From the archive: Wild about the Oscars
The 1985 Academy Awards were a first for Barry Norman, who wrote this piece ahead of attending the ceremony for the first time.
Chris Ridley/Radio Times
- Barry Norman
This article was originally published in March 1985, with the subheading: "The 57th Academy Awards are a first for Barry Norman – he’ll be there to cheer on the British hopes."
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At the ceremony on 25 March, Amadeus won eight awards, including Best Picture, Actor, Director and Screenplay. British nominees David Lean, Roland Joffé, Vanessa Redgrave and Albert Finney all went home empty-handed, but Peggy Ashcroft won Best Supporting Actress for her role in A Passage to India.
Oscar celebrates his 57th birthday this year, an anniversary of particular significance to me because, for the first time, I shall be present at the ceremony. Hitherto I’ve contented myself with watching it live on TV in a Hollywood hotel with a group of friends, our ribald appreciation much enhanced by hamburgers and Californian burgundy.
Thus in 1978 I saw Laurence Olivier deliver a speech amazing both for its eloquence and its inscrutability of content. The next morning on television Jon Voight, voted best actor for Coming Home (wrongly in my view: Robert De Niro should have won for The Deer Hunter) could speak of little but the Great Man.
F Murray Abraham with his 1985 Best Actor Academy Award for his role in Amadeus. Getty
"That speech of Olivier’s," he said. "Wow! Didn’t it blow your mind?" Well, yes, it did actually because, glorious though it sounded, it didn’t seem to mean anything. But then the British have a knack of impressing Oscar night with their verbals. Remember Colin Welland, brandishing his screen-writer’s award for Chariots of Fire and declaring: "The British are coming"?
It seemed an empty boast then but next year Gandhi cleaned up eight Academy Awards. Last year, though we won no major trophy, our actors and actresses — among them Michael Caine, Tom Conti and Julie Walters — were lavishly nominated; and now here we are again with, for openers, 11 nominations for A Passage to India and seven for The Killing Fields.
Mind you, all such prize-givings are basically daft. To compare, for instance, those two disparate British entries is akin to taking a piece of chalk in one hand and a lump of cheddar in the other and announcing that chalk is better. Perfectly true if you want to write on a blackboard but not necessarily if you’re hungry.
Nevertheless, Oscar remains the most coveted award in movies. To individual winners it represents the pinnacle of success; to film companies millions of dollars at the box office. But what of this year and Britain’s prospects?
Well, I doubt if we’ll enjoy a Gandhi-type bonanza, but I’ll be astonished if we come away empty-handed. With, for example, Albert Finney (Under the Volcano) up for best actor, Vanessa Redgrave (The Bostonians) for best actress, David Lean (A Passage to India) and Roland Joffé (The Killing Fields) for best director, we really should win something.
Our best bets? Probably David Lean, Peter Shaffer (screenplay, Amadeus), Peggy Ashcroft (best supporting actress) and Ernest Day (cinematography) both for A Passage to India.
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A final thought: the only married couple to win Academy Awards for best actor and best actress were British — Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. As Michael Caine might say: "Not a lot of people know that."
Authors
Barry Norman
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