SO Daniel Day-Lewis achieves his moment of Academy Award history — the gold standard of his mystique and reputation intensified with the reports that he will now take a further five years off before accepting another movie role.
Three best actor Oscars puts him in a one-man premier league of his own, the crowning moment of a remarkable career in movies that entered its glorious phase with his sensational, emotional withdrawal from the National Theatre’s stage Hamlet in 1989.
His Lincoln was and is a mighty achievement, inhabited with superb technique: this is a Shakespearean performance of passion and depth.
It is just impossible to imagine anyone else taking the role on, and giving the blazingly powerful and eerily exact impersonation that had the effect of making the purely procedural aspects of this film so gripping and relevant.
Lincoln was so good that I am scratching my head a little at the academy’s decision to give the best picture and best director prizes to other films.
Affleck’s Argo is an interesting, well-made film with an entertaining, but little-noticed debt to the Mel Brooks comedy The Producers.
It is based on a stranger-than-fiction true story that emerged from the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis: some terrified US staff had managed to get out of the embassy building and were holed up in the Canadian ambassador’s residence.
The CIA’s plan was to invent a bizarre imaginary film called Argo in elaborate detail, complete with script and production designs, and then enter Iran with a bunch of bogus Canadian passports for the fugitives, and claim that these people were Canadians who just happened to be in the country to scout locations for Argo - and now wished to leave, thank you very much.
It clearly captured the Academy’s imagination, perhaps because it shows the movie business saving the day, but the reverence in which it is held is a bit baffling to me.
Ang Lee’s best director prize for Life of Pi is a measure of the respect in which this formidable film-maker is held.
This vivid story of a boy shipwrecked with a tiger was certainly crafted with confidence and flair, though for me its other Oscars for cinematography and visual design are more to the point.
I personally wanted Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained to win best picture - a bit of a lost cause, but this brilliant film did get the best supporting actor prize for Christoph Waltz and best original screenplay for Tarantino himself.
So: an interesting Oscar haul, no landslide for any one film, but highly justified and gratifying recognition for Spielberg’s Lincoln and Tarantino’s Django Unchained.
By arrangement with the Guardian
