albert Nobbs:  it’s a single-person embodiment of the LGBT movement.

Glenn Close  as Albert Nobbs in Albert Nobbs:  it’s one big feminist statement in a bowler hat. 
Most horrific sex scene in a movie not staring Linda Lovelace:

Michael Fassbender as Brandon Sullivan and Amy Hargreaves as the prostitute in Shame in that bit where they’re doing it against the window of the high rise apartment and your only real sympathy is with the double glazing.

Charlize Theron as Marvis Gary and Patton Oswalt as Matt Freehauf inYoung Adult :  one sex scene Oswalt  would never have dreamed of having on his CV.

Johnny Depp as Kemp and Amber Heard as Chenault in The Rum Diary:  just when you think being gang raped in a Puetra Rican club is as bad as it gets, you’re just about to have sex with Johnny Depp when, well, you’ll have to watch the movie…

Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan and as Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen in Twilight:  Breaking Dawn.  Should have had a safe word, just sayin’. 

Kiera Knightly as Sabina Spielrein and Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung in A Dangerous Method.  If Knightly’s first instinct was to turn down the role on account of the sex scenes, then some instincts really shouldn’t be repressed.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Adam and Jessica Parker-Kennedy as Jacqui in 50/50.  If a guy who genuinely has cancer can’t get sympathy sex, then what hope is there for the guys who are just pretending?

Best thinking woman’s crumpet:

Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud in A Dangerous Method:  the neurotic woman’s crumpet.

Tilda Swindon as Eva Khatchadourian in We Need to Talk About Kevin:  the lesbian woman’s crumpet.  

Patrick Wilson as Buddy Slade in Young Adult:  the broody woman’s crumpet.

Jim Broardbent as Dennis Thatcher in The Iron Lady:  the career woman’s crumpet

Demian Birchir as Carlos Gallindo in A Better Life: the activist woman’s crumpet.

Michael Fassbender as Brandon Sullivan in Shame:  any woman’s crumpet.

CARNAGE Review

(Director: Roman Polanski)

After eleven year old Zachary Cowan strikes out at eleven year old Ethan Longstreet in Brooklyn Bridge Park and knocks out two of his incisors, the boys’ parents (Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz) meet to discuss the incident in a tightly controlled, intelligently acted chamber piece that brings Yasmina Reez’s stage play to the big screen in a stench of vomit, scotch, cologne and fury.

The film works on the principle of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, trapping a group of people together in a confined space to act as a pressure cooker to fuel their mutual hatred of one another and bring out their true characters. ‘Hell is other people’ wrote Sartre, and for these mismatched couples, hell is a woman vomiting pear and apple cobbler over your out-of-print coffee table books, being lectured on the third world by a New York housewife, being trapped in domestic conflict when there are industrial ones to be fought and being ‘dressed as a liberal’ in order compliment the contents of your wife’s bookshelves. What starts with an act of primitive violence inflicted with a stick, descends quickly into a cold war between outwardly polite and inwardly resentful parents. Handbags are flung across the room, tulips are flung on the floor and a BlackBerry meets an untimely end in a vase of water.

Polanski’s brave screen adaptation of Reez’s piece of fourth wall theatre is perceptive and shrewd, bookended by film of the otherwise unseen victim and assailant. Inventive shots distort an hour and a half of continuous film which does not drag in the heady atmosphere of the Longstreets’ apartment. Unfortunately, the overall effect is somewhat akin to a stage production with cinematic elements tagged onto the beginning and conclusion.

The theatrical nature of the film means that it is with the characters that this piece floats or sinks and Reilly, Foster, Winslet and Waltz bring their considerable talent to fleshing out their characters. While the investment broker Nancy Cowan (Winslet) who takes as much care perfecting her ice queen image as Penelope Longstreet (Foster) does in arranging the ethnic and artistic pieces on her mantelpiece, have the more combative roles, the hopelessly typecast Reilly (who has seemingly traded Kevin in for a nicer model) and the uncomfortably likeable Waltz (who appears to have reprised his role as Hands Lander in Inglourious Basterds with the addition of a BlackBerry and a law degree) present a subtler yet more compelling clash of lifestyles.

Nevertheless, this is an unmistakably minor film, which has all the hallmarks of a future cult-classic. What the piece lacks in the tension and imperative of a live stage play, to make the audience feel involved and engaged, it makes up for in mordant humour. The nods towards eccentric film-making in the closing shot of a hamster (which along with the children is the only sympathetic character in the film) released by Longstreet into the wilds of the New York gutter, looking lost and confused in Brooklyn Bridge Park, are unconvincing as an effort to turn what is a stage-bound piece into a film.

It is easy to dismiss this film as a piece of cinema for a niche market, functioning as an in-joke, leaving out anyone not involved in the middle class, middle aged, coffee-pouring, dinner party attending lifestyle of the protagonists in which people are ridiculed for their banking careers, attitudes to Third World atrocity and parenting strategies. To do so, however, would be to overlook the acerbic acting and impeccable characterisation. Polanski creates a doubles tennis match of a conflict in which the Guardian v. Telegraph strife of the two households descends into a Daily Mail style argument in which no-one survives with dignity.

