The Oscar for best performance by an animal goes to...
Will Meryl Streep finally bag her second Best Actress Oscar thirty years after Sophie’s Choice, or will they pass her over again because she has a shot at the trophy every year so they’d better give it to someone who might never be nominated again? Will George Clooney nab Best Actor for stretching himself by playing a dad in ill-fitting Hawaiian shirts, will Brad Pitt be rewarded for a performance so relaxed he doesn’t seem to be acting at all, or will Jean Dujardin get it for his retro silent screen turn?
My cats do not care. In our household the only awards season topic is which animal performer should win an Oscar this year. Here is their discussion.
As usual the best roles for animals for 2011 went to dogs. The only noteworthy feline was Daniel Craig’s temporary bedmate in The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo, and it was a short role. (That cat’s outcome had better be a product of the prosthetics department, or David Fincher will find himself reliving the murders in Seven.) There hasn’t been a meaty role for cat actors since The Long Goodbye, Harry and Tonto, and Cat’s Eye—terrible movie, but a starring role. Our species hasn’t gotten the kind of break birds (The Birds), sharks (Jaws), pigs (Babe), penguins (March of the Emperor), and especially dogs have received. Usually we are relegated to playing villains in James Bond movies and their spoofs. But that is a topic for another column.
2011 was a banner year for apes, horses, and especially dogs. Caesar was the star of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, but since he was played by the human Andy Serkis he’s not in the running. The war horse in War Horse is beautiful enough to make you suspect an inter-species romance. But dogs were the dominant species in the movies circa 2011. On TV there’s Isis the Earl’s dog in Downton Abbey, whose wellbeing is more important to us than whether Mary marries Matthew. On the big screen notable canines included Snowy in Tintin—animated, the whippet in 50/50—upstaged by Joseph Gordon Levitt, and Uggie the Jack Russell terrier in Water for Elephants.
We have narrowed the field to three finalists for the Best Performance by an Animal Oscar.
Our first nominee is Uggie the Jack Russell for his role in the silent film and Oscar frontrunner, The Artist. It is interesting to note that The Artist and Hugo, the two contenders with the most nominations, are films about films. 2011 was The Year of The Defence of Cinema. The Artist is a French film set in Hollywood; Hugo is a Hollywood film set in France. Personally we find The Artist delightful, charming, and thin. Delightful because it introduces silent film to an audience already blinded and deafened by special effects, but thin because it doesn’t say much, and we don’t mean literally.
Uggie plays the best friend, constant companion and savior of George Valentin, a big silent-film star who finds himself unemployed and impoverished when the studios adopt sound. At his lowest point it is Uggie who rescues him. Whose fault is it that the actor hits a low point? His own, for being pig-headed, no offense to pigs. We do not see the point of The Artist borrowing from the soundtrack of Vertigo, a film whose many layers calls attention to the skimpiness of The Artist. There is a far better film about the switch from silent film to sound: Singin’ In The Rain, which the French film alludes to, of course.
Still, Uggie is brilliant. He lights up the screen. If The Artist had been from Uggie’s POV it would’ve been a masterpiece.
Uggie’s closest competitor is Cosmo, another Jack Russell, who played Arthur in Beginners. Beginners is about an emotionally closed-off man whose father comes out of the closet in his old age. When the father dies, the dog goes to live with the son. The man has a relationship with an emotionally closed-off woman, at which point we dozed off and only woke up whenever Cosmo was on the screen. For giving us a reason to watch Mike Mills’s Beginners (apart from Christopher Plummer as the gay dad), we nominate Cosmo for the Best Animal Actor Oscar.
This would’ve been a two-canine field if director Martin Scorsese had not written an op-ed piece in the L.A. Times accusing the industry of discriminating against the canine star of Hugo—Blackie the fearsome Doberman who patrolled the train station with inspector Sacha Baron Cohen.
“Jack Russell terriers are small and cute,” Scorsese points out. “Dobermans are enormous and — handsome. More tellingly, Uggie plays a nice little mascot who does tricks and saves his master’s life in one of the films, while Blackie gives an uncompromising performance as a ferocious guard dog who terrorizes children. I’m sure you can see what I’m driving at.
“We all have fond memories of Rin Tin Tin and Lassie, the big stars, the heroes, but what about the antiheroes? We have learned to accept the human antihero, but when it comes to dogs, I guess we still have a long way to go. I’m proud of Blackie, who laid it on the line and dared to risk the sympathy of her audience. Let’s just say that on the set, she had a fitting nickname: Citizen Canine. The bath scene alone is a masterpiece of underplaying, with Blackie’s wonderfully aquiline face accentuated by the 3-D.”
Scorsese is correct. All too often the audience is too dazzled by the adorableness of the performer, human or animal, to make an objective assessment of his effectiveness in the role.
The Doberman’s performance should be judged on the basis of her scariness. Ah, there is the problem. We did not find her menacing enough. We did not believe she would actually bite Hugo; she did not drool and growl as if she would eat him. No, this does not rank with the great Scorsese film performances: De Niro in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, Pesci in Goodfellas, Keitel in Mean Streets. We love Hugo, though. If you make a movie about the wonder of cinema, it must be wonderful. Hugo is.
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If you wish to discuss your cats, their habits, and especially their psychiatric problems, email saffron.safin@gmail.com.
