Film: Jessica Kellgren-Hayes

where’s the suspense?

Dear reader, as I write to you I have no idea what happened at the Oscars ceremony for it has yet to happen (as is the joy of magazine publishing!). But I can probably tell you who won the big four acting categories: Eddie Redmayne for The Theory of Everything, Julianne Moore for Still Alice, Patricia Arquette for Boyhood and J.K. Simmons for Whiplash.
If I am wrong it will only be in the first instance: Redmayne may have lost to Birdman’s Michael Keaton in the Best Actor race.
How do I know this? Believe me, I wish I was psychic, but they actually all won SAG (Screen Actor’s Guild) awards for these parts, along with Golden Globes and many other pre-Oscars critics’ awards.

The SAG awards alone are such an accurate predictor of the Oscars that, over the past five years, 18 out of 20 SAG winners have gone on to win their Oscar category. Now, this creates a big problem for the Oscars – where is the suspense?! The awards for acting join with Best Picture and Best Director to create the Big Six Oscar categories. These six awards are really what the Oscars are based on but with the winners becoming more and more predictable, will people still tune in?
It is plain ridiculous that every year, the best drama viewers can hope for is that one of the four main races may come down to two nominees. Indeed, the most exciting thing nowadays seems to be finding out who will get a nomination – from there it seems to be a lock-down, done deal!
Granted, I have just presented it to you as a rather tricky conundrum to solve for the Academy; how can they keep people interested in a competition when they already know the result? But … we don’t actually know all of the results. Each year we are made aware of the winner and the four runners up, but what if (and this may be Hollywood anarchy) they didn’t release any names for nominations in the acting categories?

How wonderful would it be to have everyone in Hollywood who has been in a good film that year turn up at the ceremony (much as they do anyway) and then have the top five called out through the night – in ascending order! It would certainly keep the audience watching until the very end and, since no one would have known to practice their ‘gallant loser’ face, we would get some wonderful reactions.
The press and the actors would have an awful lot more to talk about after those awards than they do currently.
Tune in to PostFeature on Wednesday at 6.30pm on Latest TV to see what Joseph and I have to say about this year’s winners and losers.

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