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Thursday 17 March 2011
Marlon Brando’s Practical Guide to Accepting an Oscar Scott Jordan Harris For the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which stages the Oscars, and even more so for those television companies that broadcast them, whoever invented the retractable microphone is an innovator whose impact upon their profession is equal to that of John Logie Baird and the Brothers Lumière. It used to be that the Academy could do little more than pray that a newly awarded Oscar-winner would not inflict upon the ceremony an acceptance speech likely to turn the watching millions into dozing dozens. But now it has the retractable microphone. Not as unseemly as a hook from the wings thrown around the neck of a long-winded winner, and yet as decisive as a trapdoor suddenly opened beneath him, the retractable standalone microphone eased all AMPAS’s concerns about speeches. Notice how nowadays,Office 2007 Enterprise Serial, whenever some uninteresting Oscar winner (a special effects artist, say, keen to thank by name all 189 members of his staff – or some dull foreign filmmaker taking his win for Best Documentary Short Subject as licence to make the absurd insinuation that there are movies made outside of America) begins to bore, the music from orchestra pit rises and, just as the gushing acceptee starts to shout over it, the microphone in front of him descends into a hole in the floor. He is defeated, and left with no option but to welcome the impossibly elegant arm of Halle Berry or Liv Tyler as it ushers him, silent, from the stage. The Academy has powerful opinions about what constitutes an acceptable acceptance speech. It does not like lists. It does not like the discussion of agents. It does not like thank yous being given to make-up artists and chauffeurs and personal chefs and accent coaches. In fact, it doesn’t really like thank yous at all – excepting, of course, those offered to the Academy itself, to God, and to Steven Spielberg. These aren’t, incidentally, just the inferences of an inveterate Oscar-observer: they are facts stated by the Academy – which, every year, instructs its nominees in how to behave should their names be announced once the relevant golden envelope is opened. The nominees, as all who have watched the Oscars will be aware, absorb absolutely nothing of this advice. Even so, the Oscars have seen masses of acceptances speeches so perfectly pitched they might have been pre-approved by AMPAS. They have, of course, also seen an at least equal number of speeches so awful they seem calculated to annoy everyone associated with the ceremony. But only once have they seen the same winner give a standout example of each. In 1951, Marlon Brando delivered one of the pivotal performances in American cinema when he played Stanley Kowalski in Elia Kazan’s adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. Movie critics and progressively minded moviegoers all felt, as anyone who watches the film always will, that he deserved to be named Best Actor. The Academy didn’t quite agree. Having never honoured good old Humphrey Bogart, voters felt they owed him an Oscar, and so gave him one for his turn in The African Queen. Bogey’s was a performance certainly worthy of celebration – but it was, everyone knew, a league below Brando’s. Still, Marlon was awfully decent about it and didn’t seem disappointed or petulant. Subsequently, when, three years later, he gave another of the pivotal performances in American cinema in another Elia Kazan classic, On The Waterfront, he duly received what should have been his second Oscar statuette. He accepted it superbly. He sprang from his seat and jogged to the stage, seeming, simultaneously, like both an overexcited child impatient to possess his prize, and a considerate old pro embarrassed by the attention and eager to take up as little of the Academy’s time as was necessary. He was dashing, well-dressed and deferential. He was at once overwhelmed and composed. He appeared to be improvising and yet came out with a delightful quote: ‘I don’t think that ever in my life have so many people been so directly responsible for my being so very, very glad.’ But, better than all that, he was brief. On March 30th 1955, Marlon Brando was the darling of the Oscars. Eighteen years later, he was not. Between his wins for playing Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront and for playing Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Brando had evolved into an eccentric, and an activist. In 1973 he was particularly concerned with the representation of Native Americans onscreen. It was an issue that,Office 2010 Standard Activation, had Brando addressed it differently, the Academy might, quite rightly, have been concerned with too. But Brando didn’t address the Oscars in the way the Oscars like to be addressed. In fact, he didn’t address the Oscars at all. Instead, he sent ‘Sacheen Littlefeather’,Microsoft Office 2010 32bit, a traditionally costumed representative of the Apache people (later outed as an actress,Microsoft Office 2010 Home And Student, and erstwhile winner of ‘Miss American Vampire’, named Maria Cruz), not to accept the Oscar on his behalf – but to refuse it. The Academy adores itself. If it could get away with awarding an Oscar for Best Awards Ceremony, it would award it to the Oscars. The only crime it can conceive of worse than greeting one of its awards with a rambling, snivelling, snotting, incomprehensible atrocity of an acceptance speech is someone snubbing one of its awards entirely. Brando wasn’t the first to inflict this insult on the Oscars. (George C. Scott had declined the very same Best Actor award when the Academy had attempted to honour him with it, for his eponymous performance in Patton, just two years earlier.) But no-one, besides perhaps the infamous streaker of ‘74, ever made such a spectacular mockery of the ceremony. Marlon Brando’s greatest talent was not that which caused him to become the great American actor. It was, instead, the ability to demonstrate contrasting and utterly contradictory achievements. Across his ever-eventful existence, Brando embodied opposites,Microsoft Office 2007 Pro Activation, of muscular beauty and obese ugliness; of relevance and irrelevance; of superstardom and obscurity; and of the very best, and very worst, way to thank the Academy. For the education of any future Academy Award winners who may be reading, here, in two simple lessons, is Marlon Brando’s practical guide to exactly how the Academy does, and does not, like one to accept an Oscar. This post first appeared on this blog in its pre-Spectator days.
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