Baz Bamigboye

Emma: all these award shows drive me potty!

Emma Thompson has condemned awards shows such as this Sunday’s Oscars because the season goes on for too long ‘ and drives everybody insane’.

The actress (pictured below), who has won two academy award statuettes herself, declared ‘we’re just trawling up and down red carpets till we’re blue in the bloody face’ and that the shows are ‘starting to make us look idiotic’.

She suggested that the ceremonies be scrapped.

‘You want your diversity?’ she noted, referring to the outcry over the lack of opportunity and prizes for non-white actors and film-makers.

‘Then use the millions being spent on these sodding ceremonies and pay a few writers to write some great stories. That’s my advice.’

She laughed and added: ‘Now, how much trouble am I going to get in for that?’ and then, in a sombre voice: ‘and she was never given another award again.’

‘What we need is to change the industrialisation of the awards season, which goes on for fourand-a-half months — or longer — and drives everybody insane.

‘We really do need to do something about that. There are too many awards ceremonies; all sort of tied up with too much money. They’re using actors in ways that I think are not healthy at all,’ Thompson continued, before adding: ‘a lot of us feel the same way.’

In fact, in the past few years, several actors — on both sides of the atlantic — have voiced similar complaints to me, but Thompson is the first star name prepared to go on the record.

‘ There’s just too many of them (awards ceremonies) and everybody’s expected to show up, and it’s all to do with making the film work, and it has just been industrialised,’ she said.

Thompson, who has a Best actress Oscar for her performance in Howards End and another for her adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, said that ‘there’s no joy or sense of celebration any more’.

She didn’t heap all of the blame on the academy which, after all, was the trailblazer, but on the copycats which have diluted the prestige of the golden prize. Lord knows, there are way too many gong shows. The actress had been chatting to me about a new

Picture: PA film, alone In Berlin, in which she and Brendan Gleeson star. It’s an adaptation of Hans Fallada’s bestselling novel about an ordinary couple who, after the death of their son in the war, challenge Hitler’s authority by leaving...