Why the King’s Speech Won

My son and me in some famous place I look pregnant. Maybe Zeus did it.. Oh well, All that GREAT Greek Food.

Hmm. I’ve been writing a lot about the Oscars because it is topical and I am experimenting with the blog format…trying to see what gets hits and when the busy period is…

I am also sick with a bug I caught in Vegas.

Anyway, I was listening to BBC Radio Four, their Today Program, and,of course, they covered the King’s Speech’s success at the Oscars, mentioning that Paul Bettany was first up for Colin Firth’s Oscar winning role… but he turned it down to spend more time with his wife, actress Jennifer Connolly, and family.

Well, on this trip to Greece last August, I messed up my reservation by taking a ferry from Lesvos to Athens on a whim and had to go to Athens airport to fix up the problem or risk having to buy an entire new ticket to get home.

I got to the airport really early, exhausted from not having slept in 3 days. I was first in line at the Air France booth, with one family group in front of me. My 25 year old son,who had met me in Greece and was only leaving the next day, came with me to provide moral support.

He elbowed me and said, “Look there’s Jennifer Connolly and her family right in front of us.”

“Oh yea, I said.”

“And her husband’s as famous as she is,” my son said. (But he was too tired to remember the name.)

I suddenly felt bad because I had been staring at them all. Not because they are famous. I hadn’t recognized them.. Only because they were right in front of me for a long time, working out a big travel problem too.

But also because the Bettany/Connolly’s have two younger boys and I have two boys, both big and grown, and it makes me nostalgic to watch families like that, families travelling with boys. Memories, you know.

In Plomari, there were many Australian families visiting as tourists and I found the family dynamic interesting to watch, in that it was the men who were in charge of the kids, it seemed to me. The woman, often very pretty, often just sat back. I wondered if this is how they did it at home, or if the women were ‘on a break’.

And, just like with these Autralian families, Bettany was the one dealing with the boys, and Jennifer Connolly was standing shy and delicate in the background (she is tiny of course) so I assumed he was Australian.(British accent.)

Anway, when my son told me who they were, I reflexively said something really stupid to my son…. I said, “I wish he were Colin Firth.” It’s a running joke in my family that I like Colin Firth. I play upon, in my role as silly old mom who likes Period Pieces.

And then my husband puts me in my place by imitating Fat Bastard from Austen Powers every once in a while, you know, the nipple thing. The Anti-Darcy.

(I’m actually glad Bettany wasn’t Colin Firth, because I was tired, filthy, FAT, wearing a HUGE dress I had bought for 2 dollars at a thrift shop and my ankles were really swollen from 2 weeks of 100 degree heat and I had an ear infection – in both ears.

I ended up taking the plane with them, of course. And the shuttle bus to the airport from the plane. Ordinary people. I don’t think anyone recognized them.

Kind of ironic.

Whatever, thank God the Academy Awards are over. I’m up to here with The King’s Speech “mythology” and incessant Oscar Promotion. Last Night, Tom Hooper (who seems boyish) thanked his own classy-looking mom, who was in the audience. Nice moment. He said she was the one who attended a reading of a play and came to him saying “I think I have found your next movie.”

But just a few weeks ago on CBS’s Sunday Morning, it was said that Geoffrey Rush was presented with the copy of the play and it was he who said “This would make a better movie.”

That’s what happens when you have so much time on your hands, and you are a PR person by trade…

Anyway, I think that the King’s Speech wins as Best Picture and Best Director, even screenplay, would not have happened were it not for Colin Firth’s performance. Colin Firth thanked Tom Ford, and I think he’s right. I’m not sure he would have won Best Actor, or even been nominated, had he not been nominated last year.

And remember, the King’s Speech bandwagon got rolling at the Toronto Film Festival, where Firth is a favourite (in large part because he has Canadian connections.)

(Oh, Sixty Minutes last week claimed that the King’s Speech critical and box office success was out of the blue: Nonsense again. )

But Firth deserves his award for 30 years of good and great performances.

We don’t want him to be another Peter O’Toole.

This is the LAST THING I write on the topic.

Need a new topic..

The Movies are All Right

Beautiful Helena Bonham Carter from a King’s Speech Promo.

I was watching this week’s Sunday Morning and they had a feature of handwriting. Was it an antiquated activity? they asked.

I asked the same thing, but back in 1998. I wrote an essay “The Handwriting on the Wall” for a magazine. My son was in the third grade and getting poor marks for his handwriting. I wondered if that mattered, anymore.

Technology has advanced some since 1998, well advanced SOME, and an expert said the jury is in: kids learn to compose English faster on keyboards. There’s still a place for handwriting, he said, the old technology of pencil on paper.

Weird. Oh, during the show they played a long promo for the King’s Speech, showcasing the ‘acting royalty’ in the British movie, Derek Jacobi and Claire Bloom,etc.

(I must say, I, Claudius and Brideshead Revisited are two of my very top television experiences.)

I also saw a live (or close to live) interview with Colin Firth on NBC. He seemed very happy about the Academy Award nominations for his film and he never seems happy in interviews.

I hope all the hoopla doesn’t make him too big for his wet clingy britches. (I had to get that in.)

(Now he’s been in other highly-praised Best Pictures of the Year, Shakespeare in Love and The English Patient, but he had been one of the players and here he’s the title character.)

Meredith Vieira was fawing all over him. I don’t know how these celebrities do it. I once spent two days being treated like a queen at a conference where I was a prominent speaker and it went to my head. I didn’t like it, actually. Seemed unnatural. (Reminds me of the 30 Rock episode where Liz Lemon has the handsome boyfriend, the guy from Madmen, John Hamm is it?)

When I worked in TV I met many celebrities, minor and major, on a professional level, and frankly, they all seemed, how can I say, a little fragile. Scared.

Or I could sense they were scared, behind whatever facade they were presenting.

Colin Firth was described as ‘delicate’ (I think) by the Director of the English Patient, Anthony Minghella.

And once I met a world famous celebrity, an icon, in odd circumstances. He had walked into a telethon and no one had been there to greet him. (Everything was so disorganized.)

So I tried to smooth out things. But the famous man was very calm about it: he didn’t mind being treated like a nobody, for half an hour anyway. His manager was a little frazzled, but even he was nice, considering how unready everyone was for him. He told me. “It’s always like this in TV.”

Anyway, I had mentioned to my husband that I thought the Social Network was ‘sexist’ and he had replied “What are you talking about?” But I now see that I am not the only one who thought this: it’s a major criticism of the film. Aaron Sorkin has had to spend time defending his script to the media.

Film is a male medium. That’s not news. And deconstructing ‘sexism’ in one film (as opposed to the entire industry) is a complex business. I personally didn’t buy Sorkin’s excuse, that he was portraying an angry and sexist environment and really had no choice. Where was the omnicient eye? Harvard women, all high-achieving women, deserved better.

Even the female characters in the King’s Speech are kind of cliche, good wife and whore. If you think about it. But then this Good Wife wore the pants in the relationship, as Helena Bonham Carter said in a BBC interview. ( If you deconstruct the story-line of the abdication, it’s about two women, really. The men are sort of pawns. But the King’s Speech movie is really about ‘an ordinary man’ overcoming a fear. I think actors like playing aristocrats because aristocrats are ‘actors’ – ordinary people playing extraordinary ones.)

But then there is the Kids are All Right. And the Black Swan. Films about women. Oh well, oh well. And I haven’t seen True Grit, but the critic in salon.com said it is a ‘chick flick.’

So now I must see it.