SOME SHALL HAVE PRIZES

As this year’s Oscar ceremony unfolded, the most striking aspect of the award bestowing was the absence of American actors. Not a single home-grown player took home a statuette. While the long-time hot favourites won both the men’s awards (Daniel Day-Lewis, the expat Brit who took up Irish citizenship, and Spaniard Javier Bardem), the women’s titles were snaffled in late surges by, respectively, Marion Cotillard from France and Tilda Swinton from England. The early favourites whom these women by-passed, Julie Christie and Cate Blanchett, are also non-Americans. Christie, who lives much of the year in California, is English, Blanchett (though she sounds it less and less; cf Nicole Kidman) is Australian.

This clean sweep for Europe is not unprecedented. In 1964, two unmistakeable Anglo-Saxons, Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, won the top awards and two pan-Europeans, Peter Ustinov and Lila Kedrova, won the supporting equivalents. This was the only other year in which no American won an acting honour. Perhaps even more significantly, none of the ’64 winners was playing New World whereas, of the ’08 winners, only Cotillard is not passing for some kind of American (Bardem’s character is an unidentifiable resident of the melting-pot and even Christie was playing a Canadian).

The traffic is certainly two-way: Johnny Depp was nominated for the latest in his swelling repertoire of brilliantly accurate, British-accented characters and Viggo Mortensen was up too for his superb turn in Eastern Promises, the London-set thriller stuffed with Russian characters, not one of whom is played by a Russian. The Other Boleyn Girl, just released here, has American Boleyn girls to set alongside the Australian Henry VIII, father to Elizabeth I, whom Blanchett seems to have made her own. But American Equity could reasonably argue that, Edith Piaf aside, the other roles to win their players Oscars this year could (should?) have been cast from the local membership. The primary argument against that position would be that no one would wish to deny Day-Lewis, the pre-eminent movie actor of the day, any role he fancies taking. As fellow nominee George Clooney so graciously put it, before the result was known, he raises every actor’s game every time he appears.

Cotillard was the first actress to win not performing in English; the male precedent for this phenomenon was set by Roberto Benigni ten years ago. The Academy Awards have never made much pretence of representing world cinema and, though they have always willingly embraced mainstream British film-making, they have remained overwhelmingly Hollywood-orientated. What has always been true of Hollywood, however, as indeed of America at large, is that it is an ever-open refuge for foreigners and expatriates.

The very first Best Actor award in 1928 went to the great Emil Jannings, a recent recruit from Germany’s rich silent movie tradition and a Swiss by birth. For the first time, two years later, neither acting award went to an American (the supporting awards were not launched until 1936): they were the first Brit to win, George Arliss, who had been acting in the States for donkey’s years, and the first Canadian, Norma Shearer, who enjoyed the inestimable advantage of being married to the studio boss, Irving Thalberg. Charles Laughton was the next Englishman to conquer Hollywood and the first to do so in an entirely British vehicle, playing the aforementioned Henry VIII. But he too was established in the States by then, having broken through on Broadway two years earlier and then made several American movies. The Private Life of Henry VIII was, in fact, one of the rare occasions when he returned to Britain to work and, 17 years later, he took American citizenship.

The first European actress to win the top award was German-born Luise Rainer, also the first star to win two Oscars back-to-back (1936, 1937). The fabulous Rainer, once married to Clifford Odets, retired to London in the late 1940s where she still shines at 98. 1939 is often cited as Hollywood’s annus mirabilis when more great movies were made than in any other year, yet it was also the first time that both top acting awards went to Britons, Robert Donat and Vivien Leigh, the latter of course playing a quintessential American, Scarlett O’Hara. 1947 was the first year that Brits won both the awards for men: Ronald Colman and Edmund Gwenn. 1958 was the first time two Brits won for the same movie: David Niven and Wendy Hiller in Separate Tables.

In 1963, when Margaret Rutherford was best supporting actress for The VIPs, three of her four rivals were also Britons and all in Tom Jones (which won Best Film and Director but no acting honours; Albert Finney and Hugh Griffith were also nominated). Beginning in 1989, a run of three British men won the best actor award: Daniel Day-Lewis, Jeremy Irons and Anthony Hopkins. Day-Lewis thus joins the select few actors to have been Best Actor twice; and he’s the first non-American. Several British women have won two awards.

But is there some kind of crisis in American acting? I doubt it. Despite the perennial British domination of the Tony Awards for New York theatre, only Jennifer Ehle won last time round. In the Emmies, another grateful hunting ground for our side, Dame Helen Mirren and Ricky Gervais are current holders and the much-honoured Australian Judy Davis joins them; the rest are Americans. I suspect anyway that the years of international success for British television production are drawing to a close.

Europe and Australasia (with very occasional forays from elsewhere) will continue to breed Oscar-winning actors, not to mention directors and writers and, even more so, technicians. That the American cinematographer Robert Elswit for There Will Be Blood beat the Englishman Roger Deakins for No Country for Old Men was not wholly a surprise and nowhere near a travesty: Deakins will come again. But that Freddie Francis was among the annual Oscar obituaries (the director Claude Whatham wasn’t) is a reminder of how highly English cinematographers (as he was described) are rated in Los Angeles, even though he was also a noted Hammer horror director. While the Yanks continue to imagine that we embody a nebulous quality that they would so dearly like to possess – “class” – I suspect that the Brits especially and foreigners in general will be welcome on the Hollywood shoots for many years yet.