Through beautifully rounded dialogue and impeccable characterisation, Polanski makes a point that a film does not have to be big to be good. In an atmosphere alive with unspoken judgements, the subtext of this film is brought out beautifully by the direction. Despite moments that are tedious or flat or frustrating, this is an unusual and brilliant piece that was badly let down by it’s Edinburgh Fringe-style publicity. With a style which combines the humour of Friends with the multifarious psychological complexity of a fine piece of theatre, it would be a mistake not to treat this tour-de-force of first world problems and Jodie Foster’s neck muscles seriously.

3/5 stars

On Everybody’s Lips

2011 was a year marked by a resurgence of filmic facial hair.  Never since the Golden Days of cinema have the upper lips of the stars of the screen played host to a more exciting array of facial furniture.  To be clean shaven is for the passé and the ordinary.  A good sprouting upper lip it would seem is a must.

The contenders for the (very much imaginary) Oscar for best facial hair on screen in 2012:

Jean Dujardin in The Artist as George Valentin, sporting the sort of facial hair which would have made Greta Garbo blush.

Sacha Baron Cohen in Hugo as the Station Inspector, displaying an interesting symmetry between his eyebrows and upper lip.

Adrian Brody in Midnight in Paris as Salvador Dali, which says it all really.

As well as Corey Stoll in Midnight in Paris as Ernest Hemingway with the sort of stubble and moustache combination that points to why he was married four times.

Michael Lonsdale in Des Hommes et des Dieux as Luc with an impressive Sophoclesian effort.

Puss in Puss in Boots explaining the meaning of the phrase ‘the cat’s whiskers’.

And finally, Benedict Cumberbach in Warhorse as Major Jamie Stewart with the sort of moustache you are obliged to grow if you intend to lecture others on the subject of bravery.

Viewed together, these contenders appear very much like they are attending a Hollywood party for which someone has purchased for the occasion a set of false moustaches, or maybe if depicted in black and white, a group portrait of a North Polar expedition circa. 1932.  However they do appear to display simple truths about how America sees facial hair.

Across the Atlantic, they view face-fungus rather like the Romans did; for the descendents of Romulus and Remus any follicular growth on the lower portions of the face was for homosexuals, (often synonymous with) Greeks and philosophers as well as for barbarians.  To be civilised, reasonable and honourable dictated use of the razor.  For the hair and makeup departments in Hollywood, hair is for non-Americans (especially  Europeans), particularly those of bossy and artistic temperaments.  It is for stationmasters (The Station Inspector in Hugo) and majors (Major Stewart, Warhorse), for monks (Luc in Des Hommes et des Dieux), and surrealist painters (Dali in Midnight in Paris).  It is certainly not for nice American men like George Clooney as Matt King the typical American father in The Descendants or Brad Pitt as the baseball manager Billy Beane in Moneyball.

Of the owners of the six exciting moustaches listed above, three are French, two are Spanish and one, Ernest Hemingway, is an American living in Paris.  Other note-worthy screen moustaches of 2011 include that in residence upon the upper lip of Demian Bichir as Carlos Galindo the Hispanic illegal immigrant in A Better Life, styled to suggest something crawled onto his upper lip and died there, and the Elizabethan identi-beards of more or less everyone with a link to the literary scene in Anonymous.  The idea of traitors to the American way of life being marked out by their bristles is born out in Midnight in Paris where the nice American (Owen Wilson as Gil Pender) is as clean shaven as Julius Caesar while pretentious pseudo-Parisian (Michael Sheen as Paul Bates) sports an impenetrable thicket of a beard of a sort that Victorian inventors had in mind while designing spoons from which you could drink soup without first straining it through your finely groomed facial fixtures.

After all, beards are for those who paint, write, act, think or lead.  They are grown to shout through or drink French onion soup through, unless you prefer to wear a very thin pencil one in order to underline your inner self sexual nature and creative eccentricity.  The costume and make-up department of the upcoming film  A Dangerous Method, upon finding out that they were presented with a cast of idiosyncratic and learned European psychologists, seemingly leapt for their male grooming waxes with a cry of ‘they must have moustaches!’.

While Hollywood has shaved the 1940s stereotypical moustache of evil, it seems to have embraced the stereotypical moustache of ‘otherness’, of belonging to a group outside the all-American fold, alien to the all-American way of life.

Bone of Contention

Or, what the Oscar nominations 2011-2012 reveal about the place of women in Hollywood.

Maybe if Tilda Swinton had four paws and could alert a policeman to a house fire by barking, falling over and pretending to be dead, then she might be in for a better chance of getting an Oscar nomination this year…
That’s because there seems to be much more of a fuss about the impressive yet unrecognized standard of canine acting in Hollywood this year than in the impressive yet unrecognized contributions of women on and behind the screen.

