Since even those of us who are Oscar sceptics or agnostics tend to make award-related declamations at this time of year, here is one: I would rather Olivia Colman did not win best actress for The Lost Daughter.
But before I am impaled on that statement, damned by film buffs with impeccably good taste, let me sue for peace with the following clarification: like most sentient people who have watched any of her work, I am a big Colman fan. I have enjoyed everything I have seen her do, from her leading role in Broadchurch to smaller but powerful parts in films like Murder on the Orient Express or shows like The Night Manager.
I even liked her as Queen Elizabeth II in the third and fourth seasons of The Crown, though that might be considered a thankless role, a waste of an actor with such a vibrant personality: by the time Colman played the monarch, Elizabeth had been turned into a cipher, a polestar around which the other characters – including volatile people like Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher – orbited and curtseyed. [Claire Foy, who played the younger version of Elizabeth, at least got a chance to depict a princess still sorting out tumultuous personal relationships, who had not fully settled into placing duty above emotion.]
In fact, my favourite Olivia Colman Crown moment was a video of her and other cast members, in full costume, performing a little dance between filming – freed of the encumbrance of her role, here she was, goofy smile in place, gliding around and waving her arms more enthusiastically than anyone else. It was delightful, and made one feel like all monarchies would be a lot cooler if queens modelled themselves on Olivia Colman.
Even in The Father from last year, which was emphatically an Anthony Hopkins film with an author-backed role for the octogenarian – who won his second Oscar for it – I never thought Colman was overshadowed: as the despairing daughter of a dementia-afflicted man, she effortlessly caught the many shades of a caregiver playing a supporting part in someone else’s story – balancing love, concern, and guilt with the knowledge that she must find a way to move on with her life, otherwise she might break down herself. Anyone who has been in a comparable situation should be able to relate with every trace of self-doubt or hurt or exasperation that flitted across her expressive face.
If Colman played a child struggling with her duties toward a parent in The Father, in her current Oscar-nominated role in The Lost Daughter, she plays someone who carries an even greater weight of societal expectation: a mother. On holiday in Greece, as middle-aged college professor Leda observes the shenanigans of a boisterous family around her, she is led into memories of her time as a young mom burdened with the “crushing responsibility” of children – at a point in her life when she was trying to concentrate on her work and make a name in the competitive, exclusionary, often sexist world of academia.
Colman vividly depicts Leda’s surfaces – here is someone who tries to be polite and social up to a point but also has an innate impatience and does not suffer fools gladly – while also letting us sense something of her restless inner life: does she really regret some of the choices she made in the distant past, or was it all inevitable? Is it possible to both love your children and, on some level, wish you had never had them?
It us a stunning performance. And yet, to return to the blasphemy that kicked off this piece, I would be a tad annoyed if she were to win best actress this year.
This has nothing to do with the quality of her work, or with the idea that there is someone better or more deserving in the competition. [I am in no position to make such judgements anyway, having watched only one of the other best actress-nominated performances – Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball in Being the Ricardos. She was okay, though perhaps that is my bias speaking – only Lucy can play Lucy.] In any case, the idea that Oscars go to the objective “best” in a category is the sort of conceit that only a child can believe in – it has never been true of any competitive awards in the arts.
No, there are other, more whimsical reasons. One is a residue from the nerdy adolescent years I spent being obsessed with the Oscars. Obsessed, not because I hoped that my favourites would win, but because I was interested in the long history of the awards, and in their complicated workings: I spent a lot of time poring over analyses and charts and alternate-world scenarios to try and understand how many combinations of factors [apart from merit] went into determining both the shortlist of nominees and the eventual winners.
One of those factors, for example, was the “holdover” prize, a term used for a situation where an admired actor [or director, or sometimes a writer or cinematographer] does not win for their most celebrated work but is compensated later by being awarded for something that most people agree is not their best. Much-discussed examples include James Stewart getting best actor in 1940 for what was mainly a solid supporting part in The Philadelphia Story [it was widely seen as a holdover for his iconic role in Mr Smith Goes to Washington the previous year]; or Al Pacino winning for Scent of a Woman decades after not winning for The Godfather films or Dog Day Afternoon. This also applies to the lifetime-achievement awards given to legends who never won in the competitive categories in their prime.
But if the holdover is a well-known Oscar phenomenon, what about the inverse situation, where an actor is awarded relatively early in a career for what might not be their most worthy work… and then, just a few years later, they do something truly extraordinary but now the feeling in the air is: should this person get a second award so soon?
Olivia Colman might be in that situation this year. A mere three years ago, she won best actress for a very flamboyant role as the depressed, tantrum-throwing Queen Anne in The Favourite. She was terrific [again, lest I have not made it clear: Colman is terrific in everything], but the rub was that Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz had equally central parts [the film was really about their characters’ rivalries], and were very good in less showy roles; and yet they were relegated to the supporting actress category. Given this minor injustice, the old Oscar pedant in me feels it is too soon for Colman to get another best actress prize.
The other reason has to do with a weird protectiveness I feel about Colman – I would prefer her to stay relatively unsullied by Oscar’s claws. Though the awards throughout their history have tried to balance or spread the acting honours among a wide swathe of performers, they occasionally latch on to a few actors as perpetual favourites or contenders.
And when Oscar fixates thus on people, more often than not it has the effect of straitjacketing them, making them look boringly honourable.
Consider Katharine Hepburn, who was one of my favourite actors [in a certain sort of role], and more importantly one of my favourite public personalities of the last century, but whose final three best actress Oscars – all given after she turned 60 – had an element of myth-making and canonising to them. [One of those awards – in the hot-button “issue” film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner – came a few months after Hepburn’s long-time partner Spencer Tracy died, and she saw it as much as a posthumous award for him; the last, for On Golden Pond, felt like another sympathy gesture for a film that had brought two screen legends – her and the terminally ill Henry Fonda – together for the first time in their 70s.] Hepburn did not win for some excellent performances earlier in her career in small gems like Alice Adams or Summertime, but the floodgates opened once she went past a certain age, and could be treated as a grande dame performing nobly in “significant” works.
More recent entrants in this club of patron saints have included Meryl Streep, Daniel Day-Lewis, and, most recently, Frances McDormand, who won a third best actress Oscar last year for Nomadland [a film that you are only supposed to watch in reverential silence, and discuss in hushed tones]. McDormand is a wonderfully unpredictable presence who first won for the lovely, offbeat Fargo, but now, she has been shoehorned into the Hall of Worthies, doomed for all time to bear the insignia “three-time Academy Award winner” before her name.
Maybe, in the end, that is all there is to my wish: I want Olivia Colman to escape the morbidly respectable fate of becoming a multiple Oscar winner while she is still just in her 40s. She is too dynamic and too interesting for such overrated honours. Even as a queen, she looks better kicking up her heels in a behind-the-scenes dance act than sitting on a throne with a heavy crown on her head and a stoical look on her face.
Oscars 2022 will take place on 28 March.
Jai Arjun Singh is the author of The World of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Jaane bhi do Yaaro: Seriously Funny Since 1983, and The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies do to Writers. Follow more of his writing on his blog, or on Twitter.
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