Speaking of Funny...

The article below is absolutely amazing. It talks about how the Academy Awards largely ignore comedic films despite the fact that comedy is often very hard to pull off.

It's relatively long but worth it. Enjoy!

Everybody Loves a Clown, Except the Oscar Voters
By DAVID EDELSTEIN
New York Times

Renée Zellweger's Academy Award nomination for "Bridget Jones's Diary" was announced last month, show-biz prognosticators were shocked. It wasn't that they disliked the performance, a winsome blend of English adroitness and American emotional transparency, or that they minimized Ms. Zellweger's physical transformation. (Or her bravery: is there a greater risk for a female Hollywood star than adding fat cells to her body?) They were surprised because "Bridget Jones's Diary" is a broad romantic comedy with a healthy dose of slapstick. In movies, pratfalls and comic humiliations can lead to popularity and riches — but almost never to a golden statuette.

Ms. Zellweger, of course, doesn't have a prayer of taking home an Oscar — not against actresses whose characters grieve for dead only children (Sissy Spacek, Halle Berry) or succumb to degenerative illnesses (Nicole Kidman, Judi Dench). Although a handful of leading actresses have won Academy Awards for comic performances (Judy Holliday in "Born Yesterday," Diane Keaton in "Annie Hall" and Cher in "Moonstruck," among others), a nomination for a clownishly self-centered role like Bridget Jones is, to most Academy members, quite sufficient recognition, thank you.

It's more, for example, than Reese Witherspoon received for her virtuoso turn as Tracey Flick — a high school version of the archetypal Hollywood go-getter Sammy Glick — in Alexander Payne's acclaimed "Election" (1999). Plenty of real-life Tracey Flicks win Academy Awards — but not, you understand, for playing Tracey Flicks. Too broad. Too stylized. Too cynically conceived. Oscars go to movies that touch, ennoble and inspire. Think of the Oscar- winning title characters in "Forrest Gump" and "Erin Brockovich," or even the hero of "Gladiator"— who lops off people's heads, but on the road to a heart-tugging reunion with his wife and son in the life everlasting. (Cue angelic choir.)

That the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences prefer the acting in, say, "Ben Hur" to "Some Like It Hot" (both 1959) or "Gandhi" to "Tootsie" (both 1982) is not exactly news. But the prejudice suggests a hierarchy of values that needs to be challenged and challenged again every February and March. It rankles audiences who cherish comedy, both the drawing-room and baggy-pants kind. It rankles actors whose daring, intricate and emotionally truthful work wins a pat on the head and, in some cases, an invitation to be host of the Oscars — to play court jester instead of king or queen for a day.

According to some producers, directors and actors, the collective taste of the academy may even help to discourage more challenging and sophisticated comedies from being made. The thinking is: This isn't an awards candidate, so we might as well dumb it down for an audience of teenagers (or arrested grown-ups).

That's why even a rare nomination in a leading-actor category gladdens hearts. "Renée's nomination is tremendous news," said Lynda Obst, who produces both dramas and female-oriented romantic comedies like "Sleepless in Seattle" and "Someone Like You." Ms. Obst pointed out that for actresses, comedy nominations are historically in the best supporting performance category (past winners include Mira Sorvino in "Mighty Aphrodite" and Marisa Tomei in "My Cousin Vinny"), a "secondary honor for people who play hookers or airheads or crazies. It's a kind of ghetto that a lot of actors never get out of."

Name actors, she added, are eternally conflicted about doing broad comedy. "Those films can be rewarding at the box office, and they help an actor build a relationship with the popular audience," she said. "But they're not perceived as significant enough. With Renée getting this due it makes other actresses — like Sandra Bullock, who is so spectacular in comedy — want to reach for the stars in the stuff they do best. It de-ghettoizes comedy."

It can be argued that until performances like Ms. Zellweger's actually win more Oscars, comedy will stay in the ghetto. But what a ritzy ghetto it is! Among the non-winners are Carole Lombard in "My Man Godfrey," Margaret Sullavan in "The Shop Around the Corner" and Barbara Stanwyck in "The Lady Eve." Katharine Hepburn, the academy's most honored actor, with four Oscars, didn't win for "The Philadelphia Story" or any other mere comedy. She wasn't even nominated for "Adam's Rib."

And the men have it worse. None of the great comic geniuses — from Charles Chaplin to the Marx Brothers to W. C. Fields to Cary Grant — won competitive Oscars. Tom Hanks, a jazzy, nimble comic actor, only became an Oscar favorite by dying of AIDS in "Philadelphia" and being reborn as the slow but steadfast hero of "Forrest Gump." Robin Williams, who possesses one of the fastest comic minds in the galaxy, only came into focus for academy voters when he slowed way down, grew a beard and crinkled his eyes as a life-affirming therapist in "Good Will Hunting."

The only clown to have carried off a leading-actor Oscar in the last quarter-century was imprisoned in a concentration camp. And without a martyr's death, it's a good bet that Roberto Benigni in "Life Is Beautiful" (1997) would never have cakewalked into academy voters' hearts.

The sad thing is that — as any comedian can tell you — it's relatively easy to wring tears from a death scene. As Edmund Kean is said to have put it: "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."

"People don't realize how much goes into comic acting," said Michael Kahn, director of the drama division at the Juilliard School, where young actors train in both drama and comedy. "I think they can recognize it more when somebody is suffering. And especially in this country, we think of emotional truth as resulting solely in naturalism — which is considered the more pure, honest way of presenting emotion. But comic actors have to follow an inner logic and emotional truth while at the same time being fantastically skillful technically."