Yesterday alone, ‘The I’ featured two prominent articles suggesting that dogs ought to be given just recognition for their roles respectively in The Artist and Hugo .  I happen to think the dog in The Artist more or less stole the show, but this drive towards canine equality in industry recognition of excellence is still absurd given the human inequality so apparent in this year’s Oscar nominations.  As reflections of the industry, they show something is sadly amiss.  And that something can largely be put down to an overabundance of Y chromosomes.

Theatrical market statistics indicate that cinema is enjoyed more or less evenly by the male and female defining sections of the population.   In light of this, it seems absurd that a mere eighteen percent of the roles creating Hollywood  movies are held by women (and a pretty hefty number of these are in costume and make-up capacities rather than as directors, cinematographers or producers).  Not only is there a woeful lack of women making cinema, but there is a woefully small number of nominations for women from The Academy.  Of one hundred and fifteen possible nominations, nineteen nominees were women and a further seventeen were shared between men and women.  Consider that ten of the nominations were for female only categories (Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress), and you get a picture of how poorly represented and rewarded women are for their creative work in the movie industry.

The problem however is not that the nominations committee is unfairly biased towards the efforts of men, but a reflection of the industry as a whole.  Consider that of the nominations for Best Picture, only one has a female lead (The Help) and you begin to see where the problem lies.  Something is rotten in the state of California.

One possible solution to redress the dearth of films with strong female leads and characters would be to replace the awards for ‘Best Actor’ or ‘Best Actress’ with a single award for ‘Best Actor’ (male or female).  The idea that the two awards exist to reflect the fundamental differences between the roles women play and those men play should surely be an outdated concept.  A single award would function to encourage studios and producers to be more open in making films which would have the potential to win their casts nominations.

After all, these ‘fundamental differences’ ARE the problem.   This is born out in the films nominated for Best Picture category this year.  Of the nine nominations, eight have male leads; in short there are simply more films written about men, men’s problems, boys’ adventures and in general, from a male perspective.   In fact, there are more films starring animals than there are staring women nominated for the category.

The films that do have female leads are almost without exception, also films more or less exclusively about women with marked feminine tone to their content and marketing (The Help, Bridesmaids).   The Iron Lady is an exception in sea of Hollywood films where societal issues are not, unless absolutely necessary, explored from a woman’s perspective.

Why is Hollywood scared of women in films?  The traditional answer is that while women will pay to see films about men, men will not pay to see films about women.  Is this maybe because films starring men are not exclusively about just, y’know…men, but about things like the Paris literary scene in the 1930s (Midnight in Paris), sex addiction and its effects (Shame), homeless orphans (Hugo), losing a parent (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)  and the early days of Hollywood (The Artist)?  Films starring women on the other hand are often about erm, bridesmaids (Bridesmaids).

The obvious answer therefore would be to give women meatier roles.  After all, did female protagonists stop male audiences going to see box office successes such as the Silence of the Lambs, Twilight or Gone With the Wind, Matilda, Titanic, The Sound of Music, National Velvet, Kill Bill, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo or The Iron Lady or Snow White?  Did it stop (entirely male) Ancient Greek audiences from going to see Medea?  Some of the biggest hits in cinema history are in fact movies about quite ‘stereotypically male themes’ like having a difficult relationship with your children and horseracing and have (you guessed it), female leads.

Part of the problem is that often the Academy holds off on giving very strong male performers nominations (e.g. Michael Fassbender for Shame) in years where the field is particularly strong because they are seen to be at the start of their careers and will go on to get nominations and awards for other performances later on.  However, this is not the same for women – compare the ages of the nominees for Best and Best Supporting Actress and Best and Best Supporting Actor this year and you will find a host of middle aged and some downright old men (with one exception for the twenty nine year old Hill).  There are far more youthful faces among the women of whom there are four under the age of forty, compared with one man.  The mode age for male nominees is eighty three, for women it is thirty two.  The idea that actresses come to the end of their careers before men do is damaging not only to the careers of the women who work as screen actresses but also leads to the banishment of post menopausal women from the movie theatre screen.

When women get lauded for main roles they are often playing a real life character which is then seen to define their career: as in Helen Mirren (The Queen ), Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady),  Michelle Williams (My Week With Marilyn). Roles written for women, even really good, central roles which are not adaptations of classic novels, are less likely to get nominations.  Tilda Swinton (We Need To Talk About Kevin) and Adepero Oduyes (Pariah) are both seen as scandalous omissions from this year’s nominations.

After all, when even the performing Hollywood dogs are all male, you know you’re in trouble.  When Martin Scorsese is writing to ‘The New York Times’ denouncing the exclusion of his performing Doberman (Hugo) from a shortlist of other performing dogs, well you’d be forgiven for thinking that he was barking.  If there’s a dog fight to be had, it should be over the place of women in Hollywood.

On cinema attendance:
http://blogs.indiewire.com/rani /mpaa_theatrical_market_statistics_you_will_be_shocked_when_you_see_these_st

On women in the film industry:
http://blogs.indiewire.com/womenandhollywood/what-bigelow-effect-number-of-women-directors-in-hollywood-falls-to-5-percent

The Oscar nominations 1011-2012:
http://oscar.go.com/nominees