It's The Other Oscars -- And Yet Again The Winner Slips Away
It's
celebrity time again. The Golden Globes have been, and the Oscars are
coming. This is a "vintage year", say Hollywood's hagiographers on cue.
It isn't. Most movies are made to a formula for the highest return,
money-fuelled by marketing and something called celebrity. This is
different from fame, which can come with talent. True celebrities are
spared that burden.
Occasionally,
this column treads the red carpet, awarding its own Oscars to those
whose ubiquitous promotion demands recognition. Some have been
celebrities a long time, drawing the devoted to kiss their knees (more
on that later). Others are mere flashes in the pan, so to speak.
In no particular order, the nominees for the Celebrity Oscars are:
Benedict Cumberbatch. This celebrity was heading hell-bent for an Oscar, but alas, his ultra-hyped movie, The Fifth Estate,
produced the lowest box office return for years, making it one of
Hollywood's biggest ever turkeys. This does not diminish Cumberbatch's
impressive efforts to promote himself as Julian Assange -- assisted by
film critics, massive advertising, the US government and, not least, the
former PR huckster, David Cameron, who declared, "Benedict Cumberbatch
-- brilliant, fantastic piece of acting. The twitchiness and everything
of Julian Assange is brilliantly portrayed." Neither Cameron nor
Cumberatch has ever met Assange. The "twitchiness and everything" was an
invention.
Assange
had written Cumberbatch a personal letter, pointing out that the "true
story" on which the film claimed to be based was from two books
discredited as hatchet jobs. "Most of the events depicted never
happened, or the people shown were not involved in them," WikiLeaks
posted. In his letter, Assange asked Cumberbatch to note that actors had
moral responsibilities, too. "Consider the consequences of your
cooperation with a project that vilifies and marginalises a living
political refugee ..."
Cumberbatch's
response was to reveal selected parts of Assange's letter and so elicit
further hype from the "agonising decision" he faced -- which, as it
turned out, was never in doubt. That the movie was a turkey was a rare
salute to the public.
Robert De Niro
is the celebrity's celebrity. I was in India recently at a conference
with De Niro, who was asked a good question about the malign influence
of Hollywood on living history. The 1978 multi-Oscar winning movie The Deerhunter was cited, especially its celebrated Russian roulette scene; De Niro was the star.
"The
Russian roulette scene might not have happened," said De Niro, "but it
must have happened somewhere. It was a metaphor." He refused to say
more; the celebrity star doesn't like giving interviews.
When The Deerhunter was released, the Daily Mail
described it as "the story they never dared to tell before ... the film
that could purge a nation's guilt!" A purgative indeed -- that was
almost entirely untrue.
Following America's expulsion from its criminal invasion of Vietnam, The Deerhunter
was Hollywood's post-war attempt to reincarnate the triumphant
Batman-jawed white warrior and present a stoic, suffering and often
heroic people as sub-human Oriental idiots and barbarians. The film's
dramatic pitch was reached during recurring orgiastic scenes in which De
Niro and his fellow stars, imprisoned in rat-infested bamboo cages,
were forced to play Russian roulette by resistance fighters of the
National Liberation Front, whom the Americans called Vietcong.
The
director, Michael Cimino, insisted this scene was authentic. It was
fake. Cimino himself had claimed he had served in Vietnam as a Green
Beret. He hadn't. He told Linda Christmas of the Guardian he had
"this insane feeling that I was there ... somehow the fine wires have
got really crossed and the line between reality and fiction has become
blurred". His brilliantly acted fakery has since become a YouTube
"classic": for many people, their only reference to that "forgotten"
war.
While
he was in India, De Niro visited Bollywood, where his celebrity is
god-like. Fawning actors sat at his feet and kissed his knees.
Bollywood's asinine depiction of modern India is not dissimilar to The Deerhunter's distortion of America and Asia.
Nelson Mandela
was a great human being who became a celebrity. "Sainthood", he told me
drily, "is not the job I applied for." The western media appropriated
Mandela and made him into a one-dimensional cartoon celebrity tailored
for bourgeois applause: a kind of political Santa Claus. That his
dignity served as a facade behind which his beloved ANC oversaw the
further impoverishment and division of his people was unmentionable. And
in death, his celebrity-sainthood was assured.
For those outside Britain, the name Keith Vaz
is not associated with celebrity. And yet this Labour Party politician
has had a long and distinguished career of self-promotion, while
slipping serenely away from scandals and near-scandals, a parliamentary
inquiry and a suspension, having acquired the soubriquet Keith Vaseline.
In 2009, he was revealed to have claimed 75,500 pounds in expenses for
an apartment in Westminster despite having a family home just 12 miles
from parliament.
Last year, Vaz's parliamentary home affairs committee summoned Guardian
editor Alan Rusbridger to Parliament to discuss the leaks of Edward
Snowden. Vaz's opening question to Rusbridger was: "Do you love this
country?"
Once
again, Vaz was an instant celebrity, though, once again, not the one he
longed to be. He was compared with the infamous Senator Joe McCarthy.
Still, the sheer stamina of his endeavours proves that Keith Vaseline is
no flash in the pan; and is the Oscar Celebrity of the Year!
Congratulations Keith, and commiserations, Benedict; you were only just
behind.
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