Consider Steve Martin in the 1984 comedy "All of Me," for which he won a host of top critics' prizes but — crushingly — no Academy Award nomination. Mr. Martin doesn't just physicalize the emotional roller coaster of his own character, a deeply conflicted corporate lawyer; he also portrays the grief and rage of the dead rich spinster (played by Lily Tomlin) whose soul has come to occupy the lawyer's body. Mr. Martin depicts each of them alternately, even simultaneously — a spastic tug of war with left side against right side and no side (including the audience's) unsplit.

The performance is the consummate illustration of what Eric Bentley, in "The Life of the Drama," calls the "surrealist body" of the farce actor — a "supermarionette" driven by a titanic idée fixe. Them's fancy words, I know; but maybe you need to speak French (and quote great professors) to convince the academy to recognize home-grown, low-comic American genius.

This is because the Academy Awards are the way the movie industry wishes to present itself to the world — as socially responsible, given to high ideals and high (but not elitist) culture. A look at its three- quarters of a century of awards suggests a radar for what Milan Kundera would call the higher kitsch: "Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch."

It is the absence of the second tear that makes comedy comedy. The form is often cruel, vulgar, dissonant and socially irresponsible: it makes sport of others' pain. It is frequently about people with no self-awareness who behave irrationally — poor role models. It can instruct by counter example but rarely ennoble.

The subversive comic impulse is dangerous to the average Academy Award nominee. If, in "A Beautiful Mind," Russell Crowe's John Nash were seen accepting the Nobel Prize by extolling his marriage and then leering in the lavatory at a young man, it would offer a more complex — and arguably truer to life — portrait of what the man was up against in his own nature. But it wouldn't send you home clutching your hankie, or the director Ron Howard home clutching his Oscar.

It didn't help comedy's status that the writer and director of the last outright laugh-fest to win an Oscar for best picture announced immediately thereafter that he no longer wanted to sit at "the children's table." After "Annie Hall" in 1977, Woody Allen decamped for the "grown-ups' table," perhaps taking with him the notion that low comedy can be high art.

The movies are full of outrageously talented clowns who long for the acceptance that drama affords. After Mr. Martin's nonrecognition, he began to seek out more "sincere" roles, like the conventionally harried patriarch of "Parenthood." And you can see the same turn in the work of the dizzyingly inventive Jim Carrey, whose increasingly moist roles (as in "The Majestic") suggest that he, too, wants to be accepted as a "real" actor.

This is all very unfunny, but there is an easy way to counter the trend.

Why shouldn't the academy steal some thunder from the tacky Golden Globes — which offer separate prizes for drama and a comedy or musical — and give a yearly award to the best performance by an actor or actress in a comic role? That's one award, undivided into male and female categories (useless distinctions to begin with in acting), bestowed on the performer who exhibits the most imagination in a comic role of any size.

Such an award could have gone to Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, Bert Lahr, or William Demarest (in innumerable Preston Sturges comedies). Or Michael Keaton in "Beetlejuice," Martin Short in "The Big Picture," Eddie Murphy in "The Nutty Professor," Christopher Guest (or Fred Willard or Catherine O'Hara or the whole ensemble) in "Best in Show," Sean Penn in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," Jim Carrey in "The Mask," Mike Myers in "Austin Powers," Jeff Bridges or Julianne Moore in "The Big Lebowski," Hugh Grant in "Notting Hill," Sigourney Weaver in "Heartbreakers" — even Renée Zellweger in "Bridget Jones's Diary."

Don't you smile looking back on the performances above? Honestly, which would you rather watch again: Dustin Hoffman in "Rain Man" (Oscar) or Dustin Hoffman in "Tootsie"? Jack Lemmon in "Save the Tiger" (Oscar) or Jack Lemmon in "Some Like It Hot"? Katharine Hepburn in "The Lion in Winter" (Oscar) or Katharine Hepburn in "Adam's Rib"? Shouldn't the Academy Awards in some way reflect the pleasure such acting gives?

To the contention that this would further "ghettoize" comedy, the obvious response is that affirming its artistic significance is a vital first step. The best response is: Think of the comedies that might be made! For better or worse, there's nothing like the prospect of an Oscar to light a fire under an actor — not to mention his or her agents and managers, not to mention the people who decide which movies get made and how they're promoted.

What a hoot: the clowns could still be clowns and be taken completely seriously. 

 

haven: I'm not sure I totally agree. Delivering good comedy is TOUGH otherwise all actors would be comedians as well as dramatic actors. The problem with most comedies is that the writing isn't generally high brow stuff. It takes an EXTREMELY sophisticated comedy to win any critical accolades but most won't make sophisticated comedies because, unless they win the critics, they don't win at the box office.

I agree that the Academy has been leaning heavily towards single movies and blockbusters over the last few years. Having one film or one blockbuster dominate the awards can't be good for business, particularly if people are polarized by the film (i.e. Titanic).

 

That was Ian McKellan. He won acclaim for his role in Gods and Mosters and has also been in X Men and Lord of the Rings.

Agreed about him looking out of his element.

 

haven: I'm not really sure that should be the criteria for judging. Some can do both, others cannot. The issue is really more about recognition for good work. There are plenty of comedies out there that deserved recognition.

Rushmore was a good one. Four Weddings and a Funeral was a terrific comedy. Much Ado About Nothing is Shakespeare for cryin' out loud!

The thing is that guys like Robin Williams, Steve Martin and Jim Carrey (just to name a few) posses skills that NO other actor could achieve. Yet, they are passed over when they do comedies.

Besides, if acting chops were the only criteria, there would be quite a few actors out there getting recognition who are oftentimes left out. It is the quality of the role and the film that should be looked at, not just whether or not it was a comedy. Rushmore was robbed just like Royal Tennenbaum's was this year just as Tootsie was in the past and numerous other comedies.