Anything planned as Oscar-bait never works – although the Pulitzer Prize-winning play that underpins the film August: Osage County has a pedigree to please the Academy. By some accounts, it began with a lunch between Harvey Weinstein and Emmy-winning director/producer John Wells (The West Wing).
Mrs Thatcher famously presided over a huge rise in unemployment, but down the years she kept a large sorority of impersonators (and one male one) off the dole. She was lucky with her mimics, who included some of the great actresses of the age, and never luckier than when Meryl Streep (pictured below) inhabited the role of Britain's first female Prime Minister. To her three election victories, Thatcher was able to add - if by proxy - an Academy Award for Best Actress.
Even Meryl Streep, bless her, is allowed the odd dud, and Hope Springs is a snore. Much has been made of the film shifting Hollywood’s attention toward the middle-aged – meaning, in their terms, anyone 20 or older. But director David Frankel’s reunion with his Devil Wears Prada star merely proves that dogged earnestness can be just as soul-sapping as the latest teenage gross-out venture.
Maybe it was host Billy Crystal at far from peak form. Or a surfeit of cringe-making shtick by too many presenters, including the distaff principals of Bridesmaids. Or the desperation that clung to the multiple on-air tributes to an art form whose very being was celebrated in the evening’s two major winners, Hugo and The Artist.
They have been racking up the Oscar nominations since 1978, and this year they were back. Woody Allen was nominated twice over for Midnight in Paris, his biggest commercial hit ever, and won for Best Original Screenplay, while Meryl Streep was a surer bet for victory in The Iron Lady than even Mrs Thatcher in the 1983 general election.
Predictably and no doubt justly, it was a good night for The Artist at tonight’s London Critics’ Circle Film Awards. It won Film of the Year, Director of the Year for Michel Hazanavicius and Actor of the Year for its dashing lead Jean Dujardin. Both were at BFI Southbank this evening to pick up their gongs. Fans of Iranian cinema will be cheered to see A Separation also pick three awards, Foreign Language Film of the Year, Screenwriter of the Year for Asghar Farhadi and Supporting Actress of the Year for Sareh Bayat.
There is a moment some way into The Iron Lady when its titular heroine presides over a celebratory domestic soiree. Around the table are arrayed ageing Tory nabobs and their peachy consorts, one of whom at the evening’s end tremulously approaches her hostess, sitting apart in an upright chair. The guest (played by Amanda Root) sinks to one knee and, offering up a gaze that mingles concern and adoration, says, “I hope you appreciate what an inspiration you’ve been.” It’s as if she’s in supplication to Saint Teresa of Avila, not the woman who torpedoed the Belgrano and the NUM.
Meryl Streep feasts once again at the shrine of foodie-ism in It's Complicated, this time playing a California caterer who juggles two men - one of them her ex-husband - in between rolling pastry dough. "Complicated"? Perhaps in terms of decision-making: what to bake? whom to bed? But the abiding fact of writer-director Nancy Meyers' latest foray into the world of adult chick flicks is how far from complex the worlds of her characters often are.
If you tried to cross chefs, romantic comedy and cyberspace, you might end up with a YouTube video of Nigella Lawson recreating the diner scene from When Harry Met Sally. As much fun as that would be, it would hardly justify two hours of screen time. That’s where Julie & Julia comes in.