Here's why the Brits win so many Oscars
Toby Young looks forward to the 79th Academy Awards and explains why the British tend to do so well on Hollywood's biggest night out — and still be self-deprecating about it he British are coming,' announced Colin Welland when he won an Oscar for Chariots of Fire in 1982 — and this year we've arrived. Peter O'Toole, Helen Mirren, Sacha Baron Cohen, Kate Winslet, Paul Greengrass, Judi Dench, Peter Morgan, Patrick Marber — all are Oscar nominees. The Queen has six nominations in total, including one for Best Picture. No doubt we'll be facing stiff competition from our hosts, but the Academy Awards are looking increasingly like our tea party, too.
To find another year in which the British made such a strong showing you'd have to go all the way back to, oh, I don't know, at least 2001. Eight of the nominees in the four acting categories in that year were British.
Admittedly, in the intervening period we've only been able to muster an average of three acting nominations per year, but they've included two winners: Catherine Zeta-Jones for Chicago and Rachel Weisz for The Constant Gardener.
Whenever the French try to put us down, all we need do is compare our batting average at the Oscars to theirs. They haven't won any acting laurels since 1997 when Juliette Binoche picked up a gong for The English Patient. As a statistic, that's almost as embarrassing as the fact that Trinity College, Cambridge boasts more Nobel Prize-winners than France and Belgium combined.
Why do British actors consistently punch above their weight at the Academy Awards? Is it the accent? That may be true of some Oscar contenders, but it doesn't explain why Michael Caine, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Daniel Day-Lewis, Kate Winslet, Tom Wilkinson and Albert Finney have all been nominated in the past five years. In each case, they were playing Americans. Compare this to the lacklustre performance of the Yanks when it comes to doing British accents. True, Renee Zellweger made a decent fist of Bridget Jones, but I still haven't recovered from Don Cheadle's attempts to impersonate a cockney gangster in Ocean's Eleven.
Another theory is that our lot are better trained than their lot, having had more experience on the legitimate stage. Maybe so, but it's worth bearing in mind that Kathleen Turner won a London Evening Standard Award for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? last year, beating two homegrown competitors. If American actors can beat us on our home turf, how come we're able to put up such a tough fight across the Atlantic?
Perhaps it's because the 5,500 or so industry veterans who make up the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences electorate still think there's something 'classy' about the Brits. Our success at the Oscars may not be reducible to a single factor, such as our accent or our theatrical heritage, but they undoubtedly contribute to the overall impression that we're their cultural superiors. When it comes to putting a cross next to a name, members of the Academy may be in the grip of the same inferiority complex that has afflicted America since the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock.
If that is the case, they can't have watched much television recently. Don't they realise that Mike Burnett, the self-proclaimed king of American reality TV, was born in Britain? Or that Millionaire, Deal or No Deal and American Idol are all based on formats that originated in the UK? The wholesale importation of British tabloid values in the 1980s and 1990s succeeded in dumbing down American journalism. Now we're doing the same for American television. Forget about the classically trained British actors who appear on Masterpiece Theatre. The Brit who's had the biggest impact on American television in the 21st century is Simon Cowell.
Of course, the only reason I'm engaging in a bit of self-flagellation here is to demonstrate that, unlike those uptight, defensive Yanks, we're capable of poking fun at ourselves occasionally. In other words, we're more secure than they are. That's what gives us that wry, self-deprecating quality that makes us so charming on the big screen. (See Bill Nighy in Notes on a Scandal.) So what is the explanation? Why do the Brits make such a strong showing at the Oscars each year? Maybe it comes down to simple mathematics. If you take all the films made each year and work out what percentage of the above-the-line talent is British, it might well be that the number of British nominees — not just actors, but writers, producers and directors as well — is exactly proportionate.
But that doesn't really solve the puzzle, since the reason so many Brits get cast in prominent roles could be that a majority of filmmakers share exactly the same bias as the Academy voters. Sticking a British actor in your movie is a sure-fire way of classing it up, whether it's Emma Thompson in Stranger Than Fiction or Kate Winslet in Little Children.
Then again, American producers may have more mercenary reasons for crossing the Atlantic to fill out their casts. 'Brits are a lot cheaper,' says Sean Macaulay, the LA-based film critic of the limes. 'We are the Mexicans of the film industry: not just good value, but so nice and polite, too.' (He doesn't really believe that, of course. It's just another example of our self-deprecating wit.) A clue to the whole conundrum may lie in the one area of the motion-picture industry where Brits enjoy a complete monopoly — namely, playing bad guys. In 2006 alone, the arch-villain was played by a limey in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, X Men: The Last Stand, Inside Man, The Pink Panther, V for Vendetta, Underworld: Evolution, The Omen and The Illusionist. The occasional star turn by Jack Nicholson or Meryl Streep notwithstanding, why do the Yanks always look to us when it comes to playing Nazis and serial killers? I know they had to fight a war of independence to get out from under the yoke of imperial oppression, but that was over 200 years ago. Get over it. Move on.
I once asked Alan Rickman (the chief terrorist in Die Hard) if he had an explanation for why Brits are always cast as villains in American films 'It's because we can act, dear boy,' he said. Perhaps that's the explanation for why we win so many Oscars.
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