1999 Oscar winner Judi Dench
Posted on 03/26/2002 5:36:04 PM PST by alloysteel
Let me begin by saying that I feel personally oppressed and profoundly insulted by the Academy's refusal to bestow this year's Best Actress Oscar on Dame Judy Dench.
It was a painful revelation of Hollywood's entrenched bigotry against aging white women, especially those of us whose personal attractiveness (such, alas, as it ever was) is limited to the desperate second-best of an Inner Beauty, rather than the more visible form of that particular gift, which God doles out so very sparingly, according to His own inscrutable plan.
To be sure, in Dame Judy's case, Inner Beauty is enhanced by scads of talent. The woman has a gift to die for. In rejecting her for Hollywood's highest honor, the Academy's outrageous bias against us plain old broads couldn't have been more transparent.
Not that I have it in for Ms. Halle Berry.
Yes, of course I was no end annoyed by her acceptance speech. "This is for every nameless, faceless woman of color who now has a chance because this door has been opened" -- oh, for pity's sake!
In charity, though, it was not a wicked speech: merely graceless, and solipsistic. This hardly distinguishes her from Ms. Julia Roberts, and Ms. Gwyneth Paltrow, and any number of other silly young women who have, over the years, leaped to the podium and blathered shamelessly, in deep decolletage.
Anyhow, speech or no speech, Ms. Berry was as entitled to win the Best Actress award as most of the actresses who've ever won it, and more so than some. Her performance in "Monster's Ball" was really quite good.
If you don't understand this, perhaps it's because you don't understand what the task of acting is all about, and what it requires of the people who do it for a living.
For humility's sake, I suggest you try standing up in front of your local Rotary luncheon sometime, to do a little improv. Or maybe you could take on a speaking part in your church's next Christmas pageant, or regale your co-workers in the company cafeteria with your rendition of Hamlet's soliloquy.
When you have finished making a hideous fool of yourself (so much so that you waken in the middle of the night for weeks afterward, sweating and blushing and hoping that everyone you know will soon forget the horrible sight and sound of you, muffing your lines and moving like a jointed wooden puppet, only rather less gracefully) you will possibly have begun to understand that the acting craft requires a kind of courage as well as a deep well of talent. It may not be particularly important, in the grand scheme of things, but it isn't exactly easy to do.
Ms. Berry is, yes, a bit of an idiot (and THAT sure enough isn't unique in her profession) but she can act. If Dame Judy's talent is a deeper one -- well, then, them's the breaks. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't, and who's to say?
Not, certainly, the luminous minds of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
I mean, really: these were the OSCARS, children, not the Nobel Peace Prize (which, come to think of it, is a bit of a fraud itself).
As for the fact that Ms. Berry is exceptionally pretty, let that not be held against her. Beauty is, after all, precisely skin deep, regardless of the color of the skin involved.
This may be the 30th anniversary of Ms. Magazine, and all that jazz, but in the 21st century -- as in every century that ever preceded it -- most of us women would give away a great deal of what we've got in exchange for a downright case of gorgeous.
A lush and radiant head of hair, a lovely figure, perfect skin and pretty features -- you might have to inject us with sodium pentathol to force an admission, but the fact is, such skin-deep qualities are precisely What Women Want.
Even Dame Judy has almost certainly spent a few odd moments during her long and accomplished life wishing, with all her heart, to be so breathtakingly beautiful that men would go wild with longing, while other women hissed with envy.
In any case, if you feel the need to be annoyed by all the hoo-haw over Ms. Berry's Oscar, you should spare this young woman the brunt of your vexation, and direct it instead at more appropriate objects.
Ms. Katie Couric, for instance, and Mr. Charlie Gibson. The preening progressives of Hollywood. The high-minded kiddies at CNN.
Everyone, in short, who wasted expensive airtime being Inspired and Uplifted by Ms. Berry's curious delusion that she had arrived in Hollywood via the Middle Passage and the cotton fields, slavering bloodhounds baying at her expensively-shod heels.
Do direct your wrath at all those who sneered so loudly and so nastily during the Republican Convention two summers ago, when (much as they were in Hollywood on Sunday night) a few black faces were artfully positioned to command the cameras: a point that has already been widely made, but is well worth making again.
Every last one of the liberal punditry should take time out from being Moved By Ms. Berry to offer the GOP an apology for all the terrible things they said about Token Black Folks, back then, during the Summer of 2000.
An apology, and maybe a whispered concession that if you're going to go in for tokenism, it possibly matters just a wee tad more if your own particular tokens end up as Secretaries of State and National Security Advisors than as pampered, jewel-encrusted, body-guarded winners of a little gold man.
Still and all, it's not a bad thing, in this day and age, for a man as handsome and gifted as Denzel Washington to win a nice little prize, especially when he is sensible enough to suggest to an impertinent reporter that race ought, in fact, to be an irrelevancy by now. (Why not say "Actor Wins Oscar," suggested Mr. Washington , instead of "Black Actor Wins Oscar".) He really is extraordinarily good at his work.
Moreover, it was profoundly moving to see the glorious Mr. Poitier accept, with his grace and his gentle elegance, an honor he genuinely deserved.
In the end, for all the glitz and pretentiousness and sheer vulgarity of the event (and aren't these the very things we've always loved most about Hollywood?), I'd just as soon see it all as a metaphor for the American miracle.
Let the tragic, warring world note well our American capacity to progress from slavery and civil war and Jim Crow and Sheriff Clark, to this intensely foolish and pompous and, in the end, unimportant debate, with a nasty little head-count simmering on one side ("is it REALLY FAIR for All Those Black Folks to win All Those Oscars?") and an orgy of smug self-congratulation on the other ("aren't we WONDERFUL? aren't we TOLERANT? aren't we DIVERSE?")
JUDY DENCH WAS ROBBED!
Frankly, I was pulling for Nicole.
I'm just kidding... then again...
Well Deb, is it fraud as you suggest earlier in the article, or is it an honor? It can't be both. Me thinks you're trying to have it both ways as we tend to do when it comes to the Oscars. If you begin by ridiculing the members of the so-called Academy, don't end by telling us that these clowns are capable of bestowing honors on anything or anybody or that these "honors" are worthy respect! I think that the whole affair has become such an intellectually corrupted exercise that we best ignore it altogether.
1999 Oscar winner Judi Dench
Talk about cut to the bone! Whew!
Thank you. I long ago noted that American actors tend to play themselves in all films they make. Take Humphrey Bogart as an example. Are there any shades of difference between the different roles he played? Also, American audiences tend to judge acting on the basis not of acting but on the basis of roles themselves. That is a well written role, or an appealing role, is taken to be good acting regardless who plays it and how.
And finally, highly emotional acting, hysterical acting is highly valued, which is something I realized while watching Cabaret for which Liza Minelli received an Oscar, if I'm not mistaken. I thought at the time she was just an awful actress who was hamming it up and taking it over the top. Watch the French, the British for examples of fine acting. Or watch character actors in minor roles of American films. The stars play themselves from one movie to the next. Enough film theory for one evening!
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