National Post (National Edition)
An early Oscar prediction: Christopher Plummer, and here’s why.
Do you like betting on the Oscars? Maybe you throw an annual tenner into one of those Oscar pools? My hot tip for you in 2018 is this: go long on Canada’s own Christopher Plummer for Best Supporting Actor. Now, before the odds shift!
I can hear mutters from the experienced Oscarographers among you. There is an obvious problem: Plummer already has a Best Supporting Actor statuette of the nice guy/long career type. (He won it at the 2012 awards for the movie Beginners. Show of hands: how many readers can remember absolutely anything about the movie Beginners?) Oscars are too scarce to be handing out a second one to a respected senior figure in the business, just because he is respected.
But, then, that’s not why Plummer has the inside track — and I see I am not the first person to have noticed: the cinema site Vulture.com tagged him as a likely nominee shortly before Christmas. You have all heard the story of how Ridley Scott’s movie All the Money in the World, featuring Kevin Spacey as the oil baron J. Paul Getty, met with near-disaster when Spacey was publicly accused of having perpetrated copious and disgusting sex offences, up to and including rape. The final cut of the picture, which had cost about $40 million to make, was in the can.
Director Ridley Scott and his financial backers made an unthinkable decision — and yet, in a way, a simple one, because no reasonable alternative existed. They would have to delete Spacey from a completed film, and reshoot his scenes with someone else.
This choice was made, according to a fairly detailed account in The Hollywood Reporter, sometime between Nov. 6 and 8. The movie just missed its original Dec. 22 release date and was in theatres Christmas Day, with Christopher Plummer in the Spacey role. Now, think a little about those two sentences, and consider that Plummer was 87 years of age in November.
I mean, good lord. That rounds up fairly comfortably to 90. I’m about half that, and the idea of such a logistical and creative task — to be whisked from location to location, to learn lines, to work with an array of strangers under monumental personal pressure — makes me vaguely queasy.
To be sure, Plummer comes from the colonial branch plant of the British stage tradition. He is exactly the kind of man you want if you need someone to learn lines quickly, show up, hit his marks, and enunciate. Moreover, anyone who belongs to that tradition will tell you that these things make up much more than half the battle in acting. But it still beggars belief that it was possible, even in a digital epoch.
The just-completed Golden Globe Awards offer a hint that All the Money In The World may not be the kind of thing that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences likes for a Best Picture. But the Academy — and this makes it very different from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which votes on the Globes — is a trade association. The key to handicapping the Oscars is to remember that they are industry awards, above all, and not in any way serious creative or artistic prizes.
Plummer’s performance as the elder Getty is receiving universal praise, and he was nominated for the Supporting Actor Golden Globe. He didn’t win. (Sam Rockwell did.) But Hollywood, considered as a business, will want to honour the movie as an acknowledgment of Ridley Scott’s achievement in rescuing the whole thing.
The most natural way to do that would be to vote for Plummer. Actors know that Mr. Plummer was the most essential part of a miracle. The working stiffs, the key grips and the gaffers, will know it equally well. And they all know that any project they might devote their sweat and their souls to is capable of being Spacey’d.
Computer-based imagemaking was obviously essential to the rescue of All The Money in the World. On the simplest level, it allowed the movie to be re-edited in an otherwise traditional way, and for dialogue and sound effects to be replaced, much faster than would have been possible with celluloid. Most of Spacey’s scenes, we are told, were able to be re-shot with Plummer and other actors physically present. But Spacey was digitally “erased” from at least one sequence, according to THR. One senses that Scott’s team, giving a trade newspaper an official account of the movie’s last-minute revision, may have been downplaying the amount of digital trickery. (The last thing they will want is for viewers to be consciously looking out for it.)
Everyone has felt the cold wind blowing through this open conceptual door: All The Money in the World seems to be, at least in small part, a sort of animated cartoon — or, at least, a digital collage. We have already seen dead actors brought to life digitally and given all-new dialogue in mainstream motion pictures. All The Money in the World, because of the circumstances of its lastminute re-mixing, seems like one more step down that path: a path toward arbitrary, total, at-will rearrangements of actors, dialogue, and performance.
In what year, I wonder, will you be able to go to Netflix and watch Star Wars with Bogart as Han Solo and Bacall as Princess Leia? The clear logical distinction between traditional cinema and the computer-generated image is vanishing. And Christopher Plummer, precisely because of his arch-traditional arch-professionalism, may have earned a significant place in that march of creative destruction. ’Tis a strange fate, well deserving of the comfort of a second Oscar.